Author Archives: alankent
AR and ecommerce – is a spike coming?
With COVID-19 driving more shoppers to ecommerce, is Augmented Reality (AR) going to see a boost in 2020? Possibly, although 2021 is more likely, especially if the Apple leaks of AR glasses and 5G support coming soon are true. 5G AR headsets in 2020? Here is some background reading if you are not up with […]
Musings about 5G and AR
This is a late Friday afternoon rambling on possible directions for ecommerce. No deep research, just daydreaming. Did you know 5G is coming? Really? Okay, so actually there is a lot of coverage already. There is a slight problem however, lack of quality devices and demand. This is where news/leaks from Apple become more interesting. […]
Live stream your products!
Want to engage with customers without in person contact? Consider live streaming! Clearly with store closures, in-person contact with customers has significantly reduced or stopped. It is also not clear when such contact will increase even as restrictions start to lift. So it may be a good time to think about other ways of engaging […]
Engineering and SEO agencies – involve both early in projects
I have been interviewing a number of agencies this year to stay in touch with people at the coal face of ecommerce. One thing that has jumped out is the frequent divide between “engineering agencies” and “SEO agencies”. Engineering agencies build sites, SEO agencies then tune site content after the site is built. There are […]
Know Thy Customer
It is kinda an obvious statement – know your customers to make sure you deliver them what they need and value. Building a great business is not just about adopting the latest technology, but relevant technologies can help build better experiences. I was reading a case study from JH on a site built using Magento’s […]
Engaging ecommerce experiences
All ecommerce experiences are the same right? Home page, category tree, product pages, checkout (oh, and don’t forget good old site search!) – pretty it up and you are done! Right? No! One of the reasons I think headless ecommerce is so interesting is to go beyond such experiences. I don’t think the traditional model […]
Small Business Tip: Can you go Virtual?
Have you ever thought about ways you could make your physical business go remote? Obviously with COVID-19 and stay-at-home guidance there is a market right now. But even after the restrictions are lifted, could it still be more convenient for your customers? Is the current situation a time to try going remote while there is […]
Small Business Tip: Update Your COVID-19 Affected Opening Hours in Google My Business
If you are a small business and have had to change your store hours or temporarily close your store, remember to update your store hours in Google My Business. I personally recommend the app as an easy way to make such changes. For example a local restaurant business near me has changed their hours and […]
NDI Stream and Mac Problem and Solve
In my last post I talked about some of the decision process I used when exploring which video platform to use a series of online office hours for ecommerce. In this post I focus on some of the underlying technologies. It was interesting to see how the complexity can blow out pretty quickly. There are […]
Explorations in Online Video Outreach
With large portions of the world in lock down , video conferencing and online events are growing in popularity. I have been exploring some of the tools (with an admitted bias towards Google technologies since I work there) trying to work out the best way to kick off an Ecommerce Website Office Hours series (the […]
