iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

The FT reported this week that UK retailers are urging the big labels to follow EMI’s example and release DRM free music.

UK album volumes are down 11 per cent, or 12m units, for the year to date, according to the Official UK Charts Company and Music Week. I don’t mind paying for music, I’m just more incentivised to do so if I don’t have to jump through hoops to move it to my ipod, back it up, or copy it to my central server. Trouble is, they should have done this 5 years ago before it was worth everyones while to learn to use bittorrent as there was no other way to get easily get digital versions of tracks.

Massive thanks to Techcrunch for my my ipod nano as won in their recent haiku competition.

Obviously I knew it was small but its hard to exactly visualise just how small until you see it in the flesh. I’ve been happily encoding films to ipod format, and can confirm Star Wars looks and sounds just great on it. Thanks Mike

Google iphone search. Interesting stuff.

I’m an Archers fan and was recently featured on BBC Radio 4 waxing enthusiastic about the decision to finally podcast the Archers. Yeah me.
Seriously though tying up with RealAudio years ago just tied the Beeb to a rather crappy commercial platform while giving Real a huge opportunity to grab market share. Streaming sucked, and there were ways around it anyway. I didn’t say all this, as I didn’t get chance, but hey, its a good thing they changed to good old mp3.

I got an email the other day:  

Hello Emma, I came across your web site and was curious to understand your view on shopping cart abandonment and what is being done to address this.        

 I thought it was an interesting question. Here’s my reply: Well, shopping cart abandonment is a real problem – but the solutions depend on the cause of the problem. Typical issues relate to users simply saving items to find later, or using the checkout to find shipping costs, but other factors such as a too-long registration form, complicated password requirements, a lack of a progress indicator, etc. etc. all build a picture not conducive to the customer contentedly completing the transaction. When I’m analysing a checkout, I look at webstats data or if n/a then a representative set of server log files (day/week/month depending on the size of the site) to analyse every page in the checkout process to see where the drop off is in the checkout page – e.g is a particular page causing problems, or is is constant throught the checkout – and what can be done to combat any problems. I also look at the site from a usability perspective, and assess security and billing arrangements. All of these elements will be a factor in dropout.
You will always have some abandonment, but you can take steps to minimize it.