Category: online shopping

Fibre Art, Handmade with You in Mind, my artwork, online shopping, stuff from my life

Behold my own FB Page & Shop!

Josyan McGregor
hmim-cover

Well, I’ve done it! My very own Facebook Page.

After managing other Pages for many years, I finally have one of my very own to keep an eye on.

It’s very new and very empty right now but trust me, over the next few weeks that will change. I intend to give my personal Facebook profile a break from the artsy posts and use this as the centre of my creative pull.

I hope you will join me here @handmadeinmind and see what I am making, crafting and experimenting with. As my Page indicates “Handmade in Mind” is aimed at providing handmade and one of a kind crochet pieces for those who are not interested in wearing what everybody else is wearing and aren’t afraid to make a bold style statement.

Now if you want something quick and already made, you can purchase one of the items from the Hand Made in Mind Shop (more details about that in the next paragraph).

About the Shop! The Shop will mainly focus on my one of kind crochet items – my explorations. There will usually only be one of these items available. Those designs can also serve as the basis of a collaboration with a client too.

As I sharpen my photography skills over the coming weeks, more of my designs will appear in the Shop.

My art pieces will not appear in the Shop but rather will remain as a separate post with the option for more information, purchasing details or for commissions. I’m not married to that decision but as with all things, change and evolution is inevitable.

Thanks in advance and I hope to interact with you and, of course, answer any of your questions here; on my Facebook Page.

 Thanks a bunch!

branding, conferences, online shopping

Anyway you Sylce.it

Josyan McGregor

Anyone in the blogger / media / journalist realm interested in seeing a short presentation from the heads at Slyce on Oct. 30th in Montreal?

Possible meeting / interview with President Mark Elfenbien (Mood Media, Fun Technologies) and or Co-Founder Cameron Chell (BIG, FutureLink & UrtheCast). Let me know and I’ll hook you up with the organizers.

If you don’t already know Slyce (the want engine), see below for more info.

======= See it. Slyce it. Buy it. Slyce uses proprietary Visual Search technology that analyzes combinations of product attributes within an image to provide a search result. And the more your products are added to the system, the more accurate the search results get. Slyce doesn’t use barcodes or QR codes — the product itself is enough.

http://slyce.it/demo

online shopping, stats

Oh those price-sensitive teens

Josyan McGregor

I found this eMarketer post entitled “How Tweens, Teens and Parents Decide What to Buy – eMarketer.” and found it interesting that:

Teens more influential with parents and more reliant on web for information

and they:

… were much more price-sensitive, likely starting to realize that money may not in fact grow on trees. More importantly though, the internet was a much bigger factor in forming preferences. Two in five teens said online reviews influenced their computer product preferences, and 37% cited product websites.

Is the internet the next big teen “click”?

 

gadgets, online shopping, stuff from my life, tech

gdgt gets another girl to join

Josyan McGregor

Just joined the very cool gadget review, forum and community site gdgt – am probably one of a handful of girls signed up and I am just fine with that!

Here’s what is on my lists… more to come in the Want List 🙂

[clearspring_widget title=”gdgt gadget list widget” wid=”4a525a95afebfb7c” pid=”4b45560f0cf7cc08″ width=”180″ height=”400″ domain=”widgets.clearspring.com”]

branding, new media, online shopping, social media trends, stats

Milennials are only interested in email they can benefit from, duh!

Josyan McGregor

I found this on one of my favorite marketing sites Marketing Charts.  According to Participatory Marketing Network (PMN), 28% of  Milennials (Generation Y) find that they receive email that is not relevant to them.

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t that the case for the rest of as well?

Anyways, here’s what the study revealed:

Gen Y consumers are eager to see “innovative services” that allow them to better control, organize and manage email coming from brands.

  • 78% would like their email client to automatically categorize and delete expired promotional messages.
  • 62%  would like communicate directly with retailers about their favorite products in exchange for getting the best prices from them.
  • 44%  say they’d subscribe to an email service that collected and summarized multiple offers of interest to them.
  • 32%  say they’d share promotional email offers with members inside a social network and open emails from others.

More than half of Gen Y consumers (51%) say they’d join a separate social network dedicated to managing brand interactions

Now the better question is “Is someone listening to this out there?  Or better yet, has someone already figured this out and is working on the next BIG THING”.

online shopping, stats

Tips for a glitch-free online shopping experience

Josyan McGregor

Some 36% of online shoppers ran into roadblocks when buying gifts this past holiday season — ranging from slow website response, to fruitless efforts to check out, to outright system crashes — according to a survey of 1,000 online consumers, conducted for Guidance by Synovate, reports Retailer Daily.

According to the survey, online shopping hassles affect the overall degree to which people will shop online: Across nearly every demographic breakdown — other than race — the group least likely to say their online shopping was incident-free was also the group least likely to shop online.

Other major findings of the survey can be found here.  But before you click, I have put together a few guidelines to ensure your online shopping experience remains glitch-free.

I have shopped online for over 4 years now and I can pretty much say it has been a ‘glitch-free’ experience.  Over the years, I have purchased from Amazon, Future Shop, Best Buy, CDW, eBay, Etsy, and Apple.  Perhaps this unlucky 36% were victims of cyber-Monday or even that the sites they trying to purchase from were not necessarily ‘big box retailers’ who tend to be better at handling the in-coming cyber-traffic.

Here are a few tricks I can recommend if you want to make sure your online shopping experience remains a painless one:

  1. Be realistic. If your still on dial-up, forget it.  The purchase process will likely be too much for your modem and the sluggishness will likely lead to issues.
  2. Choose a ‘big box retailer’ you know and trust. IT departments in a big box retailer tend to be better prepared to manage the incoming cyber-traffic.
  3. Go with your gut. As you navigate sites, judge their response rate, evaluate the site’s organization and most of all, answer the question:  Do I ‘get’ this site?  If your experience is sketchy, chances are so will the purchasing experience.

Finally, consider this: A website has its own personality, just like each of us.  We don’t ‘get’ everyone so why would we ‘get’ every website.  So if you find yourself confused about a site and not sure where its trying to lead you, chances are you’re not ‘getting’ the site and you’ll probably encounter these same difficulties when you go through their shopping cart process.  My recommendation is to reconsider purchasing from this site.  It will save you from a potentially frustrating experience.

I’d love to know if you’ve ever reconsidered purchasing online from a site because of a ‘gut feeling’.

online shopping, stats

Cyber Monday 2008 vs 2007

Josyan McGregor
2007 2008 Growth
Dollars (mln of $) $733 $846 15%
Number of Buyers, 000 7,585 9,254 22%
Dollars per Buyer $96.62 $91.43 -5%
Average Transaction Value $53.89 $55.76 3%
Transactions per Buyer 1.79 1.64 -9%
Source: comScore

Did you choose to shop online this year?  If so, what were you shopping for? Personally, I bought books and DVD’s.  It was easier and cheaper.  🙂