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Amazon customers will begin to be charged sales tax after the company learned that because they have an operating distribution center in Texas they fall under the sales tax collection statutes. The company has had a warehouse in Texas since 2006 but being an online company did not believe it was to charge sales tax for customers in Texas. Amazon had over 14 billion in sales last year but it is not clear how much of those purchases went to Texas customers. What was interesting was the comment from Texas comptrollers office. According to Susan Combs the state lost an extimated $500 million in state sales tax on Internet sales which are the same as mail order sales they have complained about for years. The flaw with this thinking is that money is brought into Texas and pay wages to employees who ship all those products. Those employers pay taxes and those employees contribute to our great economy every time they have the money to make a purchase. If we continue to think in this manner and not realize the great impact companies like Amazon bring t our economy then soon companies will overlook Texas as a favorable place to do business.

Fortunately the state is large, there are a lot of bright people who completely understand that the residual taxes and economic benefit in our state contribute far greater than the tax charged for a book.

As some of you may know at this time Toshiba has officially announced that it will be pulling out of the next gen HD disk format war. This news comes as a shock and a relieve as Blu-ray backers, Sony, Philips, Panasonic, and Warner Bros now have effectively won the format war. Toshiba will no longer produce HD DVD movies or players and WAL*MART is now switching to carrying only Blu-ray. This is such an exciting time for those of us who can remember the old betamax/VHS war. betamax was the superior product at the time but because of the cheap production ability and the backers at the time VHS won and became the standard.

Sony now has the golden opportunity to make a golden comeback in the video game console war as well. The lose of HD DVD means that Sony with the playstation 3 now has the ability to make a good push in the market to sell more playstation 3’s as both their legendary gaming system and the home entertainment system guaranteed to last through the decade.

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In traditional sales there is usually a manager who keeps track of each sales persons activity and sales efforts. They measure how many people the sales person is talking to and how many became customers or how many went to a certain step in the defined sales process as written by the company.

Along comes the web and traditional sales takes on a different role. The manager will still ask the same questions but now we have another sales person called the website. We need to know how many people visited the website which is where the conversion rate question enters the conversation. Like the store we need to measure traffic and identify trade zones.

In great web design the question of conversion is the goal but conversion is not my problem. Information is the problem. Like a state fair there are many entrances and different things seen depending on which entrance we happened to find a parking space near. The marketing challenge is getting information to my visitor right away so they will click more links on our site and make a buy decision. Information is the key because no prospects will buy without information. When someone walks into your store they may have been there and purchased in the past but today they have not bought anything yet so we must think of them as a prospect. That prospect is going to want some information, then if we met that need they will be more likely to buy from us on this visit. This is also called conversion. Now they are repeat customers and you generally do better with repeat customers but must remember everytime they come it is for information. Where is, What is, How is questions need answers. Answers mean sales.

Conversion rates are difficult to figure for companies that are not simply dotcom webstores. With retail locations and the option of purchasing online we have to constantly work to identify what part of our marketing is working. The manager is always think about the leading the prospect down the path to conversion to a cash paying customer. On the web we simply cannot make a visitor click no matter how much color experts tell us white backgrounds and certain wallpaper colors are considered more friendly. We have to mix graphic design with actual information and this is what leads a visitor to convert and purchase or inquire further about our products or services.

Press Ctrl-D on your keyboard to mark this page and go look at your website. Does it quickly get to the point? Does it lead the visitor to the point of purchase easily? Do you want an assessment of your sites current web impact? If so contact the web team at www.dallasisp.com. �

According to the New York Times a market share for the all popular apple creation the iPhone has been getting surprisingly high hits on the major search engins. The iPhone at the time of the data was only at about 2% of the total number of smart phones on the market. Others running different browsers such as Symbian and phones like the blackberry running a flavor of Windows couldn’t account for the traffic serge that the major players like Google, MSN, and Yahoo where seeing during the Christmas season. Early reports said thatjust because of Christmas the stats where higher but those voices where quickly silenced later when the stats showed that the iPhone continuously showed an increase of browsing over all of it’s competitors. The simple browser capability has surly revolutionized the way we will forever more browse the web from a mobile device.

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