euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

A few days ago, PayPal introduced a new feature for Android Phones, that enables users to simply hold their smartphones together and wait for a buzz initiating a money transfer between the two users.

The system works currently only with Samsung’s Nexus S phones that contain Near Field Communication chips.  Near Field Communication is a wireless technology that enables devices to exchange information – including encrypted payment data – over a short distance. It can enable a consumer to pay for goods in a store by waving a smartphone with an NFC chip near an NFC-enabled terminal.

To use the new person-to-person payment service, one PayPal user sends a request for a payment to another PayPal user from within a PayPal widget on their smartphone. I’m curious when I can go to the next grocery store and pay with my phone like this!

The last days and weeks, there has been lots of coverage about Google+ features like Circles, Sparks and Hangouts, but there wasn’t that much talk about the Google Check-ins. This features shows up in the mobile app and allows you to check in by attaching your location to a status update. The advantage of Google Check-ins is that it tightly integrates with your Circles to share your checkins with only the people you want to see them. This offers a much more nuanced approach to privacy than services like Foursquare or Facebook are able to offer. If you want to try Google+ for your Android, but you cannot find the App in the Market repository, you can search for the APK file in the web and install manually. This shall work without any problems.

Watch this impressive video about how Tesco developed a virtual store on the Korean market!
But everything has a downside: Would you like others to chose the vegetables, fruits and meat for you? This might work with non-fresh food, but somehow I would be afraid to receive brown-spotted apples, open bananas and meat with too much fat and bones. Food is a very sensitive product for e-Commerce, don’t you think?

Recent studies revealed, that about 80 percent of all shopping decisions are controlled by emotions. And it makes sense, if you think about your own shopping behavior once in a while.

The science analyzing this topic is called neuromarketing and it shows us, what is happening in our mind while shopping and which role emotions play for our decision-making. Especially regarding popular brands, people rather decide via emotions than with reflection. A lot of decisions are taken subconciously and signals are translated directly to behavior, without taking a rational decision. This is also the reason why more than 90% of online shopping dropouts happen within the first 2 klicks. Do you remember when you navigated the last time on a website, and in less than a blink of an eye navigated away from it, because it was not appealing enough? I do!

For Shop Owners, this means a huge task to provide a website, that is attractive enough to countermeasure this high dropout rate.

Successful online shops attract all senses and provide an appealing interface.

Today’s internet is glutted with countless websites, blogs, networks, shops, wikis and plenty of other information. The times when people have “surfed the internet” in sense of pursuing a hobby are definitely past history. Nowadays we quickly search the information needed and navigate with speed of light through search engines and popular websites. This makes the creation of a good website a challenge, if you don’t want to lose visitors within the glimpse of an eye. Test yourself: Do you remember, when you lately visited a rather unattractive website? How long did you stay before you pressed the “close tab” button or navigated away from it? According to recent studies, web users decide with just 50 milliseconds, whether to stay on a new website or not.
This is why a good website can’t be good enough in those times. It must appeal all senses of the visitor and make him keen for more.