Trusted Shops now rolls out its activities in UK

Trusted Shops has worked successfully for more than 10 years in the fields of online retailing and consumer protection. The company offers services for internet retailers to create trust in their business. Trusted Shops services help online shoppers to choose trustworthy shops and also increases conversion rates and sales significantly.

Along with this third party approval, it’s good for business to have trust created by word of mouth through other consumers who have already used the retailer. Therefore Trusted Shops offers in all its packages a customer rating and review tool which allows the retailer to collect and analyse customer’s feedback and display it on its homepage.

Free entry to Trusted Shops customer ratings

Retailers can choose between three packages that best fit their needs. The start package is the ideal entry package for merchants who want to learn how to increase trust and credibility. It includes unlimited customer reviews.

Spread word of mouth with customer reviews

The Trusted Shops Pro package is ideal for merchants who want to spread word of mouth with the customer reviews and rating. The customer reviews and rating can be embedded into the Online Shop visible for each potential customer. With the compliance manual and modules retailers get useful insights into legal compliance in additional.

Boost the conversion rate and sales

Ideal for merchants who want to boost conversion rate and sales with the full range of trust solutions is the Trusted Shops premium package. It offers not only customer reviews and rating. Retailers benefit also from the Trusted Shops legal compliance audit and seal of approval as well as the money back guarantee for shoppers.

“Safe web shopping has various components”, says Jean-Marc Noël, founder and CEO of Trusted Shops. “Other than on the high street the consumer can not look closely at the retailer’s business and does not know if he can trust in it. Trusted Shops therefore has a close look at the shop – with a team of lawyers we check if privacy, terms and conditions as well as secure payment procedures are compliant with consumer protection rights.”

Read more about the Trusted Shops packages.

“The national law is transferred from the same EU regulations in UK as in Germany but we felt that in daily business online retailers have different needs,” says Dr. Carsten Föhlisch, Head of the Legal Department Trusted Shops Cologne. “Therefore we decided that getting UK law offices involved and to adopt the text modules we provide to retailers to the UK market. We do not only provide a code of conduct – our legal audit involves a thorough check of all legal matters in an online shop. Starting from the imprint, the terms and conditions, the privacy throughout the whole order process our team makes sure that consumers data is being treated secure.”

Find out more about this interesting shop in the following interview with director Tony J. Namdar.

What is the idea behind your online store?
The idea is to create an online rug store which offers a huge choice by archiving the rugs and carpets of wholesalers worldwide into one database with user friendly access for everyone.

When did you start your online store?
The online store exists as the B2B version since 1997, as B2C since 2005.

I joined my father’s company in Hamburg/Germany after university. Hamburg and London are two of the main locations for Oriental carpet importers worldwide. Our main activity was to find the right carpets for retailers and wholesalers from overseas. Mainly this was done “in bulk” i.e. our customers were looking to buy several hundred square meters of oriental carpets and rugs each time. Often there were inquiries for certain oversized rugs – large than 3 x 4 meters – in certain colors from certain provenances etc. Eventually, I made it my mission to archive these rare rugs in an in-house database, in order to offer them to our clients quickly without having to search for them. This database has grown rapidly and was made available online. Initially only for retail customers, then increasingly for private use. The database was later expanded to include all types of carpets.

In this way we provide carpets directly from the importer to private customers at low prices and the customers can subsequently browse the stock of thousands of wholesalers worldwide.

How important is the UK and the international market for you?
Since the business started off in Germany, our main clientele is still there. However since opening our office in London our business within the UK has grown rapidly. The USA is an important market for us as well because we have the world’s largest choice of large and oversized oriental rugs and the USA are the biggest market for large rugs.

Which shop-system are you currently using?
We had it custom made for our purposes. It was not possible to “weave” the special characteristics and categories of rugs into a standard shop system.

Which payment systems does your shop offer?
We currently accept credit card payment for MasterCard, Visa and Diners Club. We are planning to accept American Express, PayPal and direct debit.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
The first and most important advantage is the unbeatable choice. With a powerful online database browsing the products and finding the right carpet is much quicker and easier than finding a rug in any high street store. Lastly we can offer lower prices by not having to keep a stock of thousands of rugs, all made possible by the world wide web.

Does your store have any special features or functions?
The sheer number of criteria by which rugs can be searched on our website is the main functional advantage we have over our competitors. You will not find another website that covers all of these criteria including whether the carpet should have an allover design or a medallion, whether it should have a Mahi or Bukhara design, whether it should be new or antique (down to 20 years accuracy). All this is made possible by a sophisticated database, and the meticulous categorization of each rug.

Which special services do you offer?
Each rug is described in detail including the history of each rug origin/provenance and its special characteristics. We try to describe each rug and its condition (in case of used antique rugs) as honestly as possible.

For special requests, we also offer a comprehensive service. We are often asked whether we can make an assessment of the value for money performance of certain carpets. We do this gladly and objectively. One important reason being that due to our business concept of not having our own stock we are objective and not under any pressure to sell specific rugs which have been in stock for a longer time because wholesalers keep the stock for us. Nor are we motivated to sell rugs with a lower purchase price and therefore higher profit because our markup percentage is the same with each carpet. Therefore truly objective advice and guidance is possible, by the nature of our business in a way.

Customer phone service goes far beyond normal business hours, simply because our phone system automatically transfers calls to the mobile phones of our employees who can access all carpet data via a special technique on their mobile phones. E-Mails are answered within 20 minutes, mostly quicker, also beyond normal business hours (the Blackberry makes it happen).

What measures have you taken to increase consumer confidence?
First and foremost becoming a member of Trusted Shops was an important measure which is basically like the MOT for online shops. Another very important step was to grant our customers free shipping within the entire European Union and within the USA. Lastly our customers have full right of return without any shipping costs involved.

Which recommendations would you give to other e-tailers?
Find a niche of difficult to find products and invest in usability of your website and in good customer service.

What are your plans for the future?
I am currently working on a completely new design of our website under a new domain which covers modern rugs as well as oriental rugs.

What is your favourite online-shop as a consumer?
That is easy, amazon.co.uk. They are always my first stop when I want to buy something online.

To find out more about this shop go to oriental-carpets.com or have a look at the shop’s profile at Trusted Shops.

Learn more about the Market Ready Package Germany.

The Germany ready package is the largest free available extension for Magento, and it is a part of symmetrics SaaS platform for sophisticated e-commerce solutions. This release by symmetrics in close cooperation with Trusted Shops is an important contribution to the community and it is actively working on the dissemination of Magento on the German market.

The backround

Magento out of the box, configured as a universal and international product for shops of any size on the German market is not easy to handle. It takes time and requires expertise in the countless configuration steps. To help with these processes the missing valuable modules, as well as the valuable theme of the legal security symmetrics decided to launch a part of the SaaS configuration in this package. Symmetrics not only hope to inspire significantly more dealers for Magento, but also to improve the professionalism among developers, agencies and partners to drive forward the permanent standard tasks. They permanently carry out standard tasks and now they can automated solve it through the package.

A B2B package for the Magento Enterprise Edition and interfaces to more leading e-commerce services are in progress.

Here are some of the changes which are made by the localization package:

1. Creation and adaptation of information pages for supplier marking (imprint, terms, disclaimer, shipping, payment types, data protection), and filling the pages with variables from the centralized Imprint module
2. Standard configuration of the entire store for the German market (customer groups, rates, date formats, VAT rates, currencies, daily settings, basic store configurations, display of cart items, etc..)
3. Involvement of meaningful and easy to find links to information pages
4. Centralized management of all data in the new imprint module
5. Displaying and linking the price of components and additional costs incurred (including 19 percent VAT, plus shipping) to the necessary authorities
6. Optimization of orders (indication of delivery time and shipping weight, ad inventory through traffic light function)
7. Adaptation of the information in the order process and invoicing and others by a new accounting module
8. Relative SEO and options of performance
9. Distance warning from endangered formulations Shop and e-mail templates and delivery patterns of German texts (Must be the pattern with their own and replace variables in the texts of the imprint module)
10. Integration of the current German Language Pack with extensions
11. Numerous other optimizations, in particular to reduce the risk of a legal warning

With immediate effect the German localization package for Magento Commerce is ready for free (OSL 3.0 license) download for all interested parties on Magento connect.

Find out more about this subject in the following post.

Part one of this article gave an overview of the status quo in mobile commerce. Lets get into detail and have a look at some companies that have successfully integrated mobile commerce into their platforms.

Examples for todays mobile shopping platforms

Some companies already offer mobile shopping versions of their websites that were optimized so they can be displayed and used with the most common mobile phones. Popular platforms like amazon.com, otto.de and billiger.de use simplified versions of their websites that don’t contain long texts, graphics and unnecessary features.

Especially price comparison sites that offer this kind of service for mobile devices can be very useful for online shoppers as they allow comparing the prices of a high street store and of hundreds of online-shop right on the spot. The shop-system Magento has already implemented such templates and the others will hopefully follow soon with their solutions. In addition to the mobile websites that work on the mobile browsers the renowned smartphone producers have started making available platforms for the development of own applications that work as independent programs. Amazon for example has developed an application lately that is available in Apple’s Appstore as well as in the Blackberry Application centre. The application provides the customers with full access to their personal choice of products and also offers a unique 1-click check-out-process that will be hard to beat. A special feature of the application is the camera of the mobile device into the shopping process.

Think of a scenario like this:

“You take a photo of the shoes of the person sitting next  to you in the subway upload it into amazon’s application which will then display an offer for exactly that pair or a comparable of pair of sneakers. I think this example shows the potential of mobile commerce.

Advantages of native applications

The special requirements of mobile shopping that I’ve mentioned above currently means that mobile internet is used mainly for communication- and information purposes. The moment all the technical problems are solved and a one-click shopping experience is possible there will be a considerable growth in mobile commerce. Native applications of different providers especially the Android-developer-community will hopefully improve mobile online-shopping in the near future.

A good example in this context is Apple’s appstore, a native application on the iPhone which enables customers to buy, download and automatically install programs with just a few clicks. The payment process is easy but you have to be a registered iTunes user. Another new feature will be the integration of a shopping function into the new 3.0 iPhone software which allows developers and users to sell their products directly. This new function could become interesting for other platforms and online-shops. But this could also be a good chance for suppliers of shopsoftware that could provide their cusomers with a mobile version of their software through this channel.

The future of mobile shopping

The use of mobile commerce highly depends on the industry sector. Especially in mobile ticketing mobile commerce seems to be working quite well already. There are numerous solutions available that allow ordering train-tickets or the reservation of hotel rooms with a mobile device.

If you take a look at the shopping experience for daily goods you’ll find some successfully implementeed functions . Another example from the Appstore shows that there are already a lot of shopping list applications. Here the user can create shopping lists and the program will find the closest store with the best price for the chosen products.

The well known product recommendation function works well for mobile commerce, too. Think of the following scenario:

You enter your favourite clothes-store and the smart-phone recognizes the store and immediately shows the products that you’ve bought the last time. According to this choice it can now start showing similar products or special offers in this sector which are available in your size. So the smartphone could lead you trough the store constantly giving personalized recommendations. If it is a barcode scanner, products-upload or a RFID connector, there will be various possibilities how offline products can be transferred to the online world to use the endless functions offered here and to increase the offline shopping experience. The best successful example is mobile price comparison.

1. www.comscore.com
2. www.magentocommerce.com
3. www.ecc-handel.de
4. appshopper.com
5. mashable.com
6. www.bahn.de

Click here for the German version of this article in the shopbetreiberblog.

Are there already any success stories in mobile commerce?

This is the first of two posts around the subject of mobile commerce. In the following article Hendrik Lennarz e-commerce technology expert at Trusted Shops is giving an overview of the current situation in mobile shopping:

Whether you are on holidays at a family meeting or in your favourite restaurant it’s always very handy to be able to check your e-mail or have a look at an interesting eBay auction you’re bidding on.

The mobile internet has grown up

Because of the very fast transfer rates at affordable rates latest generation mobile phones play an important part as a channel for transactions and information in the daily life of many people. Consumer have constant access to price comparison sites and sites with product details of online-shops. The hardware sector today is still dominated by Apple’s iPhone but encouraged by google’s new mobile operating system the competitors are introducing their own models to the market. This competition on the market will result in falling prices for mobile devices which will further penetrate the market. A study conducted by comscore affirms this development. Compared to january 2008 the number of mobile internet users has nearly doubled in 2009.

Mobile commerce is just a question of the technical development

The way that e-retailers can profit from this development today is still limited by the technical development. The number of various different devices that all have different requirements for hardware, operating systems, browsers and operating controls still present obstacles to the developers of mobile applications for online-shops. At the same time these new applications require technical but sometimes even conceptual changes to truly improve the usability.

The requirements can be:

1. Adjustments to the screen size
2. Adjustments to Internet browsers
3. Adjustments to the bandwidth
4. providing secure connections
5. integration of payment systems

but also conceptual requirements like:

1. compressing grafics
2. shortening of texts
3. limitation of certain functions and features
4. avoiding unnecessary entry of data
5. shortening of the check-out process

For SMEs implementing mobile commerce into their shops might be too early as the costs of the implementation are high and the number of potential customers still too low to justify these high costs. For some shops like the German Wine Trading platform Hawesko mobile commerce already plays an important role as this company is already receiving up to 50 orders a day via mobile devices.

Click here for the German version of this article in the shopbetreiberblog.

A pre-certification has many benefits for online traders as well as for producers of shop software. This was confirmed by the latest study about shop software solutions. (ECIN eShop Report)

For the access to a new group of buyer’s scepticism and security worries are the major obstacles. Standardized security standards through trustmarks can build sustainable trust and overcome inhibitions.

Around 75 % of the analysed shop systems had already implemented that logic and prepared their systems for an accreditation.

Especially the Trusted Shops trustmark seems to be the standard when it comes to trustmarks. About every second Shop solution was prepared for the accreditation by Trusted Shops.

The following shop software-solutions were pre-certified by Trusted Shops and offer special accreditation conditions for online traders.

1. 1&1 eShop
2. 4sellers
3. abas Webshop
4. aconon® Enterprise-Shop
5. Actebis Peacock
6. AFS-Shop
7. Afterbuy-Shop
8. Applicas Software
9. apt-ebusiness
10. b.com Partnershop
11. BestSELLERS.de
12. blackbit
13. com4shop
14. CosmoShop
15. CP::Shop
16. Cybershop
17. DaVinci Shop
18. ePages
19. es:shop
20. Gambio
21. GEOS Shop
22. GS ShopBuilder
23. Host Europe
24. HotDigital
25. Ingram Micro
26. Interaktiv.net
27. Lycos WebShop
28. Mauve Mailorder
29. Mondo Shop
30. My-eShop
31. netclusive
32. omeco webshop
33. OXID eShop
34. plentyShop
35. Powergap
36. PX-Webshop
37. Sage GS-Shop
38. shop to date
39. Shopware
40. SmartStore.biz
41. Sonepar eas-y
42. store systems
43. STRATO Shop
44. T-Home Shops
45. T-Online Business
46. TRUITION
47. vioneSHOP
48. WEBSALE
49. WEBSHOPVISION
50. xanario
51. XoniC-Webshop
52. xt:Commerce

Here are this weeks 5 tips from selected blog authors:

1. E-Mail Subject: 8 Dos & 4 Don’ts from Marketing Case Studies

2. XML Sitemaps, guidelines on their use from SEOmoz

3. Amazon Checkout: Pros and Cons from Get Elastic

4. 5 steps to maximize online sales from ecommerce insights

5. Handling poor performing Keywords von Get Elastic

Online retailers using ePages software enjoy considerable advantages and special conditions when applying for Trusted Shops accreditation. Trusted Shops has pre-accredited ePages software. Pre-accredited ePages software has built-in quality criteria approved by Trusted Shops. The major advantage for an Internet retailer using ePages software is a much faster accreditation process together with a discounted membership fee.

Retailers using ePages profit from a 30% discount on Trusted Shops membership!

Special application form for Internet retailers using ePages software.

ePages is a leading provider of software for online shops
ePages software powers over 40,000 online shops, making it a leading provider of e-commerce solutions worldwide. A global network of ePages partners tailors e-commerce solutions for small and medium-sized companies, customized precisely to their requirements. Enterprises such as Leonardo, Lindt, Skoda or Encyclopaedia Britannica run their e-commerce activities on ePages Merchant Edition. ePages is based in Hamburg and has offices in San Francisco, London, Barcelona and Jenae.

Interesting links:

• Trusted Shops Website: http://www.trustedshops.com
• ePages Website: http://www.epages.co.uk
• ePages special conditions: More…