Sweet spot in Online & In-store Shopping

Sweet spot exits in both in-store and online shopping. Not only in regular shopping websites, but also in some special online shopping sites like flash shopping or Groupon. They are not only selling products, but also experience, life style and everyday habits.

Gilt is an upscale flash shopping websites which not only includes daily deals, 3-day regular flash shopping products, but also include Gilt City and travel sites. The travel sites, which provided by Jetsetter, is a new tool to help customers find luxury travel experience online.The Gilt city part is very exclusive in flash shopping industry, because they can find unique deals of products and services for the city you choose. Gilt group basically is selling an experience and life style so that their customers live in a Gilt life where everything is come from Gilt.com.

Sephora is a classic example of sweet spot handler. Why would I say that? Sephora is so sophisticated on how to let customers find the products, not selling customers products. Examples would be they provided classes to teach you how to do the skincare or makeup by using products selling in their store; provided expert studio service in charge so that customers will get salon service with low price; providing membership card with 3 different levels so that they can enter the sale events with different treatment. Sephora is creating a everyday habits that when you think makeup or skin care, Sephora is where you should go. Even you do not have shopping list, you would like to visit the store because there's no sales people there, just friendly advisers so that you can try products as much as you want in store.

The most successful sales is not selling products, but keep customers keep shopping in their everyday life and make it be the habit. Believe the products so customers believe it too.

Online Drive Tools

It's internet time.We can nearly live depends on internet without any other storage applications or tools. Flash drives, hard drives, CDs will be useless if you notice that there are hundreds of online companies and tools who provided free or cost-less online drives, cloud sync, backup and storage tools.

Personally I use Dropbox and Google Docs for either personal or work files' storage. I like to use Dropbox for personal information storage because it's secure and the desktop looks more like my own computer. The folder in it has the same order with my laptop and I put my homework, photos, word files and even sound or video files in it so that I can use it wherever I go.

Google Docs is more for sharing purpose, so I use it most on group meeting or projects. It's very easy to not only share information, such as PowerPoint and Word documents, but also edit information online as a group so we can see who has done what in the paper and the process of editing.

Actually these online cloud sync has common functions but are somewhat different

. Of course, the fees we need to pay is also different. For example,Dropbox have service of 100GB storage for $19.99 per month, but Google Drive just need $4.99 for the same amount of storage. Dropbox's free storage is 2GB, compared with Google's drive is 5GB. But Dropbox provide media streaming function which Google Drive do not have.

Another syncing solution called SkyDrive, which provided by Microsoft, provides the most features which covers both Google and Dropbox, and with 7GB free storage.If you are running out of storage and want to try a new way to store your files with limited budget, SkyDrive might be a good and economic choice.

Hybrid Strategy for Paid Search

This week I get better understanding about the paid search, or you can call paid search strategy.

All we talk before are the benefits that paid search will give either small or big firms.But right now as we know all those benefits, all firms will begin to consider to invest on paid search, what's next?

When we began to the specific paid search, the problem appeared. If small firms do not have too much money and they of course want to achieve big goals, how to balance this? A article called PPC Strategy: These 3 Paid Search Strategies Are All You Ever Need mentioned 3 strategies which may be applied when consider doing paid search.

The author also mentioned a way he used to hybrid paid strategy which I think is pretty helpful, which is to break out campaigns between profitability focused keywords and brand focused keywords.This will satisfy those clients with limited budget but want to achieve maximum goals.

At the end of those suggestion, the most important one is expectation management. It is the best strategy we should apply for all the cases to satisfy clients.