Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: retail

  • Retail and the internet of machines

    Retail and the internet of machines

    Online retail and payment giants Ebay and PayPal hosted a media lunch in Sydney yesterday to publicise their Australian Business Update.

    While eBay dominates the online selling market, PayPal’s position in the payment market place is extremely powerful with Internet monitoring company Comscore reporting in their Digital Wallet Roadmap how PayPal dominates the US market and does likewise in other markets like Australia.

    PayPal's US market lead

    Their update confirms the trends which have been obvious for some time, particularly in how mobile devices are now driving retail. eBay’s research indicates properly implemented multichannel strategies drives six times more sales than just having an online presence.

    What was particularly notable with eBay’s presentation was how the Internet of Machines is changing the retail and logistics industries as smartphones and connected point of sales systems are cutting out jobs and middle men.

    Paypal are particularly proud of their US partnership with cash register manufacturer NCR that integrates smartphone payments with the point of sales systems in restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations.

    eBay illustrated this with their examples of coupon offers being tied to smartphone payment systems so people paying for gas with their smartphone get a voucher offer for various up sells.

    Studies in the US have found a $10 offer can result in sales of up to $100. A pretty compelling deal for most merchants.

    With these technologies, we’re seeing how connected machines are changing even the most mundane business tasks.

    It may well be that the days of the service station cashier are numbered; it’s quite possible that in one generation we’ll have gone from full staffed gas stations to totally automated facilities.

    The example of gas station attendants and cashiers is just one example of how automation is changing many retail and sales tasks. It would be a brave person to say their job isn’t safe.

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  • ABC Nightlife February 2013

    ABC Nightlife February 2013

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightife across Australia to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For February 2013 we’ll be looking at the software rip-off, smartphones for seniors and Telstra’s roadmap for the mobile economy.

    The show will be available on all ABC Local stations and streamed online through the Nightlife website.

    Some of the topics we’ll discuss include the following;

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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  • Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

    Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

    As US bookseller Barnes and Noble shrinks its store network, Mark Athitakis has a tribute to the once ubiquitous chain in The New Republic.

    Barnes and Noble was never popular among US independent booksellers because of the perception, probably true, that the chain drove locally owned stores out of business.

    What it offered though was a safe, comfortable place for booklovers to gather in suburban shopping malls. As Mark points out, it created a community.

    Its stores were designed to keep people parked for a while, for children’s story time, for coffee klatches, for sitting around and browsing. That was a business decision—more time spent in the store, more money spent when you left it—but it had a cultural effect. It brought literary culture to pockets of the country that lacked them.

    In recent years that community moved to coffee shops, in the United States B&N’s role was taken by Starbucks, at the same time our reading habits changed and the business of selling books and magazines became tougher.

    Now that community is changing again, as the online societies like blogs, Facebook and Twitter become important, the coffee shops have responded with free wi-fi which is a perfect example of how the online and offline world come together.

    That need to create communities, either physically or online, is a driving human urge.

    Online that role is being catered to with social media platforms and sites like food, mommy or tech blogs where like minded people can gather.

    Down at the mall, Barnes and Noble catered for that need in the 1980s and Starbucks in the 1990s. What will follow them may be the next big success in the retail or hospitality industry.

    Image courtesy of Brenda76 on SXC

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  • Fiddling the prices

    Fiddling the prices

    Discriminatory pricing is nothing new, a good salesperson or market stallholder can quickly sum up a punter’s ability or willingness to pay and offer the price which will get a sale.

    Anybody who’s travelled in countries like Thailand or China is used to Gwailos and Farang prices being substantially higher even for official charges like entrance fees to national parks and museums.

    The Internet takes the opportunity for discriminatory pricing even further arming online stores armed with a huge amount of customer information which allows them to set prices according to what the algorithm thinks will be the best deal for the seller.

    Recently researchers found that the Orbitz website would offer cheaper deals for people searching for fares on mobile phones and prices would vary depending of which brand of smartphone people would use.

    Writers for the Wall Street Journal did an experiment with buying staplers and found the same thing.

    Interestingly, one of the factors Staples’ seems to take into account is the distance customers live from a competitors’s store – the closer you live to the competition, the lower the price offered.

    There’s also other factors at play; sometimes you don’t want a customer, or you don’t want to sell a particular product and it’s easy to guess the formulas used by Staples and other big retailers do the same thing.

    One of the great promises of the internet was that customers’ access to information would usher in a new era of transparency. In this case it seems the opposite is happening.

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  • What would you do if the computer screen went dark?

    What would you do if the computer screen went dark?

    What would you do if the computer went dark? originally appeared in Smart Company on November 29, 2012.

    One of the truisms of business is the more ways customers can pay; the more likely you are to make the sale.

    This is particularly true when something goes wrong – the customer hasn’t any cash, the till is jammed or the EFTPOS system is down.

    Exactly this happened to thousands of businesses across south-west Victoria last week when a fire burned down the Warrnambool telephone exchange.

    Unfortunately for the people and businesses of the surrounding region, much of the telephone, internet and Telstra’s mobile network runs through the burned out telephone exchange, sending the district back into the pre-telephone days.

    This presented real problems as customers couldn’t use EFTPOS or get cash out of ATMs, while businesses struggled to get payrolls done or place orders with suppliers who couldn’t comprehend that it wasn’t possible to place orders over the net or by fax.

    A hundred kilometres north of Warrnambool in the Grampians town of Dunkeld, a cafe worker told the ABC, “suppliers say ‘send a fax’ and you’re like ‘we can’t’ and they’re like ‘oh, we don’t want to handwrite it’.”

    Those suppliers are a good example of not having the systems or staff in place to deal with ‘out of the box’ situations.

    Unexpected events like the phone network being down for a week, major floods, devastating bushfires or zombie invasions will test businesses and it’s why having a real Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is important for business.

    A workable BCP is one that identifies all the critical failure points for the business such as not having the internet for a week, a flooded office or, as happened to one of my clients, their entire building collapsing into the construction site next door.

    The various state business agencies have guides on what to consider in a Business Continuity Plan including a good one from the South Australian government.

    Regardless of how comprehensive a plan your business has, the most important part is going to be your people. If your organisation is staffed or managed by people who like to say “computer says no,” then they are going to be particularly useless when the computer is stone dead.

    As the Warrnambool outage shows, unexpected business disruptions can come from anywhere, so flexible thinking and initiative is what matters in a crisis. It’s something worth thinking about with your staff and systems.

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