Digital Socialite

Where's the Love for Canadian Internet Users?

It's the world wide web but we all still live in geographical locations, physical places in that world. And where we live has an impact on what we do online.

If you live in the US, you have a ton of online stores to choose from and shipping to your state is usually not a problem (except for Alaska and Hawaii - see geography matters). You can also watch videos from networks that are often blocked from those of us who live in Canada.

Many countries with Internet accessibility have their own popular sites, social networks and even search engines (Google apparently is not immune to geography either).

WE LOVE THE INTERNET
According to The Canadian Internet Project, compared to the rest of the world, Canadians are heavy Internet users with 78% Internet penetration in 2007. What the hell is Internet penetration? Well from what I've seen of other stats, it likely means that 78% have been online at least once in the past month (don't quote me on that though).

Plus Canadians are shopping online more:
"This increase was driven by a larger volume of orders, which rose from 49.4 million in 2005 to 69.9 million in 2007. The proportion of orders placed with Canadian vendors declined slightly from 57% of the total in 2005 to 52% in 2007."

We need more Canadian-based websites and online stores to take advantage of all this great online love.

I was bummed out to see that our orders placed to Canadian vendors actually decreased. This could be for many reasons but I assume part of the problem is that we don't have as much to choose from and maybe Canadian vendors struggle more to sustain a business online due to geographical factors (and major competition from the US).

If any of you out there are like me and want to see this change, please share your comments and stories.

Photo by
Gordana Adamovic-Mladenovic

Building a List, Checking it Twice...Sorry Santa, I’ve Got Dibs on This One

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on building a list of Canadian online stores. I want to provide you with a great resource that will be different than many of the existing directories out there. For each store I add to the list I check as many pages as possible to ensure that they follow this criteria:

- Located in Canada and owned by Canadian entrepreneurs
- Clear shipping and return policy
- Secure online payment

Getting Personal
This list will grow with time and my goal is to contact many of the owners to get to know them better - the people behind the sites. Why? Because I believe that online shopping can be like shopping at your local stores where you get to know the people who work there and where you can feel good about purchasing from them.

There are quite a few Canadian online shopping directory sites out there and I’ve checked out a number of them. These sites, for the most part, are repositories in which companies can add their information. They often have affiliate systems attached to them as well. This means that they get paid  (not much but still) by the online stores every time a user clicks on their respective links.

While there is nothing wrong with this model and it helps the online stores get some exposure, there is no quality-control. Some of the directories incorporate reviews but as with many Canadian sites, they are few and far between and consequently, not very useful.

Gotta Start Somewhere
Still, they are good places to start on a search for stores located in Canada or in the US who have a Canadian presence and/or Canadian-friendly shipping. I’ve listed a few here for you to have a look-see:

http://www.cybershopping.ca/
http://www.onlineshoppers.ca/
http://www.canadaretail.ca/
http://www.canadashoppingcanadian.com/index.html
http://www.shoptoit.ca/
http://www.designandcopy.ca/thingscanadian/

With the exception of Shoptoit.ca, these sites are a bit ‘messy’ and cluttered so it’s not always fun but at least it’s all in one place...right? Well, it’s a start.

Photo: Justin Henry (Flickr Creative Commons)

Reviewing Reviews: How Reviews Could Be Improved to Mean More to You

Like many people, I tend to look for reviews as a basis for buying a certain product, booking a trip, selecting a movie etc.
But something has always bugged me about the whole review system as a whole, it is not personalized. Each one of us has particular needs and preferences and many times, they are not the same as those pointed out in user ratings.


REVIEW RESEARCH = TIME, LOTS OF IT

Last spring, I wanted to figure out where to go in the Carribean for a holiday. TripAdvisor is a good site with a ton of user reviews and ratings. The site was very helpful in helping me decide where to go and which hotel to stay in (I ended up going to Turks and Caicos at the Ocean Beach Resort).
The research process took a long time and a lot of careful sifting through reviews to find those relevant to me. Now, while I do enjoy going on online finding missions, I did get frustrated when I couldn’t find meaningful and valuable reviews.

SEVEN WAYS REVIEWS COULD MEAN MORE

Here is how I believe reviews could be improved and how I plan to review online shopping sites for you:

1. Reviewer profiles:

Wouldn’t it be great to find those people who are similar to you? Age, gender, parental and marital status, Internet savviness, frequent vs. infrequent buyer, traveller etc. 
Of course, I can’t become a ton of different people when reviewing sites but I will do my best to highlight certain areas where these type of details might matter to you.

2. Eliminate rating systems:

Ratings are inherently flawed and can sway you in one direction or another for no other reason than someone was having a bad day or perhaps they just really love a certain brand.
I will admit that I rarely give anything 5 out of 5 stars because in my mind nothing is perfect and 4 is the best it can be. Surveys are created with this bias in mind - it’s a real psychological phenomenon and it is not factored into review sites.

3. Grouping:

When sites have a ton of reviews, wouldn’t it be great if there was an engine that showed you which terms, phrases were most often mentioned within the comments? This technology exists all over the Internet - in the form of tag clouds. Tag clouds are visual representations of what terms are most common within a certain site, article etc. This concept likely requires its own post if you haven’t seen it yet but for now, here is a visual representation of the content in this blog (created at wordle.net).

4. Categories:

The way we organize information is also somewhat personal. My filing system is likely not exactly like yours. We use labels that mean something to us. So, categories are not always the best way to find information but in many cases, especially online, it’s the best way to guide users to certain areas of a site. Reviews could be categorized in the same way. That would allow us to quickly filter them and read only those pertaining to our needs.

5. Comment limits:

There may be a lot to say about your experience but when it comes to reading, we all have a certain limit as to how much we take in. Our visual system is limited to approximately 7 lines. So, when looking at a page of text, we can take in about that much in one view without having to move our eyes up or down much at all. And I believe that all freeform comments should stay within that limit. When forced to keep things short and sweet, we need to prioritize what we say and usually the result is a more valuable comment.

6. Fun, easy-to-digest:

I’ll admit that so far, this post has not been as light and witty as I’d intended but I aim to ensure my reviews are not all serious and corporate sounding. Many reviewers want to sound like experts so they use terms and language that we don’t always get. This is not helpful and we can usually see through it enough to ignore the comment altogether.

7. Option for more info:

The operative word here is Option. When reading a review, it’s best to be able to glean most of the information within a small space. Still, if you really like the reviewer’s comments, it would be nice to have a few options for more detail (descriptive links at the end for example).

I will try and stick to these 7 points in my reviews, until someone tells me how much they suck and why don’t have this or that. Feedback is always going to drive how I do my reviews because I am not everywoman or everyman and want to help as many of you as possible.