My favorite E-commerce profile Katrin have purchased a competitor called SiteDirect and by doing so she now will be in charge of two popular platforms and 14 people in 3 locations. This is great news, and I am very happy that things are going well for Katrin and her husband Erik.

While I do not know much about SiteDirect I know it is an "old" and experienced company with a platform that has been popular for a long time. If Katrin is investing in SiteDirect, then you can bet she has looked at it from all angles and that means that the platform and the people are top of the line.

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In the short term, nothing will happen at all with the two platforms, in the long term we will have to analyze how we use both company's resources in the best way, a merger of them is probably not completely out of the question in that situation.

From what I know today, both are headless platforms with good APIs and good functionality, and they both have strengths and weaknesses. My hope is that the strengths of one match the weaknesses of the other and I think I see such tendencies in several areas, but much analysis remains before I know for sure.

It is the platform experts at each company who need to sit down and look at it with me to arrive at a good way forward, says Katrin Lundgren to Ehandel.se

This is something I think is really good for both platforms as there are synergies that will benefit from this acquisition. Kodmyran are well known in Sweden for their excellent platform, the amazing technical skill from Erik and the development team and a ton of e-commerce knowledge and skill from Katrin and the whole team.

I look forward to seeing what this acquisition will mean for both platforms and what synergies we will see in the future.

Color psychology is a topic often brought up when discussing conversion rate optimization. It often comes up as a sort of law of what colors to use, which is based on an article online or some generic description in a book. Color psychology however is far more complex than that and a recent article by Talia Wolf at GetUplift is the best introduction to that complexity I think.

The fact that colors can affect us should come as no surprise to anyone. There are a lot of studies that show that this is true. How they affect us however is still a bit vague and seem less important to a lot of people working with it. This is a big mistake because just like music has an impact on our minds, colors also affect us based on association and everyone has different associations.

Just as Talia brings up the different association differences in her excellent article, like the fact that white is both purity and death, there is also associations based on age and even personal preferences. You also have a whole science behind the different versions and shades of the colors where for example one shade of green can be seen as healthy and full of life and another will associate with pestilence and death.

Talia also briefly touch on the fact that color psychology should not be used alone. It should be considered together with other association factors like typography, iconography and overall tonality. In conversion rate optimization it should also be accompanied by other CRO tools like direction of movement, familiarity and the gestalt laws to direct and highlight the actions we want the users to take.

If you want to know more, then head over to GetUplift and read the full article "Color psychology: The complete step-by-step guide" by Talia Wolf.

You will not regret it.

Ikea is making a bit of a splash recently with them announcing that they will not do the regular Black Friday sales and instead will buy back and resell products from their customers. This initiative called Buy Back Friday will happen in 27 of 31 markets globally between November 23rd to November 29th.

When the rest of the world get ready for the biggest marketing campaign of the year, Ikea chooses to focus on a little different approach. The Buy Back Friday will focus on sustainability and not only will it reduce the number of things that are thrown away, it will also allow people to get some furniture at a pretty low cost. The fact that you get store credit for the things you turn is also a great way to give people a bit extra before Christmas.

Personally I think this is a great example on how you can have great marketing while also making a good impact on the world. Ikea get two thumbs up from me.

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Every year, millions of pieces of old furniture are thrown away. So on Black Friday, we’re buying back old IKEA furniture to give it another life. That’s a better deal for the planet. For more information on the Buy Back service, visit your local IKEA site. Terms and conditions apply.

Today the Swedish company Teknik Magasinet filed for bankruptcy after failing their reconstruction. It is one of several Swedish companies that have failed recently and many other are struggling at the moment. With tougher competition, changes in peoples buying habits as well as more expensive rent I think we will see more brick and mortar based companies fold in 2020.

After a few rough years for Teknik Magasinet and with a reconstruction started in the summer of  2019 they finally gave up the struggle and filed for bankruptcy. The company that started in 1989 have had a tough time adjusting to the new times, just like many other older companies. They did a push for E-commerce and had some success in 2018, but lower number of customers in the physical stores and raising rents did nothing to help the difficult situation.

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Retail trade has been affected by continued falling sales and rising rents, while a weakened Swedish krona has increased commodity purchases from abroad, so despite extraordinary efforts by a new company management, it has not been possible to achieve profitability, the company writes in a press release.

While Teknik Magasinet has filed for bankruptcy on January 15th they have looked into the possibility to have someone else take over the business. So far no one has stepped forward, but there is still hope that TeknikMagasinet will survive in one for or the other.

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We have negotiated with players who have been interested in a takeover, but there has been no interest in taking over the business while it is in the process of reconstruction. They want to complete such a negotiation with a bankruptcy trustee, says Carl Östring, Teknikmagasinet's business adviser, to Di.

As sad as this is it does not come as a surprise. We see many companies struggle with making ends meet these days. It is easy to blame the death of old companies on the rise of E-commerce, but there is more to it than that. That is a topic for another time however and for now we say goodbye to Teknik Magasinet and thank them and all their employees for the services these last 30 years.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to how to present your product on the product page is not how to actually show the product, it is how to sell it. I constantly see product pages with tons of bells and whistles. There are multiple product pictures or perhaps even a 3D model which is now getting more common. There are splashes for sales, discounts and campaigns. There are social media links and sharing capabilities. There are reviews, some better presented than others, and there are product attributes.

The thing that I rarely see is: the selling text. How many e-commerce sites have you visited and looked at a nice product only to be served som SEO optimised text that just spit out keywords and attributes? Imagine for a moment that you ventured into a store and you see that same product. You walk up to it and just as you do that a sales clerk come up to you and start to talk:

“ Stainless steel watch featuring textured dial border, contrasting chronograph subdials, and pebbled leather band with stitching.
Quartz movement with analog display. Protective mineral crystal dial window.
Features buckle closure, date window, stick hour markers, and blue second hand.
Water-resistant to 300 feet (100 M): suitable for snorkeling, as well as swimming, but not diving.”

I bet your first reaction would be to wonder why the sales clerk talk like that and then you would probably feel a bit uncomfortable because you would suspect that the person is a robot. No one talk like that, it’s simply not a very human like way to communicate. You probably already know that psychologically we tend to like things we can relate to, like people with similar taste in music, clothes or that look like us. Imagine if we instead write the text like if a real person would speak to us and see what happens:

“This beautiful stainless steel watch have a nice textured dial border and the armband is actually handmade in Verona, Italy, that’s why the stitching have that special look. It was designed by the famous artist named Bruno DiMalo who is famous for his attention to the finest details and for his glass sculptures that are featured in many fashion magazines in Italy. In this particular piece he added contrasting chronograph subdials and a protective crystal dial window.

The rumor has it that this watch was designed as a gift for a famous Italian actress and that is why the second hand is sapphire blue, just like her eyes, but also because of her love for the sea. Because of that love for the sea this fine watch can be used in water, but you should not dive too deep with it.”

Suddenly we weave a story around the watch and if I have done my research on my customers this text should attract the customer and s/he can probably picture the city of Verona or some other Italian city in the mind. We add a feeling of luxury by tossing in words like handmade and then connect it’s origin to a celebrity. All of a sudden the selling text sound more appealing, even if I did not put a lot of effort into it. A skilled copywriter can surely do much better than this and it does not have to take a lot of time to write.

So why not make a test, right now. Pick say 5 products that you are already measuring conversion for and re-write the selling text and weave a story around the product with the use of basic copywrite techniques. Match the story to fit your best selling usergroups and see what happen! If you do it right you should see a nice increase in conversion as you connect to your users, just by writing as a human and not as a robot.

If you do, please let me know how your experiment turned out!