The cost of failed deliveries in the UK cost e-retail businesses between £790 million and £1 billion every year, a survey has found. That amounts to a cost of 70p for every parcel dispatched.

The report from IMRG looked at six different delivery failure scenarios and calculated the cost of “inefficient delivery”.

With the 26.9 million on-line and catalogue retail consumers in the UK predicted to rise to 30 million by 2013 this “inefficiency” figure is only likely to grow.

These consumers are currently responsible annually for:

• Purchasing an estimated £49.8 billion of goods and services
• Requiring the delivery of an estimated 1.1 billion parcel and packets comprising more than 1 billion home deliveries
• Generating £4 billion in delivery charges.
Now IMRG is planning to launch the IDIS Gold Standard, which is designed to enable retailers to offer all consumers the probability of first time delivery under any circumstances.

Do any on-line business owners have their own methods for reducing the cost/occurrence of failed deliveries?

eBay’s PayPal has reported that its new PayPal Mobile iPhone app has been downloaded one million times in less than three weeks.

The PayPal Mobile iPhone app, launched in March, allows users to split restaurant bills, collect money for events, set reminders for repeat payments, donate to causes and manage various PayPal accounts.

Osama Bedier, PayPal’s vice president of platform and emerging technology, is reported as saying: 
”One million downloads shows just how ready people are to live a cashless and card-free culture with their wallet living safely in the cloud.”

There are signs of an internet advertising recovery, according to a new report. In the US, on-line advertising revenues for 2009 had showed a 3.4% decline from 2008 but now a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers reveals that the fourth quarter of 2009 hit a record quarterly high of $6.3 billion, representing a 2.6% rise year-on-year and a 14% increase over the third quarter of 2009.

It was search and display advertising that continued at the forefront of on-line advertising growth. Search revenues accounted for 47% of the total, totalling almost $10.7 billion for 2009. Meanwhile display advertising totalled almost $8billion in 2009, recording an increase of 4% from 2008.

In particular, the digital video sector of display advertising showed strong growth, recording a 39% increase from 2008 to 2009.

We’ve all grown accustomed to using TV advert breaks as a chance put on the kettle. All but the most creative TV ads are increasingly overlooked or by-passed on the way to the kitchen. It’s almost as if many of us have become kind of numb to this traditional form of advertising.

So perhaps we were more likely to be receptive to a new form of advertising. According to a new study, it seems that when comes to ads in on-line videos we’re still happy to stay tuned in.

The study was carried out by comScore, which gave 1,800 American internet users a survey “designed to assess the levels of advertising (based on one minute increments from 0-15 minutes) that viewers would tolerate when watching one hour of TV programming on the Internet”.

The key finding was that “on-line advertising’s ‘sweet spot’ is between 6 and 7 minutes per hour, substantially higher than the approximately 4 minutes per hour that is currently consumed by ads delivered on-line as part of TV content”.

But for how long will this new form of on-line advertising capture our attention?

As an on-line business you’ll be aware that blogging and social media marketing are hot topics. But are you still wondering what the point is? Blogging takes up valuable time and you might still be thinking that it’s not really worth the effort. Here we bring you a few wise words about the importance of blogging.

Blogging is good for:

• Establishing your e-commerce or on-line business as an expert or knowledge in your field
• Offering a platform for engaging with potential customers and users
• Increasing website traffic
• Improving SEO.

But, of course, blogging takes time. And you do need to be a consistent blogger to see results. To make the process as easy and time-effective as possible there are several lessons to learn:

Organisation: You should have a list of ideas for each blog/post. When ideas come to you, write them down for future reference. And make sure you organise your post schedule, too. If you plan to blog daily then ensure you are strict wit yourself. Or if you will blog twice a week make a note of this on particular days.

Picture research: Take and then file a range of good images that can be easily accessed. A lot of time can be wasted on picture uploads if you do not already have a folder earmarked for potential blogs. And beware of taking pictures from on-line sources as you may be breaking copyright laws. Check out Flickr where many people allow images to be used for free as long as you reference the original creator.

Tell people about your blog: There is no point having a blog if no one knows about it. So get into the social media network scene and start “sharing” your blog. Twitter and Facebook are good places to start.

Analytics: Keep track of the blogs that gain traffic via Google analytics. It’s a free tool and offers an amazing range of stats about your blog site

Recent news reveals that the government has axed plans to introduce a 50p a month broadband tax on all fixed landlines. This comes following negotiations to pass budget laws before parliament is dissolved ahead of the May election.

The proposed tax, which was set to generate £175 million a year from 2011, would have been used to enable 90% of Britons to access next generation high-speed broadband services by 2017.

Labour had previously said the broadband tax was vital for the UK. It was claimed that the cash injection would have enabled internet service providers to deliver broadband services to areas where they would find it difficult to achieve a profit.

The broadband tax issue had already become something of a party political debate as the Tories had pledged to scrap the tax if they win the election. Their plan is to use some of the TV licence fee to roll broadband services out to rural areas.