It might seem strange to read of one of the worlds leading technology companies, and a name that is synonymous with the internet, openly calling out the experience of shopping online as being a poor one. That is what Google do in this advert. They are right to do so too – this advert explores some of the glaring problems with the user experience, when trying to buy something online.

The oproduct being advertised is Google analytics. The goal of analytics is to understand what your customers are going through when they come to you, wanting to press their hard earned cash into your hands. Learning what is stopping them needs to be a priority whether your business is online or IRL.

It can be easy to forget about savings accounts, however this can be a costly mistake as terms and conditions change.

Choosing the right savings account for you takes time and energy. An lot of what is, for most people, pretty dull research has to be done. Small print must be trawled though, arcane terminology unpicked and risks and benefits put into the balance. Once that is done though, and the direct debits are set up, that very much seems like that.

It is of course comforting to know that without you having to do anything further the nest egg that you are building for a rainy day will continue to grow month on month. The problem is that not all savings products are ‘fire and forget’ with many of you requiring that you keep a beady eye on them.

Often the rates offered by savings accounts are only set for a fixed period. After this time the account holders can find themselves earning dramatically less interest on the money that they have put away. It is all too easy to let a once attractive savings account morph itself into a real donkey.

The investment environment at the moment is tricky at best. Many of the investments that have proved successful in the past are no longer yielding returns. In this context pensions have to be seen as one of the better bets, however everything in the garden is far from rosy.

While there have undoubtedly been some scandals involving mismanagement and fraud in regards to pension funds, the biggest threat to most is more subtle and insidious. Hidden charges and over-inflated fees are chipping away at peoples retirement nest eggs.

Consumers in Britain are hit with very high fees for setting up and administrating pensions. Those in the USA and in fact most other European countries are typically charged much less for this. In addition to the level of fees being high, they are often structured in an overly complicated fashion. The National Association of Pension funds has gone as far as to slam these as being “eye wateringly complex”.

Incredibly some investors have found that anything up to three quarters of there retirement income has been syphoned off through fees and charges. It is those who joined schemes in the nineties that are most likely to be paying over the odds. The charges that are typically levied have fallen dramatically from their hight.

If you find that you are in a pension scheme with unacceptably high charges it may be possible to switch. There are a number of circumstances however where it is more advisable to stick with what you already have rather than changing things up. Some pensions that were sold in the past have the kind of guaranteed returns that are no longer common.

Knowing whether to ‘stick or twist’ with a pension is not an easy call. There are no one-size-fits all answers as there are many, many factors to take into consideration. Paying the premium for high quality financial planning could well be worth it. Not all the information that the best advisors are privilege to is widely available.