Is the scanner going the way of the fax machine? If so, how will you get your handwritten forms into digital format? Anoto Live gives you the tools to turn your handwriting into digital text all by just handing you a pen—a special pen, of course. Anoto helps companies stay competitive by making it easier to receive and send data quickly. The new digital writing solution requires minimal user training and transforms any piece of paper into a live document that enables information to be sent instantly to any back-office system. Additionally, a complete image of the form is available if needed.
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Technology Articles
Web.com Small Business Toolkit: Anoto Live (Digital Writing Solution)
April 3rd, 2013 :: Maria Valdez HaubrichWeb.com Small Business Toolkit: Mogreet Express (Text Messaging Platform)
April 2nd, 2013 :: Maria Valdez HaubrichMogreet Express is a self-service text messaging platform that gives small- and midsized businesses the power to initiate text message marketing campaigns and send multimedia messages (MMS)—all at their fingertips. MMS messages step up your mobile marketing game by creating visual customer interactions including video, pictures and audio. Text message marketing gives small businesses the highest open rate of all types of mobile marketing (98 percent), and Mogreet Express makes your messages more intriguing and therefore more memorable. Business owners are able to build a mobile customer database and drive sales with branded promotional offers.
Google+The Future of Online Retailing
April 1st, 2013 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
Spurred by the rapid adoption of mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, as well as by major retailers’ investment in their websites, ecommerce sales in the U.S. are projected to rise from $231 billion last year to $262 billion this year—an increase of 13 percent–according to the latest forecasts from market research firm Forrester. Three product categories account for one-third of that total: apparel and accessories, consumer electronics and computer hardware.
Ecommerce currently accounts for some 8 percent of overall U.S. retail sales (or 11 percent, if grocery sales are excluded). Growth in online retail sales is projected to outpace the growth of traditional retail sales in the next five years. By 2017, total ecommerce sales in the U.S. should hit $370 billion.
Forrester says the increased use of smartphones and tablets is a major factor powering ecommerce growth. With over 50 percent of U.S. online users owning smartphones, many smartphone owners use any spare moment to go online. As a result, people are spending more time overall online than they would if they had to go to their PC or laptop to shop—and that means more browsing, shopping and purchasing.
Another driver behind ecommerce growth is that major retailers are rapidly making investments in their ecommerce divisions in order to better integrate their in-store and online shopping experiences. Even customers who head to a brick-and-mortar store now often end up buying merchandise online within the store, or using smartphones to find the same products elsewhere and order them online.
Surprisingly, new shoppers coming online for the first time are not a major factor in the growth of ecommerce. Just 4 million people are projected to buy online for the first time this year. Instead, growth is coming because people who are already comfortable with online shopping are now spending more money online, ordering more often, and buying a wider range of products from a variety of sites. Forrester says online shoppers typically become comfortable with ecommerce by purchasing low-risk items such as downloadable music or movies. Only then do they move up to more expensive purchases such as appliances or home furnishings.
Forrester’s report has some more good news, not just for ecommerce vendors but also for the economy as a whole: Ecommerce companies are powering employment growth. Currently, Forrester says, U.S. ecommerce businesses employ over 400,000 people, and that figure is expected to hit 500,000 by 2017.
Image by Flickr user Mosman Council (Creative Commons)
Google+Web.com Small Business Toolkit: PageSpeed Insights (Website Speed Analyzer)
March 28th, 2013 :: Maria Valdez HaubrichHow fast does your website load? If it’s not fast enough, you could be losing customers who get impatient waiting for your beautiful but complex site to load. To help figure out what’s slowing your site down, check out PageSpeed Insights from Google. Simply input your URL and PageSpeed Insights will scan your website and make suggestions on how to speed up your site by optimizing photos, adjusting HTML and more. PageSpeed will also prioritize the changes in order of importance so you can see results immediately by taking care of the high-priority changes first.
Google+Web.com Small Business Toolkit: Zite 2.0 (Digital Magazine App)
March 26th, 2013 :: Maria Valdez HaubrichWe told you about Zite one year ago when digital magazine apps seemed to be surging in popularity by gathering top stories of interest to readers based on their interests and delivering them in one attractive dashboard. The demise of one major player has not stopped Zite from revamping their iPad app in their new 2.0 version and offering thousands more topics, a new look and an “intelligent discovery machine” that learns your likes and dislikes as you use it so that it retrieves more relevant content results as time goes on. Also helpful: Zite 2.0 is now integrated with Facebook so the app can provide content suggestions based on your history in the social network.
Google+Healthy Technology Is More Important than Healthy Employees for Today’s Small Businesses
March 26th, 2013 :: Maria Valdez Haubrich
By Maria Valdez Haubrich
How important is technology to today’s small business? So important, according to the recently released Brother Small Business Survey from Brother International Corp., that 75 percent of small business owners say a crashed computer disrupts their business more than a sick employee.
Although small business owners rely on technology to keep their businesses productive, they also find it difficult to manage their technology. Some 86 percent say that in the past year, they had a situation where malfunctioning office equipment hindered their business’s productivity. And two-thirds (66 percent) of small business owners admit they’re “frequently” overwhelmed by the amount of technology options available to help them run their businesses.
Technology is so crucial to smooth functioning of a business that nearly one-third (31 percent) of small business owners say they’d gladly give up a week’s worth of vacation if it could ensure they’d never suffer a tech malfunction in their business again.
While small business owners are still cautious about spending, they recognize the value of technology. Slightly more than half (52 percent) say it’s important to invest in their business to gain an edge over competitors. When they do invest, the most common area to spend on is technology-related capital investments such as software, mobile apps and cloud computing services. The next most popular investments, machinery and facilities, were far behind at 21 and 20 percent respectively.
Speaking of cloud computing, small business owners are still not widely embracing this technology, perhaps due to confusion about how it can help their businesses. Only 28 percent of small business owners say they fully understand what cloud computing is, while 42 percent do not use it at all. (That means a lot of entrepreneurs are using it without fully understanding it).
What are entrepreneurs using cloud computing for? About one-third (35 percent) use it only for data storage; 21 percent use it for document management, and 17 percent use it for business applications such as customer relations management, accounting and human resources.
Image by Flickr user Ell Brown (Creative Commons)
Google+Web.com Small Business Toolkit: Brother Digital Color HL-3000 Printers (Color Printers)
March 21st, 2013 :: Maria Valdez HaubrichBrother Digital Color HL-3000 Printers
Sometimes color just says it better. But if ever you take your documents to be printed in color you know how high the price per copy can be. Printing your documents in-house can save you as much as 60 percent, but is it worth the cost of investing in a big, professional color printer? If your small business wants to look like a big business, check out the new digital color printers from Brother. For under $300, Brother’s new series of digital color printers give you professional-grade color documents fast, with resolution up to 600 x 2400 dpi.
Google+Retailers Play Wait-and-See Game With Mobile Payments
March 21st, 2013 :: Maria Valdez HaubrichBy Maria Valdez Haubrich
Has your small business already adopted a mobile payment processing option such as Square? Are you scared about the technology issues mobile payments present? Or are you eagerly waiting to see what kinds of mobile payments your customers demand? If your answer is “all of the above,” you fit right in with the predominant attitudes in the retail industry.
When it comes to mobile payments, it seems the retail industry is stuck in the middle—believing that mobile payments will be key to success in the very near future, but worried about implementation and concerned about choosing a solution that will keep customers happy. In fact, a new report on mobile payments from RSR Research says “uncertainty” about mobile payment technology was a top business challenge for 76 percent of retailers polled.
Overall, retailers are bullish on mobile payments. Even though just 1 percent say that mobile payments are currently the dominant form of payment in their business, almost 1 in 5 (19 percent) believe mobile payments will be their dominant form of payment in three years. The smaller retailers were more likely to believe mobile payment would be important to them. These retailers currently take most of their payments in cash, the use of which they believe will shrink as mobile options grow. (Retailers also think that debit cards will become increasingly important, while credit cards will be less so.)
Where are retailers looking for the mobile payment options of tomorrow? They’re not counting on traditional payment services providers to develop these solutions. Instead, they expect Google, PayPal and other consumer technology companies to take the lead in this arena. In fact, 63 percent say that traditional payment services providers are actually impeding progress toward mobile payments becoming ubiquitous. Many of them also expressed concerns about what types of fees such providers would charge for mobile payments.
Retailers are also following the lead of consumers. Many are waiting to see if rapid consumer adoption of smartphones for browsing and shopping will translate into similar adoption of smartphone payment technologies and “digital wallets.” Retailers are wary of taking a wrong step, and very concerned about the customer experience. More than half (51 percent) say that a consolidated, cross-channel payment processing service is crucial to their adoption.
Overall, the RSR report paints a picture of retailers poised and ready to jump on mobile payments, but hanging back until payment provider options shake out and a clear winner emerges.
Image by Flickr user Ron Bennetts (Creative Commons)
Google+Does Your Retail Business Need a Mobile App?
March 11th, 2013 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
Does your small business need a mobile app? If you’re a retailer or etailer, maybe so. A new study from Flurry measured the time consumers spent using more than 1,800 iOS and Android shopping apps between December 2011 and December 2012.
The study divided apps into five categories:
- Retailer Apps (such as Walmart, Target, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Saks 5th Avenue)
- Price Comparison Apps (such as RedLaser and Grocery iQ)
- Purchase Assistant Apps (such as ShopSavvy and ShopAdvisor)
- Online Marketplace Apps (such as eBay and Amazon)
- Daily Deals Apps (such as Groupon and Living Social)
Time spent on all five types of apps grew quite a bit, but time spent with retailer apps skyrocketed the most (by 525 percent). That percentage far outstrips the overall growth in the use of both shopping apps (274 percent) and apps as a whole (132 percent).
The time consumers spent with Price Comparison and Purchase Assistant apps also grew significantly, by 247 percent and 228 percent, respectively. Even Online Marketplace and Daily Deals apps grew, though at 178 percent and 126 percent, respectively, the growth rate was far less.
The big winner in the growth of app use is retailers. Overall, in 2012 consumers spent 27 percent of app use time on retail apps (up from 15 percent in 2011). By contrast, the share of time spent on Daily Deals shrank from 20% in 2011 to 13% in 2012, and the share of time spent on Online Marketplace apps decreased from 25% in 2011 to 20% in 2012.
Flurry concludes that smart retailers will begin examining their customer relationships through the “mobile-first” lens. The rise in mobile app use—and especially in retail app use—shows that it’s more important than ever to extend your customer relationships to a variety of channels.
Instead of focusing solely on getting customers into your store—or even onto your website—you need to also focus on attracting them via their mobile devices. “In the new mobile app economy, devices are always with you, always on and always connected,” Flurry writes. Yes, 95 percent of sales still occur in physical stores, but mobile allows you to intercept customers in store aisles and affect their purchasing decisions before they ever reach the cash register. Consider tapping into apps that let customers save their credit card info, apps that let them ship an item to their homes, or apps that let them scan an item with their phones to place an order.
How are you using mobile apps to enhance your customers’ retail and e-tail experience?
Image by Flickr user Dru Bloomfield – At Home in Scottsdale (Creative Commons)
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