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Companies in the UK must include certain regulatory information on their websites and in their email footers before 1st January 2007 or they will breach the Companies Act and risk a fine.

Every company should list its company registration number, place of registration and registered office address on its website as a result of an update to the legislation of 1985. The information, which must be in legible characters, should also appear on order forms and in emails. Such information is already required on ‘business letters’ but the duty is being extended to websites, order forms and electronic documents.

The change is being made by a Statutory Instrument that is expected to be passed on Thursday to implement a European law, the First Company Law Amendment Directive, into UK law. According to a Department of Trade and Industry spokesperson, the law will take effect on 1st January, one day later than the Directive requires. (The Companies (Registrar, Languages and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2006 has now been passed.)

The information is likely to appear in the footer of every email sent from a company, to avoid having to decide whether each email amounts to a ‘business letter’ or not. Many companies do this already because the term ‘business letters’ was thought likely to include emails even without this new clarification.

For websites, contrary to the fears of some, the specified information does not need to appear on every page. Again, many websites will already list the required information, perhaps on their ‘About us’ or ‘Legal info’ pages.

The E-commerce Regulations, passed in 2002, require that certain information is listed on a website, including, “where the service provider is registered in a trade or similar register available to the public, details of the register in which the service provider is entered and his registration number, or equivalent means of identification in that register”.

That has been understood as including the company registration number and place of registration. The E-commerce Regulations also required a note of “the geographic address at which the service provider is established” – which many have taken to mean the registered office address.

However, the wording in the E-commerce Regulations is ambiguous compared to the new provisions. Further, many organisations’ sites currently omit the information, perhaps making the mistake of thinking that the E-commerce Regulations do not apply to websites that do not sell online (in fact they apply to almost all websites).

Information that must be on your website: an aide memoire
The following is the minimum information that must be on any company’s website (from OUT-LAW’s guide, The UK’s E-commerce Regulations).

It is not sufficient to include a ‘contact us’ form without also providing an email address and geographic address somewhere easily accessible on the site. A PO Box is unlikely to suffice as a geographic address; but a registered office address would. If the business is a company, the registered office address must be included.

Finally, do not forget the Distance Selling Regulations which contain other information requirements for online businesses that sell to consumers (B2C, as opposed to B2B, sales). For details of these requirements, see our guide, The Distance Selling Regulations - An Overview.

For help with email notices, such as disclaimers, see OUT-LAW’s guide on Email notices.

Posted on http://www.out-law.com/

June was a bumper month for online retailers as overall sales reached an amount higher than the annual takings in London’s West End. Some £3.5 billion was spent online in June as the IMRG Index recorded a 55% annual increase - its highest sustained growth rate for four years.

The IMRG Index climbed to 3430, close to the all time high of 3553 recorded for December 06 (when sales reached £7.66 billion). This brings the IMRG Index’s average year-on-year growth for Q2 2007 to 52.5% - significantly higher than for the same period in 2006 (35.33%), 2005 (30.8%) or 2004 (35.4%).

Sustained growth such as this has not been seen since early 2003, when 100% annual increases were a regular occurrence (78.4% on average for the three months, April, May and June).

Jo Evans, IMRG’s MD commented: “This astonishing growth shows that all shopping is entering an entirely new phase. Thanks to the internet, shoppers are getting used to thinking about, finding and buying goods and services in new ways. They no longer need to plan their lives around when the shops are open and, for many, queuing for the till is a thing of the past. They would rather listen to other shoppers’ opinions of what goods are like than rely on marketing spiel. Consumers have tasted e-shopping power, and are well and truly hooked.”

Online sales of electrical goods were a massive 92% higher in June than last year. Pixmania’s Ulric J?me, MD France & Northern Europe, explained: “June and July are key months for sales of electrical products on the internet, as people buy electronic items for their summer holidays: Digital Cameras, MP3s, Laptops… Since the beginning of the year we have seen that confidence in internet shopping has reached a very high level in the mindset of consumers.

“Our feedback shows that most UK customers are now coming directly to our web shop without first shopping / looking around in high street stores. The reality is that online retailers are able to secure more aggressive prices for their customers: this along with the vast quantity of product information available online and the ease of the buying process that avoids having to queue in stores is the winning mix of a smarter way to shop. Shoppers recognize that most internet sites are becoming more and more professional, trying to get the best of the offline experience online. This reality is directly reflected in our UK conversion rate which has increased by 59% from last year.”
Emma Herrod

http://www.internetretailing.net/

If you are not lucky enough to have a supplier who has given you a CD with all the product images your require ready for the web, this guide will help you achieve the best results.

Basic rule of thumb

• Product image should ideally be on a white background.
• Thumbnail images (small picture) should be between 70 pixel square and 150 pixels square.
• Expanded images (large picture) should be big, big enough to see the product well, 400 pixels square should suffice.
• Product image should be 72 dpi resolution.
• Product image should be in RGB mode.
• Product image should be saved as JPEG (.jpg) format for best quality.
• Image names should be lowercase with no spaces, even better the image name should be the product code e.g. product-name.jpg or 123abc.jpg.
• To distiguish between the Thumbnail and the Expanded image we suggest you use the following naming convension e.g. product-name-thumb.jpg and product-name-exp.jpg

Taking the pictures
If you have a good quality digital camera you can take the pictures yourself. If your products are small it might be worth investing in a Light Tent (Desktop Studio) for around £40, which can improve the quality of your pictures for relatively little expense.

While the general rule of thumb is that product images should be on white backgrounds, better results can sometimes be had by taking a photo of the product in action, i.e. lifestyle shots.

Manipulating Images
There are many software applications on the market that allow you to resize and crop your images, ranging from Photoshop (and their popular cut-down version Photoshop Elements) and Paint Shop Pro to the popular (and free) Gimp and Paint.NET.

Batch Processing of Images
The painstaking task of creating thumbnail images for 1000’s of product can be eased with batch processing. Batch processing tools come built in to applications such as Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. If your image maniplutaion software does not have batch processing, you could use a free program called (kd). Simply select the images you want to create thumbnails for, select the compression and give the image name a suffix (e.g. -thumb) and start the process.

The two most common errors reported by online shoppers are failure to connect to the web server and the wrong page or transaction step returned.

Site Confidence monitors more than 800,000 web pages a day and says one error is reported in every eight pages, which is threatening consumer confidence.

The organisation says retailers must focus on these common errors immediately to ensure a good customer experience that will make them want to return to the web site.

Site Confidence chief executive Bill Kirkwood says poor performance often goes undetected until identified by a customer or the press.

‘Every organisation knows how many hits its web site receives and its place within the ‘most visited’ league tables,’ he said. ‘Yet they have no idea whatsoever about just how enjoyable or productive those customer visits have been.

‘Without that information, the online cost of sales may be far more expensive than these organisations have bargained for.’

Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) members recently voted customer journey and customer retention strategies the two key areas to be addressed in e-retail.

Dave Friedlos, Computing, 13 Jul 2006

UK retailers have dramatically improved their online checkout process, according to research published today (Thursday).

The Clothes Online Report 2007 produced by web consultancy Bit10 says all seven of the clothing retail sites it tested took visitors successfully through the payment process, compared with under half of sites tested in 2004.

Bit10 strategic director Ben King says the improvement is a reflection of retailers using technology in smarter ways.

‘Our last report found that customers were giving up the checkout process because of poor usability,’ said King.

But the report says there is still a lack of user testing that would help reduce the number of steps customers need to go through, says King.

‘Unnecessary form filling is another barrier to a sale. Why ask someone their date of birth when they are buying a jumper?’ he said.

Freeform Dynamics analyst Martin Atherton says retailers now appreciate the need to reduce the number of steps in the purchasing process. ‘This can be done through things like storing delivery addresses,’ he said.

He says usability, traceability and reliability have improved over the last couple of years.

‘However, there are still too many online retailers who have discrepancies between what they offer online and what is actually available,’ said Atherton.

Lara Williams, Computing, 26 Apr 2007