Ecommerce Blog

One of the most complex industries for ecommerce is telecommunications or “telco.” Telcos may sell any or all of the following services: home telephone, cable/satellite television, dialup/broadband Internet/mobile broadband, mobile phone service. A telco may be “double-play” (offering any combination of two services), “triple-play” or “quad-play,” and often seek to bundle services to their customers.

Not only can services be bundled through online purchase, but often the services themselves are bundles within bundles. A digital TV service requires hardware, basic and premium channel subscription, length of term and may also involve promotional discounts. Mobile phone bundles are most complex – with selection of device (with hundreds to choose from), selection of plan, services, accessories, length of term and warranties/device insurance. Add to this that customers may want to port over a number from another wireless carrier, and needs to pass a more extensive credit check than a one-off sale. Current customers also need self-service tools to update/change their plans and services at any time.

If that isn’t complex enough, telcos also need to handle micro-geographic customers (regions and territories within countries). Available services, product selection, pricing and promotional offers vary by state/province, zip code, even down to home address for telephone, cable or Internet. The telco must employ targeted selling in order to show the content and offers (before checkout) to the right customers, collecting information either from the customer or through IP geolocation tools.

A telco or any other online business with micro-geographic customer segments (like grocery/fresh food delivery) has several options:

1. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region before viewing product, direct customer to geo-specific subdomain/subfolder
2. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region and filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly
3. Use IP geolocation to automatically redirect to a geo-specific subdomain/subfolder
4. Use IP geolocation and automatically filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly
5. Do nothing (because do nothing is always an option, but usually not a good option)

Some examples from telco:

1. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region before viewing product, direct customer to geo-specific subdomain/subfolder (Bell.ca)

2. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region and filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly (Verizon, ATT)

3. Use IP geolocation to automatically redirect to a geo-specific subdomain/subfolder (have not found a micro-geographic example, but many retailers already use this for country redirection)

4. Use IP geolocation and automatically filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly (Rogers Wireless)

So now the question is – which is best?

Reducing Friction

Friction refers to anything in the sales or sign up process that causes psychological resistance to proceeding. Certainly interrupting the customer journey with a page or popup asking for personal information is going to cause some psychological resistance — especially when you’re asking for a home phone number or exact address.

Geolocation and filtering avoids the interruption that may cause landing page abandonment. Whenever you can cut out a manual step for the customer, you can expect better usability – provided your technology is working properly. Showing the wrong products/prices is worse than asking for customer input. But sometimes you cannot avoid asking for information, as geolocation don’t provide exact addresses or phone numbers, and are not 100% accurate all the time. So automatic redirection is not necessarily the best option in every case.

If you do need to ask the customer to select a region or provide personal information, I offer 5 tips:

1. Use a lightbox, not a page. Bell.ca’s lightbox shows enough of the product page underneath to assure the customer they will see the right page after providing the information. Verizon Wireless’ gatekeeper page is not unlike the forced registration page that customers loathe in the checkout process.
2. Include, in as few words as possible, the reason why you ask for this information.
3. If you ask for a telephone number or address, have a clear link to privacy information.
4. Allow existing customers to sign-in from the lightbox, and redirect them to the appropriate subfolder, or apply the catalog filter.
5. Store the customer preference in a cookie (rather than a session) as customers may research one day and come back to purchase on another day.

Search Engine Optimization

Whenever product pages exist under multiple URLs, you have a duplicate content concern. If you’re a Canadian telco with a sub-site for each province and a large product catalog, for example, search engines may not index your site fully because its allocated bandwidth to crawl your site is limited. If a product page is not indexed, it cannot be found in search engines. The best approach is to choose one region as the “canonical” region (perhaps Ontario), and apply robots.txt to the other pages.

If you’re using geolocation, you can automatically redirect a customer to the geo-specific subdomain or subfolder, or if you’re not using geolocation, prompt the customer to select his/her region.

What if you’re using geolocation plus a filtered catalog and a visitor arrives through search, comparison shopping engine, email or social media links and lands on a product that’s unavailable in his/her region? This is a good case for a lightbox that cross-sells similar items: “We’re sorry, this item in unavailable in your region. You may be interested in these similar products, or click here to launch our “Phone Finder.”

Okay, that’s nice but which is best?

Best solution depends on what’s technically possible for your site. The most advanced solution combines geolocation with catalog filtering – but again, geolocation cannot recognize street address or phone number. Often you can’t change a site structure quickly (or there may be a strategic reason you maintain subdomains/subfolders), or your ecommerce platform may not accommodate customizations like catalog filtering. The key is to make sure your solution is not too interrupting to the customer journey (check if your request for information page has high exit rate or bounce rate) and doesn’t cause search engine issues.

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Selling wireless and media products online is a complex challenge which often results in a frustrating user experience and falls short of the expectations of seasoned online shoppers. Wireless and cable operators, wireless resellers, and handset manufacturers try to mirror the online shopping experience of their online retail peers, but despite their best efforts the complexities of backend provisioning processes and legacy business rules often surface for customers to see. For those telcos who have mastered selling online, the rewards are high—significant reductions in call center operation costs and increased ARPU.

In this webinar Product Manager Peter Sheldon of Elastic Path Software will discuss the best and worst practices that the top global telco brands employ in their online stores.

Webinar Takeaways:
- What are the biggest causes of shopper frustration and store abandonment?
- What best practices have emerged and what can we learn from other online retailers?
- How can complex availability, compatibility, and provisioning rules be simplified for a better online experience?
- How does the experience differ for new vs. existing customers?
- How can triple play and quad play operators simplify and streamline their online experience?

You may also like these similar posts:

• Prescription for A Targeted Shopping Experience: Drugstore Dot Com
• Targeted Selling Webinar Recap
• Show and Telus: Solutions for the Complex Sale
• How Overstock Kept TCO Low For New Site Launch
• Ecommerce SEO: How To Preserve Your Deep Link Juice

Original post by Linda Bustos

More and more online retailers are leveraging IP geolocation to personalize the store experience based on where the shopper is browsing from. Vendors including Quova and Digital Element provide a wealth of location data including country, state, city, postal code, connection speed, time zone, telephone area codes, TV regions and much more. In this blog post we’ll explore some of the ways retailers are leveraging geolocation data to optimize the shopping experience.

Global navigation

Many multinational retailers and manufacturers like Trekbikes.com often place a nasty country selector landing page in front of their store. First of all, this upsets the search spiders from gaining entry into your site and secondly, creates an unnecessary barrier to entry for the customer. Using geolocation data you can direct the customer to the correct store based on country they are browsing from. For multi lingual sites countries like Canada and Switzerland, you can automatically set the language of the store based on their browser language.

If you do this, remember to always allow the shopper to change their country and language manually in the header or footer of your site.

Even if you don’t automatically redirect shoppers to the right geographic store, you can still prompt them to the right store. Visitors to amazon.com get presented with a redirection link when they visit from regions where Amazon have a store presence like Canada and the UK.

Offer & product localization

Travel retailers can use geolocation to present geographically relevant offers. For example, Continental Airlines present promotional offers that target shoppers based on their closest airport, hence visitors browsing from New York will see special offers from Newark airport.

Outdoor retailers might promote winter sports products to shoppers in Northeast US whilst promoting summer sports products to those lucky enough to be shopping from Florida and Southwest.

Experience optimization

Geolocation service providers can also provide data on the shopper’s internet connection. This allows you to know if the shopper is browsing via dial up, cable, DSL, T1 etc and also if the user is connecting via a mobile gateway (3G) . Accordingly you can optimize both the site experience and content to ensure that your store is optimized based on connection type. Users connecting via a mobile gateway can be redirected to your mobile optimized store, whilst users on slower connections can be presented with low resolution graphics instead of rotating flash banners.

Multi Channel

Forrester research projects that by 2012 approximately one third of all retail sales will be influenced by the Web. Geolocation data can improve the online experience for those online shoppers who are researching an offline purchase. For years multichannel retailers like Sears have provided store finders, in store inventory lookup tools and pick up in store capabilities. All of these tools require the shopper to enter their zip code or city and select the store or stores closest to them.

With geolocation this step is simply unnecessary. You already know down to zip code level where the shopper is browsing from, so you can automatically select the closest store or store for pick up in store, in store availability and store locators.

This simplifies the user experience for the customer and removes the need for zip / city field inputs and location finder pop-ups. In the minority of cases the IP address the shopper is shopping from will differ in location to pick up location they are interested in. You can handle these cases with a simple ‘check another store’ hyperlink and remembering the customers preferred store in their cookie for their next visit.

Checkout optimization

During the checkout process new customers are forced to enter a wealth of personal data including shipping and billing addresses. Geolocation data can be used to pre-populate fields like country, state/province and city, reducing the number of fields the customer has to manually complete. A simple ‘not shipping to xxxxxxx’ link clears the pre-populated fields when the shopper is shipping to a different city from where they are browsing from.

Shipping & tax estimators can also benefit from geolocation data, allowing you to automatically present estimated shipping and taxes without the need to enter a zip code. Again the shopper should be able to change the zip code if they are shipping to a different city from where they are browsing.

Fraud

During order processing you can use geolocation data to compare the location of the shopper’s IP address to their provided credit card billing address and shipping address. If there is a mismatch between the two (shopper is in Russia but using a UK credit card address) then you can flag the order for manual review. This reduces your risk to fraud and reduces costly credit card charge backs.

Enforcing digital content and territory rights

Contractual and publishing rights often mean that digital and media content can only be distributed within certain geographic boundaries. Popular subscription music sites like Pandora and Spotify restrict access to their sites to users from the countries they are able to distribute in.

The BBC prevents access to their online iPlayer to viewers outside the UK in order to protect the commercial rights of their pay per view channels in the US, Canada, Japan etc.

Enforcing distribution rights

Many manufacturers enforce shipping restrictions between markets to protect distribution rights. For example Backcountry.com have a warning message in their checkout that advises customers that orders for certain brands will be canceled if they are shipped outside the US.

Using geolocation retailers have two alternative tools at their disposal to deal with cross boarder shipping restrictions.

a) They can hide these products from the shopper, i.e. a Canadian shopper will not see products that cannot be shipped to Canada
b) They can display shipping restriction information on the product results and product pages for Canadian customers, thus setting availability expectations prior to entering the checkout process.

This post was written by Elastic Path product manager Peter Sheldon.

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None Found

Original post by Peter Sheldon

Google Alerts ping you every time new occurrences of the keywords you track are found by Google’s search robots. This is great for reputation management (tapping into what’s being said about you, your brand or your competitors online) but it’s also a handy tool for keyword research.

For example, I’m subscribed to Google Alerts for the Vancouver 2010 mascots Quatchi, Sumi, Miga and Muk Muk. We’re buying these terms in Google Adwords and using the broad match type so it’s important to do exhaustive negative keyword research. Even though these are fairly specific terms, and we’d like to think all searches including these keywords are looking for merchandise — truth is there are a lot of other reasons someone might include “sumi” or “miga” in a search engine.

Over time I’ve discovered negative matches that my keyword research tools missed:

• Andrew Miga (journalist)
• Motherson Sumi Systems Ltd
• White Snow Sumi Brushes
• Sumi Ink Painting
• MUK: Muk (EP)
• MIGA-World Bank
• Western Sumi Student’s Union
• Sumi Salad

Negative matches: -andrew -motherson -systems -white -snow -brush -ink -painting -world bank -western -students -union -salad

The tough one is Muk, the self-titled album by the artist MUK. Negative matching “muk” to “muk” won’t work unless I phrase match the keyword “Muk muk” or -ep -album.

It only takes a couple minutes a week to stay on top of this small list. Certainly you wouldn’t want to be alerted every time someone mentions “iPhone” or “skinny jeans” - but for unique terms this works well.

You may also like these similar posts:

• PPC Tip: When to Use Negative Exact and Negative Phrase Match
• PPC Myth Week Pt 3: Kill Keywords That Dont Convert
• How To Apply Google Search-Based Keyword Research
• Negative Keyword Research Tools & Tips
• PPC Myth Week Pt 2: Bid Higher to Appear Higher

Original post by Linda Bustos

Because top positions typically receive better click through rates than lower, many people use average position as a KPI (key performance indicator) to measure campaign health, and seek to optimize it — either by trying to improve Quality Score* or raising the maximum CPC (cost per click) for the keyword. For some, raising the bid is easier than trying to figure out how to appease the Google Quality Score god.

*Quality Score is Google’s way of scoring the quality (clever name, hey?) of your ad and landing page relevance and attractiveness to searchers. If you’re interested in learning more about Quality Score, Craig Danuloff of Click Equations is writing a book about it and is dripping out chapters on his blog.

Click through rate (CTR%) is the most important part of Quality Score, according to Google’s own explanation of how it ranks ads (Youtube video). CTR% is followed by ad/landing page relevance and landing page quality. The video goes into detail on how ads with high Quality Scores are rewarded by higher positions and lower average CPCs.

It used to be common practice to crank up your bids when you first launched keywords so they would rank higher and get better click through, and turn them down once you established a good click through history. Today, Google calculates your click through rate at each position it tests your ad in, comparing it against other data it has for advertisers in those positions rather than an average across every position. So there’s no need to bid high - your focus should be improving that click through rate!

Tips for Improving PPC Click Through Rates

1. Find negative keywords. Add as many negative keywords as possible to reduce impressions for irrelevant or near-relevant keyword searches. Some negative keywords will be applied at the Campaign level, others at the Ad Group level. You can also find negative keywords by adding a broad match exposure filter.

2. Group keywords more tightly. Studies have shown click through is highest when the ad headline includes the exact keyword the searcher typed in (limited to 35 characters) — especially for brand / color / model number searches. So rather than having one big Digital Camera Ad Group with all your brands and models, you would have a Digital Camera group with only unbranded keywords, and Ad Groups for each brand, and model-specific Ad Groups for each brand.

Some keywords might be so popular / high converting they may justify their own Ad Group so you can write an even more specific ad, like “Ashton Kutcher Coolpix.”

3. Write better ad copy. Some tips include:

• Use keywords in your ad’s headline that match your keyword list (you might use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to accomplish this
• Write persuasive ad text including value propositions about your business or enticing calls to action
• Use numbers like prices and percentages
• Capitalize The First Letter Of Each Word. Don’t Laugh, It’s Proven.
• A/B test your ads

In this economy, you can’t afford sloppy PPC campaign management. Make sure you do everything you can to improve Quality Score before you ramp up bids on keywords. After optimizing for CTR%, look at improving landing page relevance, not just to please Google, but to convert more clicks to sales.

You may also like these similar posts:

• PPC Tip: When to Use Negative Exact and Negative Phrase Match
• Should You Remove Keywords With Low Click Through Rates?
• Negative Keyword Research Tools & Tips
• Laptop Bags, PayPerClick and Landing Page Relevance
• PPC Advertising: Are You Selling Yourself In Your Ads?

Original post by Linda Bustos

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Robert Scoble

Perhaps this is the one time of the year you can predict a large chunk of US consumers will be receiving some additional spending cash - tax rebate time. And many online retailers hope to cash in on customer’s stimulus checks, judging from the number of email campaigns and home pages jumping on this trend:

(more…)

9 Ecommerce Innovations: What’s Now & What’s Next
Free webinar: June 19th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Jason Billingsley, VP Innovation, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Greetings from the Rocky Mountains! I’m away this week in beautiful Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada for the CWC/Corus Digital Media Career Accelerator workshop.

This morning I will be presenting to a select group of women in the broadcasting industry a session on blog promotion through new media. I thought I’d give you a peek at the slide deck anyhow as the ideas can apply to ecommerce blogs also. (You may also download it from Slide Share)

They’re not the sexiest slides but I made them a bit more textual so the deck is somewhat understandable on its own.

| View | Upload your own

Blog Promo and Social Media For Ecommerce

I’d like to go into a bit more detail here on Get Elastic with an ecommerce focus:

Why Blog?

• Open up for conversation with your customers, gather feedback and attend to reputation management concerns

• Establish a personality for your company, employees or brands
• Attract long-tail search traffic and pre-sell your company or products
• Build backlinks to boost your overall link profile (if the blog is a sub-folder or sub-domain)
• Landing page for contests and promotions
• Information resource for customers, employees, partners, investors and affiliates

Blog Traffic Sources

• Offline awareness (your brick-and-mortar stores, print or TV/radio advertising, word-of-mouth)

• Link from your estore
• Links from other websites and blogs
• Search engines
• Blog search engines
• Social networks
• Email campaigns with blog call-outs

Basic Search Engine Optimization

• Keywords in the right places

• Links from relevant sites
• Blog plug-ins
• Good content / more content

Where to Place Keywords

• Title tag

• Page title
• Body text
• Link text (on your site and when others link to you)
• Post tags
• Alt attributes (images, video)
• Headings / bolded text
• URLs (keyword relevance in search engine and when people link to you)

Why Links Matter

• Search engines need a measure of authority or popularity

• Blogs are more “linkable” than static business sites
• Deep links look more “natural” to search engines (don’t look purchased or bartered for)
• Links send traffic and help branding

Examples of Link-Baity Content

• Humor: Jockey Stop Squirming
• Controversy: Dove Evolution campaign
• Contest: Target dormroom contest in Facebook
• Amazing: Ray-ban sunglasses
• Emotional: 1-800-Flowers mother’s day
• Informative: Sephora makeup how-to’s
• Timely: Ice.com - Mr. Cupid
• Ongoing: Blogs (Ecommerce Blogs of the Top Online Retailers)

SEO Plugins

• SEO Plugins for Wordpress from Michael Gray

• Best SEO Plugins for Wordpress from The Blog Joint

Other “Search Engines”

• Video sharing: YouTube, Google Video etc.

• Google / Yahoo News (Tips for getting into Google News from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Guide)
• Blog search: Google / Technorati / Ice Rocket & more

Why StumbleUpon Rules

Because this is a fairly short session (45 minutes) and there are so many things I could say about the subject, I only had time to address one social network - StumbleUpon. In my opinion, if you do no other social media sharing, you should at least be on StumbleUpon. It’s a good entry-level social network for a number of reasons:

• Drives a ton of traffic (often more than Google)

• Don’t have to be a “power user” to get results (according to Dosh Dosh)
• Drives traffic long-term (as opposed to Digg-style sites where stories are hot for a day)
• General site but you can get very targeted (specific tags, groups etc)
• Toolbar makes submission easy
• Tech-savvy users often have their own blogs (link opportunity)
• You can discover things to blog about

StumbleUpon is a social network where members can surf tags related to their interests to discover sites, photos, videos and articles relevant to them. Rather than using a search engine and letting a machine decide what’s good content, StumbleUpon shows you sites others thought were cool. You can also follow members interested in your topic/industry and when you log in, you see a feed of relevant recently “thumbed” content that you can start checking out yourself. If you like it you thumb up, if you don’t like it you thumb down or hit the “Stumble” button again. Simple.

You can also share items with your network. This can be powerful when you have a network of like minded people who will thumb up content you share with them. Their recent thumbs may appear in Facebook profiles and newsfeeds as well as their StumbleUpon profile page and friends’ feeds. Here’s a StumbleUpon Networking Guide with screenshots for further reading.

You can friend a maximum of 200 people on StumbleUpon (but more than that can subscribe to your Stumble feed). Neil Patel gave us a tip back in October when he joined us for a webinar on social media marketing strategies: friend as many people as you can initially, and if they don’t friend back within a week, move on and friend some more.

I suggest looking for a group on a niche topic and adding friends from within that group or looking for people who have indicated their interest in a certain topic by tag. You can find niche groups by browsing http://group.stumbleupon.com or typing a tag keyword in the search box.

StumbleUpon users are techsavvy and are often bloggers themselves. They may be using their SU account to discover blog fodder and your content can reach more people (the blog’s RSS subscribers and search engine traffic). The back links also benefit you.

SU is also a social bookmarking tool. When people Stumble your content there’s a good chance they’ll come back later to view it again.

Other social media sites like Digg have algorithms that skew towards “power users” that submit topics that go popular. It takes a lot of work to build up your Digg history and friend following. StumbleUpon takes less effort – you can get traffic just for submitting stories to the StumbleUpon system. But you can get more mileage if you make use of the social features available to you: friending, joining groups, tagging and reviewing sites and members.

Original post by Linda Bustos