komel.net

Well, it’s been more than 24 hours (an eternety if you consider internet time) since I mailled the ombdusman and have not received any feedback at all.

I cease my case. No more to say.

Here are a few common mistakes the biggest e-commerce in Brazil has made:

- Offered a payment method that they did not test well, also did not offer any way out for the customer. Once the person chooses to pay via banking account debit he can not turn back and reconsider (in case things wen’t wrong). The customer cannot even cancel the transaction and redo it in a different way.

- Americanas.com does not know how stablish a one-to-one relationship with their customers. Everytime I sent a message (even responding to their answers) I got an answer to somebody diferent.

- Copy-and-paste answers. Even worse, cut-and-paste answers very poorly written. So i all sounds like nonsense, you feel really bad about it.

- Their ombdusman is unexistent. No answer whatsoever from this person. I start to wonder if he or she really exists.

Americanas.com, see you in the next life. For now I’d rather spnd my moeny somewhere else.

Even though selecting the keywords for your SEO strategy is one of the most important steps, I have experienced many diferente situations where care is undertaken.

So, to enlighthen a little this I decided to put out a few hints of what to think whenever picking keywords for your SEO strategy.

a. Consider what you are selling. By this I mean services, products or even information your website delivers. Try to look for how your customers get to you, what do they search, time, etc. You can do it in many ways: searching, asking people and also using tools like Google Analytics.

b. Understand who buys your products. Recently I took part in a campagin aimed to sell a product to aid students (high and junior high school). Even though we’ve managed to put up about 5 k words we could not see our sales going up. We had the CTR, but sales weren’t goog enought. After an analysis we understood that we were bidding on keywords aimed to students not the ones who paid the bills: the parents.

c. Do not ignore the obvious. Some keywords are so obvious that you must bid them. Often the cost a little more, but frequently it pays off.

d. Find out what others are doing. Yep, sometimes you can really be surprised of how smart people can be.

e. Look for ROI and look for VOLUME. This means: look for words that will give you a lot of visitors, but don’t forget the keywords that will give you a good return.

f. Try to group words in Add Groups that make sense. Than, on a daily basis, check their performance. You will often find patterns that can be used to mine new keywords.

I have just sent an e-mail to the americanas.com ombdsman. Let’s see what happens now. I will keep you posted.

You can read the full story here, here and here.

This is my adventure trying, praying to find a way to pay a business for a product I want. If you want caught up with the whole story look here and here.

After sending a message through the “talk to us” link I receive a message a minutes later… it goes something like this: “We have received your message and will get back to you within a working day. This an automatic message, please don’t reply”. Fair enough I thought. They are letting me know the received my message, so the DO care. One working day for an answer is not the best timming for internet time, but hey let’s give them a break.

So the next day I do get an answer from someone called “Francisca Santos”. Here is what she said, my comments follow:

a. the option for payment through bank account debit is only for clients of Itaú and Unicanco (braziliam banks)

b. The conditions may vary for each bank

c. The bank can take up to 2 working days to inform us of your payment

d. We recommend that you first inform yourself of the payment conditions offered by your bank

I was convinced that this was a “copy-and-past” answer. She did not even bother to read my e-mail. If she had taken a minute to read what I’ve sent. What the heck, let’s answer her and make sure I include a print screen showing the part of their website that shows that they offer split payments through banking account debit.

Again I receive a message saying that they had received my e-mail and would answer within a working day. This time someone called “Bruna Dias” answers me. In a “copy and paste” answer (again!) she tells me that they do not accept split payments on baking account debit payment. HUMMMM interesting. Even after I’ve send a print screen of their website that says they accept split payments…. she did not bother to read my e-mail (again!) or even check the attached file. It is starting to get funny.

Then she says customers of Itaú and Unibanco can have split payments (first they don’t and now they do??). But I would have to check with my bank. HUMMM … the biggest e-commerce in Brazil sells me something and tells me to go check it up with my bank. I begin to believe they are treating my like a monkey.

E-commerce rule of thumb: TREAT YOU COSTUMERS WELL. TREAT THEM LIKE SMART PEOPLE.

So I fire up another message and I basically say: I want to know how to finish my transaction. Nobody cared to explain me this up until now - despite the fact that I have asked many times.

Again the same message stating that they’ve received my message an shall answer within a working day. TA-DA I get my answer and it says: your order awaits for your payment. You can pay calling our call-center throught the number XXXX. Thank you for your message and you are a very important client to us.

Actions speak louder than words, isn’t it ? How much care does americanas.com have towards their customers? Not to mention that this time ANOTHER person has answered me. Third message, third different person. Why?

Off course I would love to blog out loud: americanas.com fuck you very much! I shall not return here and I will make sure everyone I know will know about this. But I want to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes, so I say nothing.

Tomorrow would be the day I was going to get the printer if everything wet fine. So tomorrow will be the day I e-mail the ombudsman.

Stay tunned, it is a promissing story of everything you should not do and how not to sell online.

Every thing started here. So I proceded to my check out. As I decided to pay throught debit directly on my banking account, splitting payments.

Everythig ready so I clicked on the “BUY” buttom and was redirected to my bank website to make the payment. And something that the folks at americanas.com probably didn’t think of happened. My bank’s website was out.

So americanas.com believes I have made the payment and is waiting for my bank to confirm it. My bank never knew about the purchase so it has done nothing and will do nothing. And I, thy custumer, am waiting here for the damm printer I wanted to buy but I could not.

Should I proceed into re-doing everything again? What is the system at americanas.com understands that there are 2 printers to be delivired (and charged) to me?

The safe way, I though, would be to try to contact them and explain what happened and find a way to finish this transaction.

How naive one can be ?

– more on the next post –

Last friday night I decided I should get a new printer. So after browsing the internet in some e-commece websites like e-Bay, mercadolivre.com and americanas.com and after reading some products commets I made up my mind. I wanted to buy a color laser printer that was inexpensive and also not so big - just good enought for me.

Usually I buy stuff at mercadolivre.com, but this time I decided I should give americanas.com a try. I guess the main difference between this two is that while mercadolivre.com is like an e-Bay, americanas.com would be more like amazon.com.

The printer I wanted to buy was on for 500 bucks (more or less 300 dollars) and I could split payments in 12 times. Even better, they offered me a special payment system where they would charge directly into my banking account. So no credit cards - I loved. All that I wanted. I was happy and thrilled. So I went for it.

But that was where everything started to fall apart.

More on the next post !

This morning I decided I could run away for a while from the big city. So me and my wife drove about 80 miles into the country side to ride horses.

Just after the class my I found myself talking to the Hara’s owner about how she could bring more peolple to her horseback ridding classes. She has already an AdSense account and invests about 100 bucks per month.

She has already her own website that is amazingly well build and has a lot of information … this means she is a potential for natural search (SEO). The website lacks a proper landing page so that she could convince people to come by.

I guess for her business, one that she must bring people to her school in order to them to hide the horses it may be a little pointless to try to sell things on line. Maybe it would be a good advice to have a landing page tatics towards telling people how easy it is to get there. Once there, you become a new customer almost garanteed - I did.

Yo, so this s the first post for this blog. And, guess what? It had to be about content. If I was Steve Balmer I would be saying: Content! Content! Content! - Content! Content! Content!

Seriously, if you don’t have unique content pelople will no bother to read you (very few will) and even Google will either penalize you or give you a very low relevance. Which means you will not rank well or not rank at all.

Not ranking well means no visitors. No visitors no cash.

So let’s talk about how to create unique content, how to rank well, how to make things easy for your visitors and finally, how to sell to them. Hang on and keep reading this blog.