Online departments rant

You know how in big corporations there are departments and managers who take care of "online". Like there is this person and his job is to make sure everything related to online is working.

That's actually stupid by design. Think about it.

Online and offline should not be two different things today, they should be integrated as one thing. Consumers engage you on all levels equally. They don't understand that there is a difference between talking to your phone support or talking to you through Twitter, Facebook or e-mail. They don't understand how and why does some product cost differently offline or online in the same store. They don't understand why a coupon they got via snail mail couldn't be used online or vice versa.

Why are there different people in charge of offline and online sales? Why are there different departments taking care of it?

Well, for the most part, it's because people working in "offline" departments don't have the knowledge to do "online" departments while in most cases people in "online" departments don't have the experience necessary for senior management positions that are held by "offline" department managers.

If you could look at your online and offline marketing as one department, your online and offline sales as one department and so on, you could achieve so much more.

Cross department multi channel digital marketing strategies

What a mouthful this subtitle is. And completely unnecessary. There is no multi-channel today. It's all one big channel in the eyes of consumers. Offline a.k.a. phisical world is connected to the online world through multiple entry points and it's stupid to separate them into different channels.

Consumers don't split your company into different departments like you do. They don't think "I'm going to buy this product through the mobile store of company X handled by their excellent mobile department, because I hate their offline department since I had bad experience buying offline with them".

In the eyes of consumers, you're one company and your sales is your sales, your marketing is your marketing, the channel doesn't matter.

What's up with Toni lately?

I figured I haven't written an update here in quite some time. I apologize to all 7 of you readers, but I've been busy.

Busy doing what?

Well...

1. Moved to another company.

You all know I use to lead ICG at Inchoo. Less than 2 months ago, I decided to make some major changes in my life and moved over to Dejan SEO. It's a well known Australian SEO company with some amazing people and amazing projects. So far, I'm loving it here. I took a position of technical SEO strategist working under Martin Reed.  

I've been working with some of the largest companies in the world over here and it's an amazing experience. I've learned something new every day and also put in use all of the years of experience I had so far. 

2. Moved to another town.

As some of you know, I lived in Osijek, Croatia. I didn't move to Australia, don't worry, I couldn't handle the heat :)

I moved to Dubrovnik Croatia. One of the most beautiful cities in the world. Have a look at my new office:

If you take a summer trip or cruise to Dubrovnik, make sure you contact me to grab a cup of coffee!

Good sources of eCommerce industry news for online merchants and professionals

There are some of you who read this blog that are not aware of other places where I write my opinions about the eCommerce industry much more often.

In this blog post, I'd like to tell you about online resources that help me stay up to date with everything related to the eCommerce industry and eCommerce marketing.

I already answered a similar question on Quora, you can read it here.

I'd like to broaden my answer and elaborate it a little bit here. So, let's get to the point, what do I read?

eCommerce Industry News

When it comes to general eCommerce industry news, these are my common sources:

• Econsultancy.com - especially their blog section. They tend to release really useful data and researches from different sources including original researches they do themselves. If you join (bronze membership is free) their website, you'll be invited to participate in some researches via e-mail and get the research report in return for free. 
• Internet Retailer - Is like a magazine for online retailers. It usually has very general news about the industry but every now and then it releases something that's really interesting and useful.
• eCommerce Times - Very similar concept to Internet Retailer website. 
• Every now and then my and my ICG mates cover and link to eCommerce industry news that we find most important at that moment, we do it through eCommerce industry news category at ICG website.

eCommerce Marketing and Optimization Blogs

These are regularly updated blogs by mostly people who actually work in that industry and give some practical advice on how to run a successful online store from marketing point of view.

• eCommerce Business Blog - The blog where my ICG team and I write from our 5 years of experience in consulting online stores about their marketing strategies. It's regularly updated and will inform you about latest news in the eCommerce industry. 
• GetElastic - I have enormous respect for Linda and her years of writing and working in the eCommerce industry through this blog. 
• BlueAcorn - A company that does very similar things like we at ICG do. Great guys, lots of experience and they share it via the blog.

I hope this list will help anyone new to the eCommerce industry to pick up some knowledge from authoritative sources. 

Unfair Advantage

If you are an SF fan, it is highly likely you're familiar with the theme from the hit series Firefly - "The Ballad of Serenity". To explain the concept of unfair advantage, lets concentrate on the first few lyrics of the song:

It goes something like this:

Take my love.
Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care,I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.

What is your company's unfair advantage? It's what you'd put instead of the word "sky" in these lyrics.

It's something you can't copy, something unique, the reason why competitors no matter how hard they try, no matter what they do are unlikely to beat you and eat your lunch.

Many services oriented companies do not have an unfair advantage. Their only asset are their employees, but employees can go to competitors or competitors can hire better ones.

Think about it.

First post on my new Blogger powered blog

It's been a while since I last had my own professional blog. Nowadays I mostly write for the company I work at.

I opened this blog out of curiosity. I'm interested in blogger's features, since I mostly used WordPress in the past few years.

I hope I'll update this blog regularly with my thoughts on e-commerce marketing related news, especially e-commerce SEO and conversion rate optimization topics.