1998 Cassbeth E-Commerce Findings

CassBeth

1998 CassBeth E-Commerce Findings

January 6, 1999

Prepared By

CassBeth

311 Highgate Lane

Cherry Hill, NJ, 08003

CassBeth

Table Of Contents

Background......

Lessons Learned Summary......

Clean Presentation......

Online Statistics......

There are 3 log formats......

Technology Management......

This is Not TV or Radio......

Amazon.com Invented Something Great......

Advertising Banners do not Work......

Cross-fertilization is critical......

Search Engine Wars......

Secure Order Processing......

E-mail Spam......

Visitor Patterns......

Internal Search Engine......

Dynamic Pages via SSIs......

Advertisements......

Detailed Discussion......

Web Introduction into the Home......

The First Days......

Level of Technical Bells and Whistles......

Graphics Management......

Frames......

SSIs and Dynamic Pages......

Understanding the Visitors......

Site Management......

Blue Print for Starting an E-Commerce Site......

Purpose......

Business Model......

Development Approach......

Phase I......

Phase II......

Phase III......

Phase IV......

Final Comments......

Background

It is no secret that the Internet has generated a great deal of activity, from companies, such as Dell, that appear to have established foot holds in various markets, to Internet stocks that appear to be based on hot air. This background discussion is based on a personal experience of a web presence that was established in late 1997. The report was created in early January of 1998, so this represents over 12 months of experience.

There appear to be 3 major alternative goals for a commercial web site today. The first alternative is to establish a web site for marketing reasons. It is primarily projecting an image of a company. The perception is that the company needs a web site because it is viewed as being in step with the times. This is probably the worst type of web site. It costs money to establish and maintain with no apparent financial based method for tracking its benefits. Further, there is no reason for anyone to visit the site. Without visitors, the value from a marketing perspective is completely lost.

The second alternative is to establish a web site for the sole purpose of selling something. This is interesting and has created at least 1 major company, Dell computers. They were the pioneers in online sales. Amazon.com, although not showing a profit is an example of a true consumer site that may establish a major presence in a market exclusively because of the Internet.

The third alternative is to establish a web site to reduce company costs. Cisco is an example of a company that chose to place proprietary information online for the sole purpose of reducing maintenance personnel costs. This proprietary information could have been used by competitors to weaken Cisco product offerings. This was a risk the company realized and chose to take. The gamble was worth it according to Cisco, saving several hundred million dollars in field support costs.

This report contains 3 sections. The first section is a summary of the lessons learned in the evolution of an e-commerce site over a 12-month period. The second section is a more detailed description of the purpose of the site, the reason for its inception, and more detailed information on the site e-commerce lessons learned. The third section is a blue print for starting an e-commerce site.

Lessons Learned Summary

The following is a summary list of the lessons learned in establishing an e-commerce site. More detailed information will follow this section. We believe these lessons are critical to the development of a successful e-commerce solution. The site, was established in 4Q97.

Clean Presentation

Pages should have white backgrounds and high contrast text, preferably black text. People who are only familiar with river raft documents must be retrained in techniques such as STOP to create effective content. White space and highly descriptive text reinforcing useful pictures is critical. Themes and threads, the fundamentals of STOP are critical to site organization.

Online Statistics

It is critical to know who visits a site and why they visit. Logs should be generated using server side includes. Logs also can be generated via the web server software, but control is lost, unless the server is dedicated and the administrators understand that the e-commerce staff own the log files. The logs should be analyzed using either Win95 tools such as Hitlist from Market wave inc. or perl based tools available from various script archives.

An example of the Win95 reports can be found at (Jun 98):

An example of a perl-based report can be found at (Dec 98):

A real time report, generated on the fly using dynamic HTML and an online log file can be found at:

There are 3 log formats

The 3 log formats are NCSA, NCSA long, and WinNT IIS. WinNT IIS has the most comprehensive data. An example of a log entry can be found at cassbeth/cgi-bin/log_1.dat.

Technology Management

The technology must be understood and managed. Filling pages with Java script, Java, and animated GIFs lead to frustration on the part of the users with inadequate equipment and low bandwidth connections. They also translate to poor results from search engines. Images need to be categorized as thumb nails (2k max), copy images (15K max), and stand alone images (200K max). Further a page needs to be loaded in 30 seconds. A page needs to be less than approximately 30 KB. These rules, although broken, on many pages, are the driving rules for any page. A good reason needs to surface to break these rules.

The following is an example of the current equipment profile of visitors arriving at The point is that 80% of the users should be serviced.

Hits / Percent / Agent
4,417 / 31.63% / MSIEv4.X
3,795 / 27.18% / Netscapev4.X
1,885 / 13.50% / MSIEv3.X
1,363 / 9.76% / Netscapev3.X
1,113 / 7.97% / Spiders/Robots
832 / 5.96% / OtherAgents
155 / 1.11% / MSIEv5.X
132 / 0.95% / WebTV
71 / 0.51% / Netscapev2.X
70 / 0.50% / MSIEv2.X
45 / 0.32% / Lynx
26 / 0.19% / AOL'sBrowserv3.X
21 / 0.15% / Operav3.X
15 / 0.11% / AOL'sBrowserv1.X
12 / 0.09% / Netscape
7 / 0.05% / Netscapev1.X
2 / 0.01% / Prodigy'sBrowser
1 / 0.01% / MSIE
1 / 0.01% / TeleportPro
Hits / Percent / Platform
6,515 / 46.66% / Windows95
2,507 / 17.95% / UnknownPlatform
2,164 / 15.50% / Windows98
1,318 / 9.44% / WindowsNT
619 / 4.43% / Macintosh(PowerPC)
197 / 1.41% / Windows3.1
174 / 1.25% / Windows3.1/95(16-bit)
132 / 0.95% / WebTV
85 / 0.61% / Windows
59 / 0.42% / Windows95/NT(32-bit)
50 / 0.36% / UNIX(Other/Unspecified)
37 / 0.27% / UNIX(SunOS)
34 / 0.24% / Macintosh(68K)
18 / 0.13% / UNIX(HP-UX)
16 / 0.11% / UNIX(IRIX)
16 / 0.11% / UNIX(Linux)
10 / 0.07% / OS/2
5 / 0.04% / UNIX(OSF1)
4 / 0.03% / UNIX(AIX)
1 / 0.01% / UNIX(FreeBSD)
1 / 0.01% / UNIX(BSD)
1 / 0.01% / UNIX(NetBSD)

The full report is available at

This is Not TV or Radio

The number of transmitters that were technically possible limited the TV and Radio to a select number of transmitters. This gave birth to the FCC early in the century. The result was the creation of oligopolies with huge economies of scale that could translate to name recognition - ABS, CBS, and NBC. People could remember the small number of players. The Internet is different. There are millions of transmitters (web pages) on the Internet. People will not type in or Nor will people bookmark the entire universe. They will access a search engine to find what they want. Search engines are critical to an e-commerce solution. Whoever established the ground rules for the Internet and the rules of the search engines was a genius. These simple rules make millions of transmitters possible today.

Amazon.com Invented Something Great

As everyone tries to apply the paradigms of traditional media techniques to the web, Amazon.com has invented the associate program. This is not advertising. Amazon.com started with 25,000 associates in 1Q98 and currently has 150,000 associates some of who have content on their web sites that represent Amazon.com products. With the associate program, amazon.com has multiplied the effective reach from the search engine perspective to the equivalent of 150,000 sites. In return these sites get from 5% to 15% commission. Cassbeth.com delivered over $10,000 worth of business to amazon.com in 98. If cassbeth.com is a typical good associate (i.e. top 20%), then the associates delivered 150,000*.2*10,000 = $300 million in 1998 sales. 1999 will be the year of associate programs on the Internet. Further, it probably will be the year of the demise for the application of traditional media techniques on the web. Again, this is not TV, radio, or print media.

Advertising Banners do not Work

As part of an experiment, cassbeth.com joined a banner program. Its banner was shown 20,000 times. There were less than 100 click throughs from the cassbeth.com ad on other sites to cassbeth.com. Targeted ads appear to have higher results based on a cassbeth.com banner that is placed on 2 reciprocal sites, but there have been no sales. Advertising banners do not work. Content draws the masses via the search engines. Analysis of the log files show that users arrive, based on some type of theme, and rarely diverge from that theme.

Cross-fertilization is critical

It is critical that links from other portions of the web site be placed on all the pages in a consistent manner. Early analysis of the cassbeth.com log files showed that visitors would arrive at a particular page and they would leave CassBeth without visiting other pages. Adding links to the right hand side of each page increased the rate of user browsing on the site. The average stay is 2 and is as high as 5 on certain shops. That means when a user arrives, they select from 2 to 5 other pages on the site. This is important because people do not click on ads. They search the Internet based on a category and stay in that category. The site needs to provide the links in the category once they arrive. Finally, search engines deliver users to a main home page less than 10% of the time. Users arrive on a particular leaf on the site tree. The urge is to get the user to traverse the leaf, its branches, and perhaps venture into the trunk and another branch. However, empirical data shows that a sale should be closed at or near the leaf of entry.

Search Engine Wars

The search engines are not created equal. Many search engines reject URL submissions from certain ISP sites. For example, most search engines will reject URL submissions from free web site providers such as geocities.com. The argument is that members of those sites have abused the engines by using various Spam techniques in efforts to get their pages listed higher in search engine query results. AOL will reject most URL submissions if the URL is not listed on AOL. Yahoo needs to be paid, but no one officially talks about that issue. One engine has openly admitted that they accept payment for placement of URLs in the database. Eurofret, the European search engine rejects all submissions from the USA. All Australian search engines reject URL submissions from any site that is not an Australian site.

Discussions about anti trust violations in the US and trade wars with other countries is really important in this area. No one knows about these issues except for those attempting to farm or mine the web. Given all of this, web traffic to cassbeth.com is relatively high. The cleanest search engines appear to be altavist.com and infoseek.com. Pages are immediately spidered and available on the web within 5 days. Infoseek previously would make the pages immediately available on the web. It appears that AOL searches the web for pages that have been submitted and get traffic. They then, after a period of 3 months, make those pages available for searching on AOL. My perception is that they wait for a phone call and money.

Secure Order Processing

Netscape created secure order processing as a method to differentiate itself from other browsers and take advantage of the hype associated with security. It is really not needed for high-end items. People send e-mails requesting to order product 10 times more often than they use a stock form, if the web site provides the option. The issues of security are more relevant for companies such as e-trade, where log in sessions might be tapped by a criminal element, or data might be left on a browser that is hosted on a community PC. However, all the e-commerce sites have implemented Netscape style secure transactions. You may only need this capability to support integrated e-commerce with commercial buyer departments or to reduce the costs of order processing by discouraging e-mail.

E-mail Spam

E-Mail SPAM is a serious problem on the Internet. The log files show that up to 10% of site traffic can be web crawlers looking for e-mail to be incorporated into a mass mailing database. If the current infrastructure is $10 trillion dollars, $1 trillion dollars of the infrastructure is being devoted to this useless stuff. The British have realized the magnitude of the problem and are attempting to address the issue. The following graph is part of an online report depicting various web crawlers including the e-mail siphons.

The ribbons with the peaks are web crawlers. The highest peak is an e-mail siphon. This report is available online at Select any *.html file from the directory.

Visitor Patterns

Visitor peaks are definitely present. There are peaks during particular days of the week and during certain times of the day. For a small site like visitor patterns are not important. Large sites selling trinkets can probably chose to ignore the data. Mission critical sites with lives or money on the line, such as e-trade.com probably can not ignore the data and survive a legal incident. The Following charts are an example of site traffic:

Internal Search Engine

There is no question the visitors arriving on the site use the internal search engine to find pages on the web site. It is unclear if the CassBeth search engine has translated to sales. The search engine has significantly helped in site management and order processing. This includes searching for bad part numbers reported by amazon.com to searching for items ordered by users who order via e-mail rather than an order form.

Dynamic Pages via SSIs

Site management was significantly improved when SSIs were added for the menu that appears on all the pages and for the introduction and ending area on each page. Avoiding dynamically composed pages was a serious and costly error that resulted in significant and re-work. The current web site is over 250 pages. Managing the change of a common item across many pages that changes frequently is critical.

Detailed Discussion

Web Introduction into the Home

In the summer of 1997 I had concluded an activity which allowed me to learn HTML, a small piece of web technology. This initiated a strong interest in the web and its technologies. As a result I had a discussion with the wife and kids about the purchase of a new computer with the express goal of bringing the Internet into our home. The kids would become familiar with the Internet, perhaps helping them in their academic activities, the wife and I might participate in a joint activity, yet to be determined, and I might make sense of the investment world and develop a viable retirement plan.

Once the computer arrived it took approximately 30 days to get online with a small Internet service provider recommended by my brother. The kids very quickly took to the web and found their own use, primarily to support school projects. I made a conscious decision not to limit content access. The web access was via Netscape or Internet Explorer. After several discussions with the family about content, the kids were given a choice: They could use the web in a positive way and aspire to the highest standards of our society, or they could sink to its lowest level. Given that the wife and I felt that the kids could behave just as irresponsibly when they are at the movies or mall with their friends, we chose to trust them and not isolate them from the bad elements of society.

The wife and I had several discussions about the possibility of a web page and we decided to start an e-commerce site. She would use her retail background from the Buyer Dept of Home Shopping Inc in finding products to be resold on our site and I would continue to learn about the web and feed my appetite for understanding this new technology with its collection of tools and techniques. With this goal, we registered cassbeth.com. The name is based on our daughters' first names, Cassandra and Elizabeth.

The First Days

The first days of the web site were not as critical as initially believed. A good web site needs to evolve easily. This will happen if there is a commitment to have the web site accomplish a measurable goal, like produce money via e-commerce. The web technologies are rather complex and it is best to start with a simple site and evolve it as the web authors try to deal with the new technologies. Trying to learn it all and build the perfect site the first time means that the site will never be started. The bottom line is to jump right in and start the process.

The initial site was characterized with traditional well-accepted proposal practices. It was perceived that good proposal practices may not translate to good advertising practices, but it would not lead to bad advertising practices. Further, skills were based on previous proposal activities. These practices include black text on white background, lots of white space, and pictures reinforced with highly descriptive text. The highly descriptive text was later found to be critical in having the search engines spider a page that people would search for on the Internet.