Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: June 2004

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June 27 2004

Monitor resolution statistics

Varying monitor resolutions cause major headaches for web and graphic designers in terms of the differences that can occur in how a page is displayed. It used to be a popular practice to allow pages to stretch/shrink to accommodate varying resolutions. Taming the Beast.net was created that way, but I really think that this isn't such a good idea any more as lines of text can become very long for those people viewing the site on very high resolution monitors.

So what are the most commonly used resolution configurations these days? I've taken a look over our stats for the past few months, just under a million visitors, and the following is the breakdown.

The interesting trend is that 1024x768 has now overtaken 800x600, which was the most commonly used resolution until fairly recently. Given the continued high use of 800x600, this group of users shouldn't be ignored - having to scroll horizontally is highly annoying to visitors. Each extra action required by a user in order to view your content can mean lost sales.

I think that at this point in time, setting pages to display for 800x600 (approximately 780 pixels wide) is the safest bet as it allows for your pages to be rendered in an acceptable way to the vast majority of users.

For a comparative study of global monitor resolution statistics view this report on TheCounter.com.

June 25 2004

R. Bemer - inventor of ASCII, passes away

Robert W Bemer, the inventor of the ASCII language, the "escape" key and also assisted in creating the programming language COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, passed away a couple of days ago at the age of 84. 

Mr. Bemer invented the ASCII code in 1961 by assigning numeric values to letters and other characters. Without his contribution that became a global standard, the development of the World Wide Web may have been delayed for years. ASCII is an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

Mr Bemer was also a driving force behind Y2K awareness.

June 22 2004

ASTA releases anti-spam recommendations

The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA) which consists of industry heavyweights such as Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have put forth a series of recommendations for decreasing the volumes of spam which litter our inboxes. 

The figures keep on changing as to the percentage of email that can be classified as spam - the latest figures I read were around 83%; but whatever the real number is, I think everyone would agree the practice has surpassed being an annoyance.

Amongst the recommendations put forth by ASTA:

• ISP's and hosts should block or limit access to Port 25.

• Tighter controls on automated account registration processes.

• Placing limits on outbound mail from desktop based PC's.

• Increasing customer awareness of firewalls and anti-virus software.

• ISPs to use e-mail authentication systems e.g. POP before SMTP.

• Authentication of senders based on IP address or content signing.

• Open relays and proxies should be secured.

• More rapid suspension of user accounts being exploited for spamming purposes.

Learn more about ASTA.

Download the full ASTA recommendations (PDF)

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eBay moves in on India

There's just no stopping eBay's growth - they've now acquired their Indian counterpart, Bazee for a reported 50 million dollars. Bazee boasts a membership of over 1 million and while India's Internet population is still reasonably small; approximately 17 million, this is forecast to grow to 30 million within 2 years.

June 20 2004

Bulging inbox battles - MS to offer more space too?

First Google offered a whopping 1 gigabyte of free email space (still in beta testing), then Yahoo bumped up it's free services to 100 meg (which 12 months ago cost $100 per year) and now it looks as though Microsoft has no choice but to get in on the action. Rumor has it the company is planning to supersize things soon so "that storage won't be an issue" according to a Microsoft spokesperson.

Just on the subject of Gmail; it seems that people who have been lucky enough to be a part of the beta testing have also been given extra invitations to give to others, allowing them to open their own Gmail accounts. These invitations are hot property with some people reportedly getting up to $200 per invitation on eBay up until recently.

Of course, as with anything Google related, a site has sprung up for the trading of these invitations - Gmailswap. 

June 14 2004

PayPal/eBay settles class action

eBay, the parent company of PayPal, have settled a 2 year old lawsuit with PayPal customers to the tune of over 9.25 million dollars. The class action was filed as a result of a number of customers claiming that the company had illegally frozen their funds. 

In settling, eBay has not admitted any sort of liability, but supposedly has settled to prevent ongoing costs and distractions caused by the litigation.

Aside from grumbling about their fees and unusual currency exchange rates, I've never experienced any issues with PayPal. No doubt they have their faults like every other business, but the company has made ecommerce a heck of a lot easier for people like me who are based outside of the USA. 

Over the years, I've watched the company go from strength to strength; continuously providing new tools and services to merchants and generally improving the flow of cash - both into members accounts - and theirs ;).

Ad targeting becoming more refined

A few years ago, some major ad networks created an uproar amongst privacy advocates due to profiling practices. This mainly involved putting cookies on user's computers to track them through their network of affiliate sites in order to display more relevant ads based on their activity. For example, if you spent time on an entertainment site, then traveled to a financial site, you may still see ads for entertainment related products.

With the advent of Adwords and similar non-invasive technologies demonstrating that content sensitive advertising is very successful, the privacy envelope is being pushed again. 

According to an article  from the Rocky Mountain News; several ad companies are now experimenting not only with content triggers, but also building profiles based on the amount of time a user spends on a particular section of a site, their IP address and subscription registration details to deliver advertising - and it appears to be paying off. While this new approach isn't as invasive as previous strategies, it's still worrying those concerned with privacy issues - learn more. 

June 13 2004

FCC releases data on broadband usage

The FCC has recently released summary statistics of its latest data on the deployment of broadband in the USA. Amongst it's findings:

ADSL connections increased by 24% during the second half of 2003, from 7.7 million to 9.5 million lines, compared to a 19% increase, from 6.5 million to 7.7 million lines, during the preceding six months.

Of the 28.2 million high-speed lines in service, 26.0 million served residential and small business subscribers, a 26% increase from the 20.6 million residential and small business high-speed lines reported six months earlier. 

Cable modem connections increased by 20% during the last six months of 2003, from 13.7 million to 16.4 million lines, and also increased by 20% in the first half of 2003, from 11.4 million to 13.7 million lines. 

Of the 28.2 million high-speed lines, 20.3 million provided advanced services, i.e., services at speeds exceeding 200 kbps in both directions

For further details, visit the FCC site.

eBay providing RSS feeds

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June 8 2004

Domain name registrations top 63 million

According to Verisign, more than 63 million domain names have are currently registered, which works out to be around one for every 100 people living in the world today. The latest figures show an increase in registrations for Q1 2004 of 23 percent over Q1 2003. 

The other interesting point in the report is that over 72 percent of currently registered domain names now resolve to a Web site. In December of 2002, this figure was only 55 percent; mainly due to the domain name speculation boom where names were purchased as an investment. I was one of the fools that participated in that speculation in early 2001 - many lessons were learned :).

June 6 2004

Ecommerce sales up 28%

The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce recently announced that the estimate of U.S. retail ecommerce sales for the first quarter of 2004 was $15.5 billion, an increase of 28.1 percent (±2.9%) from the first quarter of 2003.

Adult sites more popular than Google?

According to HitWise, adult sites receive around triple the visitors than the top Web search engines, including Google. I don't know why this made news - there's a zillion adult sites out there; but it's an interesting snippet you can use at boring business meetings :).

Yahoo testing anti-spyware add-on for toolbar

Google's toolbar has the popup blocker and not to be outdone, it appears that Yahoo is beta-testing an anti-spyware app for its search bar. I find this quite amusing considering that both companies toolbars are a kind of spyware :). Does that stop me from using them? Heck no, they are both very valuable tools. 

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