Online customer reviews and ratings have a significant influence on the shopping behaviour of consumers buying online.

According to the Deloitte study more than half of all U.S. consumers and 69% of Millennials say that reviews and ratings by other consumers influence their buying decisions more than any other type of online advertising. As a result of the study 51% of the respondents said they had purchased products based on an online recommendation, and 24% said they would like to have an online service that recommends products based on consumers’ recommendations.

An ecommerce persuasion poll, carried out by user experience consultancy, Webcredible, revealed that almost one third (28 per cent) of online shoppers are most likely to be persuaded to make an online purchase by the reputation of the retailer.

Only 50 % of the eretailers use customer reviews

Still, though, only 50% of online retailers use customer reviews on their sites, according to Forrester Research. Those who don’t likely fear what their customers might say. They shouldn’t, according to Forrester, which also found that 25% of online shoppers report that they are unlikely to purchase a product after reading negative reviews, and most don’t take those reviews seriously.
But there is another reason why retailers should consider integrating a system into their online-shops that gives their customers the opportunity to share their service experiences: It can increase their creditability with their customer base overall.

Honest and impartial reviews written by real people enable consumers to choose the right shop for a product or a service and to buy with more confidence.

The Trusted Shops buyer feedback service

In addition to the well known trustmark Trusted Shops is offering a review and rating service where online buyers can provide feedback on transactions, rate online shops in a structured way and leave comments, provided they registered for a Trusted Shops guarantee at checkout.

Shopkeepers can use these unbiased buyer feedbacks to learn what customers liked and disliked, identify potential issues and use these insights to improve the shopping experience.

Click here to learn more about the Buyer Feedbacks by Trusted Shops.

Find out why trust is so important in e-commerce.

To watch the Interview click on the Screenshot below:

Learn more about the Market Ready Package Germany.

The Germany ready package is the largest free available extension for Magento, and it is a part of symmetrics SaaS platform for sophisticated e-commerce solutions. This release by symmetrics in close cooperation with Trusted Shops is an important contribution to the community and it is actively working on the dissemination of Magento on the German market.

The backround

Magento out of the box, configured as a universal and international product for shops of any size on the German market is not easy to handle. It takes time and requires expertise in the countless configuration steps. To help with these processes the missing valuable modules, as well as the valuable theme of the legal security symmetrics decided to launch a part of the SaaS configuration in this package. Symmetrics not only hope to inspire significantly more dealers for Magento, but also to improve the professionalism among developers, agencies and partners to drive forward the permanent standard tasks. They permanently carry out standard tasks and now they can automated solve it through the package.

A B2B package for the Magento Enterprise Edition and interfaces to more leading e-commerce services are in progress.

Here are some of the changes which are made by the localization package:

1. Creation and adaptation of information pages for supplier marking (imprint, terms, disclaimer, shipping, payment types, data protection), and filling the pages with variables from the centralized Imprint module
2. Standard configuration of the entire store for the German market (customer groups, rates, date formats, VAT rates, currencies, daily settings, basic store configurations, display of cart items, etc..)
3. Involvement of meaningful and easy to find links to information pages
4. Centralized management of all data in the new imprint module
5. Displaying and linking the price of components and additional costs incurred (including 19 percent VAT, plus shipping) to the necessary authorities
6. Optimization of orders (indication of delivery time and shipping weight, ad inventory through traffic light function)
7. Adaptation of the information in the order process and invoicing and others by a new accounting module
8. Relative SEO and options of performance
9. Distance warning from endangered formulations Shop and e-mail templates and delivery patterns of German texts (Must be the pattern with their own and replace variables in the texts of the imprint module)
10. Integration of the current German Language Pack with extensions
11. Numerous other optimizations, in particular to reduce the risk of a legal warning

With immediate effect the German localization package for Magento Commerce is ready for free (OSL 3.0 license) download for all interested parties on Magento connect.

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Find out more about this subject in the following article.

Online shoppers use alternative payment methods

In 2008 the company trialpay found out in it’s Alternative Payments Survey, that 75% of online shoppers have used an alternative payment method, such as Google Checkout, PayPal, Bill Me Later and TrialPay to purchase an item online. And 59% of online shoppers say they are more likely to make a purchase online if there is an alternative payment method available.

More payment options – more trust?

40% of those surveyed by ClickandBuy also said that they would feel more comfortable purchasing from a retailer who offers a wide range of payment methods than a retailer who only offers one payment option.

One third (36%) of survey participants said they would be spending more online than on the high street in 2009 than in 2008 and 45% agreed that they would be spending more time shopping online for cheaper versions of things they used to buy on the high street.

Financial security risks associated with ecommerce continue to be a concern, however, with 83% of respondents believing that the number of people trying to commit fraud on the internet is increasing. Only one third disagreed with the statement ‘I feel no safer when buying online now than I did five years ago’ and less than half (42%) of regular online shoppers are totally confident that their credit card details are secure when entered online.

Concerns of security risks

Of the 32% of adults surveyed who do not regularly shop online, over half (54%) said that this is because they are concerned of the security risks from entering credit card details online.

Commenting on the findings, Nick Drew, director, e-commerce operations, ClickandBuy, said:

“The message to merchants is clear – consumers are prepared to shop more online, but they want to feel completely comfortable and secure in doing so. Competition is rife in the online space and if shoppers aren’t being offered the right service and payment systems to meet their needs, they will take their purchase elsewhere, leaving merchants to potentially miss out on millions of pounds of business. Yes, e-commerce is set to grow, but only for those merchants who appreciate that different consumers have different preferences when it comes to making online transactions. The logic is simple – by offering a wider range of payment systems, the more customers a site is likely to appeal to.”

Find out more about this interesting shop in the following interview.

What is the idea behind your online store?
With MiaDeRoca we are offering products that are not available everywhere. We are specialising on beautiful things that are produced in the Alpine region or are inspired by the Alps, its symbols and its traditions. Our product range encompasses funky handbags, messenger bags, exclusive purses, garnet jewellery, woollen caps, porcelain, fake deer trophies and exceptional cookie cutters. It is very important to us to visit and get to know manufacturers and designers that provide products for the MiaDeRoca shop. We have had the luck, that so some very special and exclusive products were developed. MiaDeRoca is in fact the combination of all things we love to do – travel, explore, scout local products, test and promote them online.

Why did you decide to start an e-commerce business?
Like always, there have been several reasons. Since 2003 we have been running an internet marketing business and had developed and optimized online shops for customers, we were more than ready for our own adventure. The second reason is of course, that we love the region were we live and that we love, that the Alps are extremely diverse, encompass several nations, all different dialects and traditions. And the wonderful MiaDeRoca shop enables us do look for interesting design and manufacturers from Vienna to Monaco. The planning started 2006, the English webshop was launched in autumn 2007.

Could you tell us about your professional life before you started your online store?
We run an internet marketing business focusing on the German speaking market, but work internationally as well.

Do you work full-time or part-time for your online business?
MiaDeRoca is in fact an online family-business. Regina Kainz and Florian Fischer work part time and we do have employees on our payroll during the more busy months.

Where are your customers located?
Our customers are located all over Europe. If we would put a pin on the map for every purchase we had since 2007, there would be a big punch of pins within the boundaries of Germany, several in the UK, quite some pins in Ireland and of course a nice bulk in Austria.

Which shop-system are you currently using?
The Shop System is based on Zen Cart. Numerous modifications have been developed to improve the usability and to make the shopping experience more powerful and better than at standard webshops.

Which payment systems does your Shop offer?
Prepayment and PayPal. We will add other payment methods as well.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
One of the advantages is time flexibility – you can shop whenever you want, you can take as much time as you want, buy and leave or read thoroughly through the descriptions, look at the pictures, sleep it over and then go for it. The MiaDeRoca advantage is of course the product range, our customers find a selected range of products from handmade bags, exceptional jewellery to unusual cookie cutters.

Do you also run a high street store?
We did run a fantastic high street shop in the medieval centre of Salzburg from November 2007 until April 2009. We had some customers who bought online after visiting the high street store and we had customers who visited the store after exploring the online shop. Unfortunately the high street store soon was too small for all the products and logistics needed for the online shop, and city centres are wonderful to stroll and walk, but not ideal for daily deliveries and the quick shipping of products.

What measures have you taken to increase consumer confidence?
We follow all legal necessities, we try to provide clear information on the shopping process and of course the Trusted Shop Certification shows that we are certified by a renowned company.

What did you do to increase the visibility of your shop?
We promote MiaDeRoca in several ways. Offline promotion has mainly been through press releases and press contacts. Internet marketing has its emphasis on search engine optimisation and networking.

Are you using web 2.0 approaches for your online business?
We run the MiaDeRoca magazine, a blog where we post Alpine recipes, sightseeing tips, book reviews and some crafty stuff.

Where do you gather information about online shopping and web-retailing?
Through all kinds of media, be it books on consumption theory, blogs on usability or discussion boards on internet marketing. And we value the information exchange with fellow shop owners.

Which recommendations would you give to other e-tailers?
An online-shop is never finished, it is a continuous process.

What are your plans for the future?
We are constantly adding new products to the shop and are scouting new designers. There is a big number of creative and skilled minds in the Alps! One new section we will introduce during the next weeks is “DIY Projects”. There will be basic patterns to felt knitted bags or to crochet iPod purses or flower scarfs. In autumn, right before the second birthday of MiaDeRoca, we are planning some nice give-away and lottery.

If you want to get more information go to MiaDeRoca or visit the MiaDeRoca Magazine which presents on monthly basis interesting facts about Alpine Lifestyle.

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Find out more about consumer behaviour in online-shops.

Here are some facts:

More than half (56%) of the internet users are afraid of the misuse of their personal data when they shop online. The result of the user analysis WB3 that was based on a poll asked 121233 German speaking respondants questions about their online-shopping behaviour. Number one of the worst fears of online-customers is the fear of transfer of data and receiving unwanted newsletters from third parties. The second place was taken by bad customer ratings (45%) and third place by unsecure payment methods (43%).

Clear communication of the methods of data protection

One of the interesting results of the study was that the experienced online-users (59%) had more concerns of their personal data being misused than the newcomers. 79% of the respondents said that they consider an online-shops safe when the adequacy of Data protection clearly communicated in the shop.

It is a fact that hardly anyone believes in the security of personal data in the internet. Only one in ten persons believes that the online-shop follows the Data protection laws but two thirds think that companies misuse their data for advertising. Looking at these facts it is no surprise that people prefer to use pseudonyms instead of their real name.

27 % percent of the respondents admitted having used false names in the internet. Even when registering online people don’t like to give away their details. The reason given by most people was the fear of data misuse. One out of five users admitted having used false names when registering on websites. 66% percent said that they had used false names in order to prevent receiving unwanted e-mails. 62% percent said they were afraid of their data being sold to third parties.

Conclusion

Data protection is an important issue for many consumers. In order to increase the trust that people have in a website e-tailers should have clear communication on their website about how personal data is handled in their online-shop. There are different sources of trust that people consider when shopping online. It can be a strong brand name of a well known bricks and mortar business that is also selling online or a recommendation of friends, collegues or family member that works as source of trust.

A trustmark like the Trusted Shops seal of approval can increase the trust people have in a website because it works as an inmdependant source of trust. The Trusted Shops accreditation protocol contains more than 100 criteria a shop has to fulfil in order to display the Trusted Shops trustmark on it’s website. About 20 % per cent of the criteria are about data protection and data security.

In this context it is important to note that the Trusted Shops criteria set a higher standard of Data Protection than provided by law in the Data Protection Act and the e-Privacy Regulations. Communicating this together with the display of Trusted Shops trustmark in your online-shop can help to build trust and confidence in your shop and eventuallywill help to turn visitors of your online-shop into customers.

If you want to find out more about the Legally compliant sample texts, the Trusted Shops test specifications with more than 100 criteria and the Accreditation procedure click here.

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Find out more about this subject in the following post.

Part one of this article gave an overview of the status quo in mobile commerce. Lets get into detail and have a look at some companies that have successfully integrated mobile commerce into their platforms.

Examples for todays mobile shopping platforms

Some companies already offer mobile shopping versions of their websites that were optimized so they can be displayed and used with the most common mobile phones. Popular platforms like amazon.com, otto.de and billiger.de use simplified versions of their websites that don’t contain long texts, graphics and unnecessary features.

Especially price comparison sites that offer this kind of service for mobile devices can be very useful for online shoppers as they allow comparing the prices of a high street store and of hundreds of online-shop right on the spot. The shop-system Magento has already implemented such templates and the others will hopefully follow soon with their solutions. In addition to the mobile websites that work on the mobile browsers the renowned smartphone producers have started making available platforms for the development of own applications that work as independent programs. Amazon for example has developed an application lately that is available in Apple’s Appstore as well as in the Blackberry Application centre. The application provides the customers with full access to their personal choice of products and also offers a unique 1-click check-out-process that will be hard to beat. A special feature of the application is the camera of the mobile device into the shopping process.

Think of a scenario like this:

“You take a photo of the shoes of the person sitting next  to you in the subway upload it into amazon’s application which will then display an offer for exactly that pair or a comparable of pair of sneakers. I think this example shows the potential of mobile commerce.

Advantages of native applications

The special requirements of mobile shopping that I’ve mentioned above currently means that mobile internet is used mainly for communication- and information purposes. The moment all the technical problems are solved and a one-click shopping experience is possible there will be a considerable growth in mobile commerce. Native applications of different providers especially the Android-developer-community will hopefully improve mobile online-shopping in the near future.

A good example in this context is Apple’s appstore, a native application on the iPhone which enables customers to buy, download and automatically install programs with just a few clicks. The payment process is easy but you have to be a registered iTunes user. Another new feature will be the integration of a shopping function into the new 3.0 iPhone software which allows developers and users to sell their products directly. This new function could become interesting for other platforms and online-shops. But this could also be a good chance for suppliers of shopsoftware that could provide their cusomers with a mobile version of their software through this channel.

The future of mobile shopping

The use of mobile commerce highly depends on the industry sector. Especially in mobile ticketing mobile commerce seems to be working quite well already. There are numerous solutions available that allow ordering train-tickets or the reservation of hotel rooms with a mobile device.

If you take a look at the shopping experience for daily goods you’ll find some successfully implementeed functions . Another example from the Appstore shows that there are already a lot of shopping list applications. Here the user can create shopping lists and the program will find the closest store with the best price for the chosen products.

The well known product recommendation function works well for mobile commerce, too. Think of the following scenario:

You enter your favourite clothes-store and the smart-phone recognizes the store and immediately shows the products that you’ve bought the last time. According to this choice it can now start showing similar products or special offers in this sector which are available in your size. So the smartphone could lead you trough the store constantly giving personalized recommendations. If it is a barcode scanner, products-upload or a RFID connector, there will be various possibilities how offline products can be transferred to the online world to use the endless functions offered here and to increase the offline shopping experience. The best successful example is mobile price comparison.

1. www.comscore.com
2. www.magentocommerce.com
3. www.ecc-handel.de
4. appshopper.com
5. mashable.com
6. www.bahn.de

Click here for the German version of this article in the shopbetreiberblog.

Mr. Anderson from e-z buy talks about his experience as an e-retailer.

What is the idea behind your online store?
The idea behind our online store is to offer our past and present customers a more professional and easy shopping alternative to our age old eBay store.  On top of this we wanted the option of keep our loyal customers coming back for more so we needed a site which could handle offering discounts to our Loyal Registered Customers.

Why did you decide to start an e-commerce business?
Our Small Family Run Business initially started up in 1999 as an Engineering Parts Sourcing Company.  Basically, customers would come to us with a drawing for a Metal Casting and we would have it produced by one of our numerous suppliers in China. As you can imagine this involved many trips/meetings in China which opened our eyes to many, many other products.

The very first thing that caught our eye was a Terrific Grandfather Clock which stood almost 7 feet high!  We thought what the heck if you don’t take the risk we’ll never know.  So we went ahead and ordered a 20’ Container of 2 different models of Grandfather Clocks without thinking how we would sell them. We thought we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it!  Anyway, it took us nearly 3 years to sell them! We tried all sorts of ways, advertising in magazines, local auctions, leaflet drops and then we hit on an online Auction. But even on there things where extremely slow until one Lady in the South of Wales purchased one. As we were setting the clock up for her in her home when she just happened to mention “why do you not sell them on eBay”? To be honest we never really used or heard of eBay…. yes I know what you’re thinking but its true. Within months we had sold out and had enquires for more and more. All thanks to the Lady In Wales.

Since then we have moved into many other products, good products bad products, of all kinds. All of which where being sold on eBay. Now we have tried to settle to what we know best we have my Father who specialises in Clocks and Furniture, me who specialises is anything Electrical or Mechanical and then there’s my Wife who like any other woman is an Expert on anything that sparkles! Now we don’t sell just anything we sell products that we understood and we have a great knowledge of. In this way we can give our customer full support and a professional service.

As any business we wanted to grow, wanted more sales and reduced cost so we decided to try and move away from eBay due to the fees and started looking at web stores. While still selling on eBay we found a small cheap web store which we could offer up to 20 items. We opened the store and basically sold next to nothing over a period of about 12 months we also had nothing but trouble with it. So we closed the shop and continued to use eBay.

As many of you may know lots of things have changed recently on eBay one of them being there fees! Due to this we decided to find another Web Store, a better quality one than we’d previously had and hopefully something that could integrate with eBay and other shopping channels. We found BT Trader Pack Shop which is hosted by ePages. We registered back in August 2008 but due to the lack of time we really only got our store up and running early this year 2009.
We where getting the odd sale here and there but still not what we expected.  While setting the store up we had noticed the setup for Trusted Shops but at the time this didn’t seem very important to us. A couple of months later and still with low sales we decided to look more into the Trusted Shops Seal to see if this would improve our sales because we where getting the hits but not the sales. Since this time we are getting much more sales and much more enquires so we think it’s been a worthwhile exercise.

Could you tell us about your professional life before you started your online store?
I’m a full trained Motor Vehicle Technician with a Distinction In Micro-Processing and Electronics in Motor Vehicles. My father is a Fully Trained Engineer who has work for Large Multi National Companies. My wife has always been a Secretary and her specialist interests are Jewellery.

Do you work full-time or part-time for your online business?
Me & My father work Full Time, My Wife and Mother are part timers. 4 in Total

Where are your customers located?
Majority of our sales are to UK customer but we do get a few sales every month to EU Countries and some times the USA. We would like to increase our sales to EU customers due to the strength of the Euro but our web store can’t currently handle it.

Which shop-system are you currently using?
We use a BT Web Shop provided by ePages. Its template based but I designed and implemented everything in the store.

Which payment systems does your Shop offer?
We currently Offer PayPal and Google Checkout but today I’m filling out the application form for Sage Pay… Formally Protex. This will allow us to take mail order/telephone sales.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
We only have a warehouse, most high street stores have a warehouse a shop front and mountains of staff. We are a small family run business which have to make sure product are right and customers are very happy.  If we don’t we stand to loose our business. Unlike high street stores if a problem arises you are speaking to a company Director not just a paid employee who most of the time just turns up to work to get paid. You are speaking to the highest authority within a business and it’s us the Directors who make the final decisions. You don’t get passed around/fobbed off you get results, positive results, results which keep our customers happy and hopefully coming back for more.

Do you also run a high street store?
No, no high street store.

Does your store have any special features or functions?
Email Marketing, Cross Promotion, Product Recommendations, and User Accounts where the customer can track their orders and also store their information. We are currently looking at offering a 5% discount to all registered customers.

What measures have you taken to increase consumer confidence?
Applied the Trusted Shops Seal of Approval. Also everything which we send out is opened check and repacked to ensure it leaves us in perfect condition.

What did you do to increase the visibility of your shop?
I submit a data feeds weekly to Google Shopping and also advertise with Google Adwords. We are currently looking into other shopping comparison sites. We also send flyers out with every eBay sale.

Are you using web 2.0 approaches for your online business?
I’m not 100% sure what Web 2.0 is, I have read something about it on another site which offers ecommerce sites. I think it may be soothing to do with Search Engine Friendly Sites.  Sites which have a Page for every Product instead of dynamically producing a page when the product is called.

Which recommendations would you give to other e-tailers?
To invest in a good system early on which can handle multi channel selling from one inventory point and can handle Shopping Channel submission automatically. Also have a good brad a brand which will be recognisable from any of the shopping channels they find you on.

What are you currently working on?
As above. We want to implement a system which will handle multichannel shopping from one central inventory. We want to direct more sales to our web store rather than on eBay.  Also we want to introduce more products.

What is your favourite online-shop as a consumer?
I think that would have to be Play.com because I have used this more than any other.

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Are there already any success stories in mobile commerce?

This is the first of two posts around the subject of mobile commerce. In the following article Hendrik Lennarz e-commerce technology expert at Trusted Shops is giving an overview of the current situation in mobile shopping:

Whether you are on holidays at a family meeting or in your favourite restaurant it’s always very handy to be able to check your e-mail or have a look at an interesting eBay auction you’re bidding on.

The mobile internet has grown up

Because of the very fast transfer rates at affordable rates latest generation mobile phones play an important part as a channel for transactions and information in the daily life of many people. Consumer have constant access to price comparison sites and sites with product details of online-shops. The hardware sector today is still dominated by Apple’s iPhone but encouraged by google’s new mobile operating system the competitors are introducing their own models to the market. This competition on the market will result in falling prices for mobile devices which will further penetrate the market. A study conducted by comscore affirms this development. Compared to january 2008 the number of mobile internet users has nearly doubled in 2009.

Mobile commerce is just a question of the technical development

The way that e-retailers can profit from this development today is still limited by the technical development. The number of various different devices that all have different requirements for hardware, operating systems, browsers and operating controls still present obstacles to the developers of mobile applications for online-shops. At the same time these new applications require technical but sometimes even conceptual changes to truly improve the usability.

The requirements can be:

1. Adjustments to the screen size
2. Adjustments to Internet browsers
3. Adjustments to the bandwidth
4. providing secure connections
5. integration of payment systems

but also conceptual requirements like:

1. compressing grafics
2. shortening of texts
3. limitation of certain functions and features
4. avoiding unnecessary entry of data
5. shortening of the check-out process

For SMEs implementing mobile commerce into their shops might be too early as the costs of the implementation are high and the number of potential customers still too low to justify these high costs. For some shops like the German Wine Trading platform Hawesko mobile commerce already plays an important role as this company is already receiving up to 50 orders a day via mobile devices.

Click here for the German version of this article in the shopbetreiberblog.

Find out more about this interesting shop in the following interview with CEO Jürgen Enninger.

What is the idea behind your online store?
To allow our customers who have no direct contact to retailers to find, pre-listen and buy our music productions.

Why did you decide to start an e-commerce business?
There was a growing gap between the demand for our productions and the physical presence of the CDs in the shops.

How did it all start?
It started with email requests from Jazz aficionados from Canada and Australia who lived in remote areas and had no chance to get in touch with our products.

When did you start your online store?
We started our activities four years ago.

Could you tell us about your professional life before you started your online store?
Before the online shop started we were a purely physical production company which produced Jazz CDs and Vinyls and sold them through the usual channels.

Do you work full-time or part-time for your online business?
In total we have one person only doing online business.

How many employees are currently on your payroll?
We currently have 10 employees.

Where are your customers located?
All over the world.

How important is the UK and the international market for you?
Especially important because we take care of British musicians such as Gilad Atzmon and Mike Westbrook.

Which payment systems does your Shop offer?
Visa, Master and bank collection.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
Anyone on the globe with internet access will be aware of our music and can buy our CDs and printed music.

Do you also run a high street store?
Yes we also run a street store and those two concepts suit perfectly as we  can also refer to each others activities.

Does your store have any special features or functions?
We have a pre-listening function and a page view function for the printed music.

What measures have you taken to increase consumer confidence?
We have special features such as trusted shop and acquired a special security certificate.

What did you do to increase the visibility of your shop?
We have linked our shop system to different other websites.

Are you using web 2.0 approaches for your online business?
Yes, we have linked our shop to myspace, facebook etc.

Which recommendations would you give to other e-tailers?
As secure as possible and as convenient as possible any obstacle is one customer less.

What are you currently working on?
We plan a complete relaunch of our website.

What is your favourite online-shop as a consumer?
Jpc.de.

About ENJA Records

Established in 1971 in Munich by long-time jazz fans Matthias Winckelmann and Horst Weber. Beginning in the late fifties M.W. was exposed to many US jazz musicians when growing up in Frankfurt – then the jazz capital of the country. At after hours sessions at famous “Jazzkeller” and a couple of other live jazz spots he met and listened to Oscar Pettiford, Phineas Newborn, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, Attila Zoller, Roy Eldrige, Kenny Clarke, Albert Mangelsdorff, Don Menza, Cedar Walton, Billy Higgins, Chet Baker to name just a few. When M.W. set up ENJA he attended Munich University as a graduate student (economics and sociology).

First recorded artist was U.S. expatriate Mal Waldron. European and Japanese musicians followed (A. Mangelsdorff, Terumasa Hino, Masahiko Sato). After this European style avant-garde phase American fare became the focus produced by Matthias Winckelmann during frequent working visits to New York (Tommy Flanagan, Chet Baker, New York Jazz Quartet, Freddie Hubbard, Abdullah Ibrahim – then Dollar Brand -, David Friedman, Hannibal Peterson, Bennie Wallace, Abbey Lincoln, Franco Ambrosetti, Kenny Barron a.o.)
The Munich club “domicile” offered many opportunities to record visiting U.S. artists (Charles Tolliver, Pepper Adams, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, John Scofield – his first recording -, Terumasa Hino a.o.), and so did European festivals where ENJA recorded Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Yosuke Yamashita, Walter Norris, Jerry Gonzalez & The Fort Apache Band.

Some tapes were acquired and added a historic dimension to the catalog (Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Elvin Jones, Hampton Hawes. In early 1986 Matthias Winckelmann and Horst Weber decided to separate and to work individually from now on. Differing views on work intensity, on “where to take the label” were solved this way. M. W. got even more involved with New York’s jazz and produced an average of 30 albums annually on ENJA (Kenny Barron, Ray Anderson, Mitch Watkins, Wayne Krantz, Gary Thomas, Leni Stern, McCoy Tyner, Arthur Blythe, Abdullah Ibrahim, Elvin Jones, Abraham Burton, Maria Schneider Orchestra, Ingrid Jensen, Dan Wall, Lee Konitz, Kevin Mahogany et.al.).

To be able to present “border-crossing” music he established also the TIPTOE label, recording Mike Westbrook’s tribute to the Beatles, Michael Gregory, Kevin Bruce Harris, Intergalactic Maiden Ballet feat. John Zorn, Blue Box, Paul Jackson-Mike Clark a.o. The dormant blues label BLUES BEACON was revived by several releases of the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir and classic blues artists such as Bukka White, Little Brother Montgomery but also contemporaries Lillian Boutté, Christian Willisohn, Nick Woodland, Al Jones.
In recent years Matthias Winckelmann opened ENJA to musical territories far beyond the jazz mainstream and jazz avant-garde of the early years.

The most important artist in this repect has become Lebanese oud player/composer Rabih Abou-Khalil whose work combines classical Arabian technique with a European compositional approach and jazz influenced improvisation. Others are Tunesian vocalist / oud player Dhafer Youssef, Brazilian group Rosanna & Zelia, Lebanese composer / guitarist Mahmoud Turkmani, Israeli instrumentalist and novelist Gilad Atzmon, Moluccan vocalist Monica Akihary and her group Boi Akih, Pasaporte and Clave Y Guaguanco from Cuba, Hungarian acoustic guitar wizard Ferenc Snétberger, Okay Temiz from Turkey – the groove has truly become universal.

Today, ENJA has become a label which is highly respected worldwide and is well distributed in most parts of the globe. We are quite proud that we have achieved this in a truly difficult market place. In October of 1996 M.W. was awarded the Honors Prize Of The German Phonographic Critics, a body of 100 music critics in classical, jazz and pop music. To quote the jury: “Again and again Matthias Winckelmann sets the standard for quality with his productions. He succeeds with ambitioned projects in a market swamped by mediocrity. The name ENJA has gained an excellent reputation throughout the world.” In 2006 Jürgen Enninger joined Mattthias Winckelmann as CEO of the company.

If you want to find out more about the shop go to enjarecords.com or have a look at the shop-profile at Trusted Shops.

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Transaction Rating and Seller Rating

A Trusted Shops Buyer Feedback is comprised of two parts: the Transaction Rating and the Seller Rating.
The Transaction Rating captures how the specific online purchase turned out: positive, neutral or negative. The buyer can also leave a brief comment to explain its choice. With the Seller Rating, the buyer can additionally rate the seller in 4 categories : website, delivery, goods and customer service. A star rating with a scale of 1 to 5 is used for each criterion, with 5 stars being the best rating.

Fig 1. Rating form for the online buyer

Buyer Feedbacks in the Trusted Shops System

Buyer feedbacks are currently displayed in the private member area of the Trusted Shops system only, i.e. online merchants view only their own buyer feedbacks and online buyers can view only their own feedbacks via the Trusted Shops system. None of these feedbacks are made public. This will be possible upon explicit request by the online merchant at a later stage.
Online merchants can identify transaction ratings quickly with the smiley icons displayed in the list of their guaranteed transactions (green for positive, yellow for neutral and red for negative rating) in the Trusted Shops system.
Online merchants can also view their seller ratings including the buyer comments as well as the average seller rating which aggregates all seller ratings of the last 12 months. Shopkeepers have the possibility to leave their own comment on a buyer feedback.

Fig 2. List of seller ratings
The Feedback Profile gives an overview of Transaction Ratings and Seller Ratings.
The positive transaction percentage is calculated as the ratio between the number of positive ratings against the sum of positive and negative ratings in the last 12 months. The transaction rating table provides also the breakdown of the transaction ratings of the last 1, 6 and 12 months.
The average seller rating is calculated as the average of all seller ratings in the last 12 months.

Fig 3. Rating profile: summary of ratings provided

Are you Trusted Shops member?

If you are Trusted Shops member, log into the system today and view the ratings of your online shop!

What’s next? The Buyer Feedback Widget

A special a buyer feedback widget will provide the ability to display shop ratings and buyer feedbacks. The Trusted Shops Buyer Feedback package will be available as upgrade to the Trusted Shops membership soon.
Unbiased buyer feedbacks help both online buyers and sellers to increase customer confidence and shopping experience and therefore complement ideally the Trusted Shops Quality Seal.

Fig 4. Example of Buyer Feedback Widget integration

Find out more about how to increase the trust visitors have in your online-shop.

Trust and security matter when you’re running a website.  That’s why 1, 2, 3 Reg. recommends Trusted Shops to it’s customers that have an e-commerce business.

If you want to find out more about the Trusted Shops membership options click here.

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Find out more about the study by the Office of Fair Trading.

About one in three internet users are still not using online-shops for their shopping, mostly because of a lack of trust in the internet. That was one of the results of a new report from the Office of Fair Trading.

While consumer confidence is gradually improving, says the OFT, overall levels are still too low for the market to reach its full potential. Even for those who do shop using the internet, which were about half the people interviewed, 72% say they still have concerns over doing so and 38% are, at best, only slightly aware of their online consumer rights.

Since the last market study into internet shopping that was published in 2007, the OFT has focused on increasing consumers’ awareness online and on business compliance. This included:

• Securing agreement from the top five auction sites to provide information to consumers about their rights under the Distance Selling Regulations — including cancellation rights.
• The OFT’s consumer advice line Consumer Direct publishing top tips for safe shopping online, such as how to understand refund policies.
• Updating ‘advice to business’ webpages, including advice for small firms on online security.

The 2009 figures, the OFT reports, indicate that despite concerns there have been some positive changes. Among the people who do shop online 54% feel it is as safe as shopping in store, compared to 26% in 2006. New figures also released today by Consumer Direct show that more people than ever are seeking guidance about internet shopping transactions. Enquiries about online purchases now account for 10% of calls to Consumer Direct, compared to 6% in 2006.

John Fingleton, chief executive of the OFT:

“Online retailing is the future for many businesses and increasingly important to the economy,”. “If consumers are not confident online, demand will grow at a slower rate. So, we must tackle these concerns right now if the online market is to grow at its full potential.”

The government is also planning to look into the issue of consumer trust in online shopping.

Gareth Thomas, minister for consumer affairs:

“It’s encouraging that the OFT’s survey shows increasing consumer confidence when buying online — but people still have concerns, that’s why we will be setting out proposals in our forthcoming consumer white paper to better protect people from fraudsters and increase their consumer knowledge when shopping online.”

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