Karen Millen to increase online sales with new search engine

Nicola Brittain, Computing, Tuesday 10 August 2010 at 14:49:00

SLI Systems search engine learns from visitor site behaviour

Karen Millen expects to see a 50 per cent increase in online sales following the implementation of a new search function by the fashion chain in May.

The figure comes from conversion rates experienced in the US following the introduction of the technology to the US site last year.

The search technology, provided by SLI Systems, learns from visitor site behaviour and is currently set to prioritise searches in order of search numbers. … Continue Reading

Zara and H+M to move into online retail

Nicola Brittain, Computing, Monday 9 August 2010 at 17:10:00

Fashion retailers target UK’s increasingly web-savvy consumers

High street fashion retailers Zara and H+M are to join the hoards of retailers that already have an online presence, according to an report in the Guardian.

Zara, the clothing chain owed by Inditex of Spain, will open its web site in the UK on 2 September and go live in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal at the same time.

In mid September, H&M will follow suit. Its range will include clothes for men, women and children as well as household furnishings.

This follows a report from e-commerce trading specialists eCommera stating that 42.6 per cent of Brits are now shopping online on a weekly basis, and that the average shopper now spends £71 per month on online goods. The latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index reported a 20 per cent rise in retail sales year on year.

Motivations for online shopping include price, convenience and choice. The eCommera report found that 60.4 per cent of respondents thought they were getting a better price than on the high street, 51 per cent were impressed by the convenience of the services and 39 per cent were persuaded by online choice.

UK businesses allowed to use trademark terms in AdWords

Dawinderpal Sahota, Computing, Monday 9 August 2010 at 15:02:00

Brand-owning companies such as LVMH concerned about sites selling counterfeit products

Google is updating its AdWords policy in the UK and Ireland to allow certain advertisers to use third-party trademark brand names and words in their advertisements displayed via Google’s AdWords service.

This will allow IT resellers, sellers of replacement technology parts and informational sites, for example, to use trademark terms such as Microsoft or IBM in their advertising text online, even if they don’t own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it.

The ruling may dismay brand-owning companies such as luxury goods label Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH). The company was defeated in the EU courts in March following a legal action it raised against the ad function. Its concerns were that sites selling counterfeit products could use trademarks as keywords.

Google already operates this policy in the US and it will be extended to Canada, the UK and Ireland on September 14.

“We believe that this has helped our users and advertisers by improving the usefulness of text ads on Google.com and across partner sites in the US,” said Dan Stokeley, AdWords product manager in Google’s Inside AdWords blog.

“For example, resellers of jeans have been able to highlight the actual brands they sell in their ad text making them more specific and relevant for users.”

The company has released a list of FAQs for advertisers outlining the policy guidelines.

Google will also allow advertisers elsewhere in the EU to select trademarks as keywords [search terms] but unlike in the US, UK, Ireland and Canada, they will not be allowed to put them in the body of the advertising text.

The changes to EU legislation will also be made on September 14 and the company revealed it currently has no plans to bring its EU policy into line with the UK and the US.

“Based on business and legal considerations, we have decided that such a change is consistent with the law in the UK and Ireland and follows a similar change we made in the US last year. We have no plans to introduce this to other countries at present,” said a Google spokesperson.

Tesco mobile strategy focuses on Nokia, not iPhone

Dawinderpal Sahota, Computing, Monday 9 August 2010 at 12:34:00

iPhone users are not typical Tesco shoppers

Tesco has admitted that the iPhone does not take prime position in its mobile strategy, claiming that more Tesco shoppers are Nokia users.

Nick Lansley, head of research and development at Tesco.com, admits the company is just finishing user-acceptance testing of the iPhone version, but opted to launch the Nokia app first in an effort to target busy mums.

The supermarket chain announced a new grocery app for Nokia handsets last week. The app allows users to search for products and add them to their online basket. It is synchronised with Tesco.com customers’ online shopping accounts.

“When we did look at the sort of phones [Tesco shoppers] have, we saw that plenty of them had Nokia phones,” Lansley wrote in his blog, “So we invited Nokia to come and map their phone data onto our demographic data and we confirmed much more overlap with their Series-60 smartphones than we did with iPhone. Maybe not a surprise, but we needed to see the evidence.”

“The biggest cold, hard fact is that a much greater percentage of our core customer-base for online shopping have a Series-60 Nokia phone than an iPhone,” he added.

Microsoft talks up IE9 as preview downloads hit 2.4 million

Dave Bailey, Computing, Thursday 5 August 2010 at 11:53:00

The plaform has been tweaked for increased speed and interoperability

Microsoft released its fourth and final platform preview of IE9 today, with enhancements designed to deliver increased interoperability and hardware accelerated performance.

The first beta of the browser is due to ship in September.

Microsoft’s UK web product manager, Mark Quirk, said IE9 will significantly faster than its predecessor. “[Performance is determined by] the Javascript engine [in the browser], and currently as measured by the SunSpider browser benchmark, IE9 is 11 times [at 326 milliseconds] faster than IE8.”

In addition, IE9 uses native graphics and sound cards, including graphics processing units (GPUs), to aid performance, rather than offloading tasks onto the desktop CPU itself.

“Rendering graphics, text, video, and audio makes IE9 very fast, since we’re using DirectX to write directly into the graphics hardware memory. Writing the browser to work cross-platform with most graphics cards was not a trivial task, ” added Quirk.

Interoperability issues have also been addressed in IE9.

Developers should be able to write a web page/site and see it rendered correctly by the majority of browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

That means they will be able to use markup language tags and scripting from other popular browsers.

“We’re implementing a lot more of HTML 5, and other standards based around that. We’re also using a lot of telemetry to check which standards are used by the broadest range of sites,” explained Quirk.

However, Microsoft will not be supporting IE9 on Windows XP, and will not be implementing Adobe’s Flash media technology natively in the browser, so users will have to install a Flash plug-in to enable Flash on IE9.

Quirk said that about 2.4 million previews had been downloaded already. The new preview is available to developers at IE’s Test Drive site.

The latest NetMarketShare statistics for global browser usage put IE’s share as 60.7 per cent, up 0.42 per cent on last month, suggesting the drop in share from September 2009’s figure of 65.7 per cent has stopped.

Firefox currently has a 22.91 per cent share, with Chrome on 7.16 per cent, Apple’s Safari on 4.85 per cent and Opera on 2.27 per cent.