Ecommerce Blog

It’s a shame that CompUSA will not be with us much longer, because it gives us a great example of the potential for RSS feeds for ecommerce sites. Check it out while you can: http://www.compusa.com/help/rss_feeds.asp

This is a close-up:

This is how a sample feed appears in my Google Reader:

Online retailers that use RSS syndication for product content are few and far between, the ones that do usually are electronics and computer related (more tech savvy audience, I assume). It’s likely that the general public still doesn’t understand what RSS is or how it can help them, so CompUSA provides a nice little introduction to what RSS is with links to resources and popular RSS readers.

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

Nielsen Online recently released some data from the top 1,000 influential blogs (determined by inbound link popularity) and discovered that gift recommendations, reviews and gift buying guides were all the buzz in the blogosphere.

As you would expect, gadgets, gaming gifts and other techie stuff was most discussed according to the press release. Which makes this leaderboard a bit of a head-scratcher:

Top Online Retailers Ranked by Buzz Growth for Week Ending December 2nd

Source: Nielsen Online

Are these really the top discussed retailers for product reviews and recommendations? Hallmark? Last time I checked, Hallmark wasn’t sellin’ no iPhones or Wiis. So I looked under the hood at Google Blog Search, and found that there were a lot of results for Hallmark on deals/coupon sharing sites, Hallmark buildings, the Hallmark Channel, and Paris Hilton suing Hallmark for cards like this:

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

Amazon is often touted as the usability darling of e-commerce. Number one on Internet Retailer’s Top 500 List last year, the mega-store is usually way ahead of other retailers in so many ways. That’s why my experience on Amazon this weekend was so surprising. Shopping on Amazon.ca, I experienced search failure more than once — and also discovered that my problems wouldn’t have happened on Amazon.com.

Exhibit A - Can’t Handle A Typo

This is what happened when I made a spelling error for “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” on Amazon.ca:

And this is the same search on Amazon.com:

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Is Your Affiliate Program Your Top Sales Generator? If Not…
Free webinar: Tuesday, December 11th, 9am PT / 12pm ET:
Affiliate Marketing: What Every Retailer Ought to Know
Guest Panelist: Shawn Collins, Author, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

Original post by Linda Bustos

Naw, you’ve got plenty of time to do your Christmas shopping. Stay in this weekend, curl up with your notebook computer and a cup of ‘nog and enjoy some good ecommerce and marketing reading!

Here’s this week’s Bloggers Digest:

Ecommerce News

• Big announcement for Elastic Path this week - we’ve launched the online store for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games which are being hosted right here in Vancouver. You can check out the mascots and find great gift ideas for that someone on your list who has everything — because I bet you $1,000,000 Linden dollars they don’t have this bottle opener-slash-fridge magnet.

Reputation Management

• Thanks again to our special guest blogger Ayat Shukairy for sharing her wisdom of conversion rates with us. I bet you think I took the day off to watch every single episode of Ask A Ninja, but you’re wrong. I was busy blogging about reputation management - what to do when your brand is trashed on forums and blogs, and some tips and tricks for nudging those search engine results off the first few pages. (I did ask a ninja about it, but he couldn’t offer even one solution that didn’t end up with someone dying).

Is Your Affiliate Program Your Top Sales Generator? If Not…
Free webinar: Tuesday, December 11th, 9am PT / 12pm ET:
Affiliate Marketing: What Every Retailer Ought to Know
Guest Panelist: Shawn Collins, Author, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

Wishlists are becoming more and more popular with online stores. They help customers bookmark items they like but just aren’t ready to buy, (which can reduce shopping cart abandonment) and when they are shared, they can help gift givers know what their loved ones really want.

This year, online retailers are getting aggressive and creative with wishlist sharing. Designer apparel retailer Net-a-Porter provides a woman with Santa’s Little Helper to give her significant other a not-so-subtle hint on what she wants to find under the tree.

The customer fills out a simple questionnaire, complete with cutesy name for husband/boyfriend. These selections are injected like Mad-Libs into a video email message starring Santa’s Little Helper, who coaxes the recipient “Let’s face it, if she’s happy, you’re happy.”

I gotta admit, it takes guts for a gal to be so bold. But hey, some guys appreciate it this kind of assistance, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The majority of sites that offer wish lists also have some way of sharing them, by email or even a Facebook application. But often times the customer is unaware or forgets that she can do this. What Net-a-Porter’s doing is reminding customers that they have this ability, and making it a little fun at the same time.

The Wall Street Journal article gives a few more examples of retailers who employ this tactic, including Bluemercury:

Marla Malcolm Beck, owner of Bluemercury beauty boutiques, says the company first tried the tactic last year at its Philadelphia store, where 50 customers were asked to pick out items and provide contact information for a gift-giver. Each gift-giver contacted ended up spending between $1,000 and $5,500, she says. “What do you get someone who has everything? The truth is, you should get them exactly what they want,” she says. “If you try to second-guess them, it doesn’t work out.”

Is Your Affiliate Program Your Top Sales Generator? If Not…
Free webinar: Tuesday, December 11th, 9am PT / 12pm ET:
Affiliate Marketing: What Every Retailer Ought to Know
Guest Panelist: Shawn Collins, Author, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

Original post by Linda Bustos

This is a guest post courtesy of Invesp Consulting. Ayat Shukairy is a managing partner at Invesp Consulting, an online marketing and conversion optimization company. To read more of her posts, visit www.invesp.com/blog.

Everybody these days is talking about conversion and its significance. But how much of this conversion talk is half-truths, and how much of it is relevant and useful information? The fact of the matter is looking at your conversion rate without deciphering the information is not very meaningful. Conversion must be segmented and assessed from each segment’s perspective rather than lumped into one big number.

Marketers usually talk about conversion as a whole they don’t talk about these segments because that’s not “elegant” marketing talk. But analyzing your segmented conversion data can make a big difference.

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Is Your Affiliate Program Your Top Sales Generator? If Not…
Free webinar: Tuesday, December 11th, 9am PT / 12pm ET:
Affiliate Marketing: What Every Retailer Ought to Know
Guest Panelist: Shawn Collins, Author, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

Original post by Linda Bustos

SEO guru Stephan Spencer contributed a great overview on tagging and its virtues for usability and SEO to Search Engine Land last week. Do check out Stephan’s entire article if you’re new to the concept of tagging, tag clouds and folksonomy.

Tags help describe various content. Basically, you can tag a blog post, product or photo with relevant keywords. When you want to check out all the posts, photos or products related to a certain keyword, you can click on the “tag” and voila! Usability-wise, visitors can navigate visually through a “tag cloud” (see the bottom of our page for an example) and even discover tags, whereas in a traditional dropdown menu or even faceted navigation this could get out of hand. Tags are great for SEO too, because your tags generate their own URLs, and each tag is a keyword-rich internal link to that page, reinforced by the tagged items themselves and the sitewide tag cloud, if you have one.

I took a peek at blogs from our list of 75+ blogs from top online retailers to “look who’s tagging” and as I expected, I can easily count them all on one hand. What’s worse, the ones that do are doing it WRONG!

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

Expect a huge announcement from Facebook tomorrow about “Social Ads.” Recently partnered with Microsoft, Facebook’s been sitting on a very large pile of consumer information such as age, political views, favorite movies, college information, marital status and more that lends itself to behavior-targeted ads. Certainly this advertising model has been months in the making.

Depending on the details, there could be some low-cost opportunities for online retailers big and small to market effectively through Facebook. Until tomorrow’s big reveal, here is a recap of the Facebook rumors:

Project Pandemic / Mullets

Facebook may be removing “sponsored groups” and replacing them with sponsored pages that might include interactive games or other Facebook applications developed by Facebook itself, rather than third party developers.

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Is Your Affiliate Program Your Top Sales Generator? If Not…
Free webinar: Tuesday, December 11th, 9am PT / 12pm ET:
Affiliate Marketing: What Every Retailer Ought to Know
Guest Panelist: Shawn Collins, Author, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

Original post by Linda Bustos