E-COMMERCE

Venita Watson, 43

Venita has an antique book shop in Hay-On-Wye. She’s been selling online for three years: the US and Middle-East are her biggest customers outside of UK. Her income from the web has just outstripped the shop and she employs 3 people for shop and online fulfilment.

QUOTE

"I need to be sure this is going to make me money if I have to pay for a developer to build it for me."

GOALS

• To sell books online and take payments from around the world
• The majority of her traffic comes from Google, but she wants to increase word-of-mouth traffic (and track that increase)
• To enable customers to be notified of new, relevant inventory
• To enable customers to save items for later review and action
• To be able to easily update her online catalogue, including imagery

ASPIRATIONS FOR WEB INTENTS

• Web intents could make payments easier for customers, perhaps circumventing her reliance on Paypal and the
• limitations of global payments
• It would let customers share in a way which works for them
• The system could notify customers in a way which works for them, like RSS
• She’s like to update imagery without having needing Photoshop

CONCERNS ABOUT WEB INTENTS

• She may not be able to track word-of-mouth actions
• She’s worried about the time and expense of implementation – she has no tech staff so would need to pay someone
• Will I need a new merchant account? How would the payment work with existing systems?
• I don't want my web pages cluttered with buttons I can't control
• I don't want to confuse my not particularly technical customers with stuff they don't understand