JCK Las Vegas -Seminar on E-Commerce

One of the great benefits of attending trade shows is the opportunity to attend seminars given by top professionals in their areas of expertise. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the one given by Matthew Perosi entitled " E-Commerce: What you need to know before starting".


Perosi emphasized that it is important to be unique, and not just copy others. He says that if you are in a hurry to get online fast, then there are "cookie cutter" websites that all look alike, but can work for you if you have a limited budget and time constraints. To do a professional job, however, requires a full time employee and he says is not for the small independent jeweler. A realistic launch takes nine months and your return on investment will be three years later. Expect no sales for the first few months and that you will need to redesign the site within twelve months of the launch and every eighteen months thereafter. You will require advertising dollars set aside and will need analytics to track how users navigate around the site. Expect to spend $20,000 before the launch. To make matters worse, he says there will always be delays, due to photography needs, people to write copy or content, and search engine research.


Basically, Perosi highlighted five areas or challenges:
1. Security
2. Credit cards
3. Content
4. Products
5. Photography


For me, the biggest surprise came concerning security and credit cards when Pelosi mentioned PCI-DSS compliance (Payment Card Industries Data Security Standards), a law that was implemented in June 2003 and represents a complicated set of security standards that apply to merchant accounts and that has reporting requirements. The law forces you to protect your site against common attack methods and automated attacks through forms by random strings of code. What?? Yes, if your site processes credit card information from your customers, you have to worry about what happens if a hacker gets into the system. RAM memory is exposed, database dumps might be triggered, they might install a Trojan horse virus...there are all kinds of new hacking methods out there to worry about.
The PCI requirements include 1) no visible email addresses on your site, 2) the server software must be up to date,3) WIFI router in your store must be hidden from the public, etc. 4) For credit card processing you need a gateway company that you can find out about through your bank. Check out www.pcisecuritystandards.org for a listing of all the requirements.


Perosi warned that the jewelry industry is a high risk industry for situations when the physical credit card is not present, i.e. online transactions, and the underwriting process is tricky. He suggests having a separate merchant account from your store account so that website chargebacks won't adversely affect the in-store discount rate.


Regarding content, he says that search engines need content and the words used need to match common search terms in order to be easily found. he recommends a minimum of 100 words, says 250 is a reasonable amount and 400 will get you good results. Developing good content takes time and requires many talents by many people...writers, photographers...they may be employees or outsourced. Perosi says a huge product catalogue without content will fail, and the content must be updated often. Ranking results start to fade when content creation stops. The best content is blogging, product descriptions, jewelry educational information that you have written yourself (not a link to someone else's). Descriptions need to be long and unique, as Google filters identical duplicate content.


On the subject of photography, Perosi said e-commerce is difficult if you only have one photo of your product. You need top, side, profile views plus a "sizing shot" for size reference and maybe a style shot on a model. It is imperative to have professional quality photos with good lighting and a white background. Having photos done by professionals, however, is extremely costly. He had a very strong opinion on the right light box to use, and says the newer Photocubics Flashbox A10 that uses a strobe technology gives better quality photos with a true white background as compared to the more popular MK Digital Direct's Photo eBox Plus. The latter, he says, produces a grayish background to the photo that requires additional editing. Time is money and editing increases costs.


At this point in the seminar, we were out of time and I think Perosi could have continued with many more meaningful tips for us. I certainly look forward to hearing from him again.