Gene Alvarez

An interesting story on a court ruling that enabled students to rate teachers sparked an equally interest discuss discussion around reviewing people performance.
As the e-commerce person here, I have been talking with clients about product rating for years. It has been my belief that with all product review ratings the reader should apply the [...]

[Read more →]

An interesting phenomenon that I am seeing is that a company can go bankrupt and yet its online store can outlive the physical business. Take for example Linen – N – Things (www.lnt.com) and Circuit City (http://www.circuitcity.com/) both who filed for bankruptcy and closed their stores in 2009 have new owners of their website [...]

[Read more →]

Ok, I have been swamped with client inquiries, research and the upcoming Internet Retailer Conference (Come to my session if you are there it will be quite interesting. http://www.internetretailer.com/IRCE2009/session_detail.asp?sess_id=76 ). Anyway, I was up late last night planning my much-needed vacation and being a web person I used an online booking service that I [...]

[Read more →]

In a discussion on social software and online selling, Amazon is one of the most often used examples.
However, in the examples used in these discussions Amazon’s perceived image is different to each person. So as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Amazon’s business model is in the eyes of the user. For example, [...]

[Read more →]

The other day in my blog, I asked my followers to vote. The vote was for me to tweet or blog. Additionally, I posted a link that asked my Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Plaxo friends to “Please read my blog”. What I found out from this little experiment was interesting. Putting aside people saying I [...]

[Read more →]

OK, I admit it. I prefer to Tweet. There it is out. I have said it. I know I have not been the best and most diligent blogger and for my readers/followers I must apologize. I find Tweeting from my mobile device a much easy way to let my followers know what I am up [...]

[Read more →]

What a week! As the economy goes up and then back down, I am finding that more clients are concerned about thier web sites customer experience. I am not just talking about business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations. I am seeing business-to-business (B2B) organization looking to the web as a way to improve sales, build brands, work well [...]

[Read more →]

In between all that I had to do today; I couldn’t help but watch the Whitehouse online “Open for questions” voting. Although some question such as health care were no surprise. One topic I didn’t expect as the top question was the legalization and taxation marijuana. Moreover, I was surprised that is ranked the highest [...]

[Read more →]

Ever wonder why e-commerce sales for your organization aren’t as high as you think they should be? Well I can tell you one possible reason the shopping to check out process could be harder than just driving somewhere to buy the item. For example, I own two GPS devices for my cars and I wanted [...]

[Read more →]

I was surfing through some of the midday news items online and came across the story of the Girl Scout that used a facebook with Youtube to sell cookies and that caught my eye. It seems as though the Girl Scouts themselves are not ready for online selling but that this little girl (with the [...]

[Read more →]