onlinemarketing

November will be Black Friday Month

Retailers are hustling to pull revenue forward this year - it is a race to the wallet and it is ramping up.

Expect to see the term "Black Friday" much earlier this year, led by Kmart's launch of the holiday shopping extravaganza this past weekend. In 2007, retailers stretched Black Friday a few days forward into the prior week, but this year we will see almost a month long Black Friday sales campaign across retailers from all industries. Kmart launched their event on November 2 - a full 26 days before the actual "Black Friday" on November 28. More retailers will be falling in line shortly.

Potential downsides will include consumer fatigue around holiday spending. Look for the retailers marketing to ratchet up the volume as each of them try to be heard in an increasingly strained consumer environment. Retailers' margin and inventory pressures will manifest a whole host of buyer focused incentives and promotions:

- "An Ode to Consumerism" - BestBuy is giving away $1,000 shopping sprees and Black Friday limo rides to the store to 25 customers in select markets who in 250 words or less can attest to the family aspect to post-Thanksgiving shopping. Winners will receive:

• A limo ride to and from Best Buy on the morning after Thanksgiving
• On-site pampering and prizes for the winner and three guests
• Early admittance into the store at 4:30 a.m. – a half hour before anyone else!
• The ability to purchase up to four Black Friday doorbusters

All the details can be found here.

- Free Shipping - Expect to see Free Shipping like it is nobody's business. Kmart already has the whole store on Free Shipping today excluding TVs, Furniture and Computers.

- Alternative Payment Methods - Store branded credit cards, PayPal, BillMeLater and Google Checkout have run threshold based dollar off promotions for the last two years running. Expect more of the same this year only with more aggressive offers as they look to expand market share. BestBuy already is running no interest for 18 months on all purchases storewide over $499.

Expect huge creativity from all the retailers this year as they look to online to pull them through what is shaping up to be a soft selling season.

MSN Live Search with cashback, goodbye CPCs?

MSN is onto something with their Live Search. If you haven't noticed you can get cash back at numerous merchants across the web by shopping through MSN Live Search. Cash back has been met cooly in the past by consumers contrary to popular belief. Many have tried (Shopping for one) and entire sites are dedicated to the concept (Cashbaq is a good example).

But play this idea through - none of the other cashback sites really have had the traffic volumes of MSN. Some have grown really fast, but don't have the average monthly unique visitors of Live. The major development for ecommerce folks is that Live search is a revenue share opportunity - meaning retailers pay MSN only if MSN drives a sale. This is the good thing the Jellyfish acquisition brought to Microsoft. Right now, MSN is passing back some/all of the revenue share earned directly back to the consumer in the form of cash back. A sort of self funding marketing and traffic building program.

The current implementation begs the question: "What if MSN rolled revenue share out to their entire search program and what would be the impact on Google?" One way to compete is to change the game, specifically, change the pricing game off of CPCs and onto revenue share. Obviously this is a retail-centric model, but imagine if MSN came in under Google on the ad pricing and ROI, which I bet they are for many retailers. Obviously search volume is a major factor, however, if you want take some wind out of Google's sails this would be one way to do it. Google is a one trick revenue pony today. Nothing in their revenue portfolio compares to the revenue earned from their Adwords/AdSense business.

MSN stands to win on two fronts (1) increasing search share like they did in June (2) suck the margin out of the market by pricing on a revenue share. MSN has failed increasing search share alone, so making the entire channel less lucrative is a logical albeit devious strategy. In this specific case attacking sales margin is a viable alternative given how far behind MSN is lagging behind Google.

I for one would love to see the world get off CPCs, go Live Search with cashback!

EMS.com welcomes NY Affiliates

With the current NY state tax law coming into effect June 1st, many companies with online stores are starting to drop their NY state Affiliates, instead of finding ways to work with them. We feel this is a very poor decision as these companies are:

•  Severing a relationship with people who were actively supporting and promoting their products and brands.
•  Allowing competitors to jump in and help show why they have a better product or service.
• Weakening your current Affiliate channel and strengthening your competitions.
• ·Not seeing the long-term value in taking a small financial cost now.

Today we got wind that REI has decided to kick out all of their NY state Affiliates, which is unfortunate. The good news is that Eastern Mountain Sports is happy to offer NY State Affiliates the opportunity to partner with a 41 year-old outdoor equipment retailer icon.

It was our absolute pleasure this afternoon to get to announce on Abestweb.com that Eastern Mountain Sports will be continuing to work with NY state Affiliate marketers, and in fact, we are rewarding new Affiliates from NY who join the Eastern Mountain Sports program on Performics, with a $3 cash activation bonus (please read the posting on ABestWeb for more details about how you can earn your bonus).

We find it hard to believe that some companies would not see the value in keeping their relationships with their Affiliates strong. On the upside though, you still have many companies out there who do value these relationships and we are proud to be able to represent some of these companies like Eastern Mountain Sports.

We would also like to give a large thank you to all of the support of people within the blogosphere like:

http://72kilowatts.com/2008/05/23/big-shout-out-to-eastern-mountain-sports/

for their kind words to Eastern Mountain Sports and Downtown Ecommerce Partners.

Affiliates are under attack - New York ones first out

New York State has launched a frontal attack on ecommerce recently by initiating a tax by passing legislation that would require Merchants with Affiliates in New York to be sales tax. Amazon is fighting the law tooth and nail as those Merchants with the most to lose are the online pureplays who enjoy the not having nexus (a taxable presence) in many states.

Overstock.com has decided to fire all their affiliates based in New York. The letter below, dated May 13, 2008,  just went out to their Affiliates. This is simple math for Overstock.com - New York is probably a good chunk of their business and why risk hurting sales in New York by having to charge sales tax to people who live in New York City. Overstock has decided to throw their long standing Affiliates under the bus as opposed to standing by them.

The conversation has already started over at ABestWeb.

ebay partners with Buy.com

With all the Microsoft and Yahoo! talk, very little is being said about some major moves that will drastically impact ecommerce land for years to come.

Interesting release from the eBay corporate blog this past Saturday. eBay links to some interesting analysis on other blogs as well.

Key Takeaways - quotes taken direct from eBay:

• "eBay has entered into a partnership with Buy.com that will see them move all of Buy.com’s new and in-season inventory onto their eBay Store  in the coming weeks."
• "Terms of the deal are not being disclosed publicly but the messages I’m hearing echo recent themes coming out of eBay presentations focusing on a better buyer experience and moving toward a more retail-like experience."
• eBay is "not, at this time, extending the “deal” to top sellers and that any partnerships will be assessed on a one-off basis with hand picked partners."

Big moves - year of the Marketplaces, here it comes.

Everybody Sell Everything!

It has been a busy year for ecommerce land in 2008:

1. Zappos is selling electronics.

2. NewEgg is selling Shoes.

It is definitely a sign of the end of the world. Everybody wants to be Amazon. How long until these guys get into cloud computing?

In the annals of ecommerce, 2008 will be the Year of the Marketplace.

The Poetic Prophet Strikes Marketing Again

The Poetic Prophet who has made a name for himself by providing Youtube and the online marketing community with valuable insight and a fun way to learn the basics of Search Engine Marketing has a new video.

At the recent Conversion conference, he released his video on conversion closing and how effective targeting can increase your online business.

Click here to view the Poetic Prophets new video.

This guy not only knows his stuff but he found a way to make it more than fun for new online marketers to learn the basics.

Are you ready for Q4 in Q2?

The second quarter of the year is upon us, affectionately referred to as "Q2".  It is important for online marketers to begin to think about how they want to position their SEO efforts for the coming holiday retail sales season. Now, this seems a bit early considering departments are now preparing for their spring and summer sales,.

Although seasonal events and sales are extremely important to work on, seeds planted now in SEO will begin bearing fruit in Q4. Take action now with your content and efforts to aim for the position you want on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Any ability to rank well on certain natural search terms will also have a positive benefit for your paid search campaigns.  We recommend you begin to put the correct strategies in place today.

Here are a few reasons to help support why it is vital to begin your Q4 SEO in Q2 and hopefully they are enough to help you get started.

- The Search Engines (SEs) may index your holiday pages within a week, however it may take up to six months before they really begin to show.  You now have the 6 months to work on your efforts and get optimized for all those terms you would really like to try and show for on the SERPs.

- If you have efforts in line already, however you are not getting the top results you strive for during your busy Q4 season, now is when you have the time to play with your site and still recover if you make a mistake and lose placements before the busy season kicks in.

- What better time to begin to go after the terms that generate high ROIs for the competition when they are busy focusing on the present, instead of the future?

- Starting this early also gives you time to really focus in on a larger quantity of long tailed terms, instead of rushing to work on a few higher searched general words or phrases.


With that said, a few of the basic SEO strategies you may want to work on are:

- Content, Content, Content - Useful and educational content for customers will only help your SEO efforts.

- Meta Tags, Title Tags and Content consistency combinations.

- Working with top industry sites for backlinks where appropriate, which will have time to be crawled and registered before Q4.

- Getting that forum or blog on your site finally up and running so you can start to build some readership and return customers for your Q4 product, sale and service announcements. This also helps out with the content point above.

Many people forget about Q4 when working on their spring product lines, however, those who prepare ahead of time are the ones who benefit in the long run.

If you’d like to find out more information about how you can begin your prepwork for Q4 or want a consultation from Downtown Ecommerce Partners, please write me at adam @downtownecommerce.com and I will be happy to help you.

Best,

Adam

Google goes Guerilla

A good friend of mine found this Google recruitment letter on the streets of Manhattan today. I enjoy the fact they are recruiting a "wide range of characteristics" - very funny. Visiting the url on the flyer - www.google.com/usability it appears that Google may have an adversity if the candidate works for a web or software development shop - with a very specific yes/no question:  "Do you work for a web or software development company?". Maybe they are looking for the "Yes", but I sincerely doubt it. The predisposition on Personal details surrounding languages - both native and spoken is interesting as well.

Personally, I think it is a good development. I believe Google is a shop built by engineers/developers for engineers/developers. It is well documented that "business people" are effectively second class citizens inside Google - a fact I also have verified informally with Googlers. (The business people are purportedly not afforded the same 20% free time for projects as the special engineering people.)

Google needs to "cross the chasm" back to the rest of America and design technology not just for the Internet elite. I have had a few intensive sessions just teaching Gmail to my neighbor after he couldn't understand why there wasnt an obvious 1-800 phone number to reach "help" at Google.

Being the big silent morass that Google is, we may never know the outcome of these tests - but the flyers on light poles brings back fond memories of campaigning for student body president at my alma mater. Gotta love the referral code - "NYFD1". Do they get a CPA on that?

Photo taken at Broadway and Vesey in lower Manhattan. 3/25/08

Getting into the guts of Ecommerce

I find little talk online about the basic underpinnings of ecommerce. Albeit the topic is a little dry, I am still surprised at the void. I am talking about the core pieces of technology that allow us ecommerce folks to do what it is we do. I am speaking about three core things:

1. URLs
2. Cookies
3. Pixels

I told you it was a rather mundane topic. It is mundane, but it is not. It is where the competitive intelligence, strategy and self-identified key performance indicators (KPIs) reside. The irony is that unlike the brick and mortar retail world, these juicy tidbits are sitting out there for all to see. Let me take an example in each case and show you what I am talking about. Obviously, interpreting these things takes some educated guessing, but in many cases it is not that big of a jump.

URLS

Let's take this url I found on Google Base (formerly Froogle) as just one example of the intelligence embedded in public URLs:

http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/app.detail/params.aol_refer.false.tpl.detail.msn_refer.false.item.J70538.ref.GBA?cm_ven=GOOGLEBASE&cm_cat=Jewelry&cm_pla=Rings&cm_ite=J70538

I know it looks like a jumbled mess of slashes and code. But trust me, their is intelligence in here. Let's break it down a little ways down the URL.

/params.aol_refer.false.tpl.detail.msn_refer.false.

This little snippet of the URL clearly shows that for some reason QVC is pre-occupied with AOL and MSN traffic. My guess is that QVC either renders a special splash page or wants to see how much traffic comes from these two portals.

cm_ven=GOOGLEBASE

The first of the telltale name-value pairs. Admittedly I am non-tech, but have been doing this long enough to glean the important parts. Clearly here is the name-value pair QVC is using to track marketing vendor or "ven", in this case Google Base.

cm_cat=Jewelry

The second of the name-value pairs denotes the category the product falls in. The name-value pairs are also indicative of the levels of reporting important to a company. In this case QVC will be able to roll up marketing results for all of Google Base where the category of interest was Jewelry.

cm_pla=Rings

I don't know what pla stands for, but effectively it is the sub-category of Jewelry that is Rings. Like any of the name value pairs, usually reporting can roll up both vertically, meaning show me all results for Rings in Jewelry on Google Base or horizontally, meaning show me all results for the Ring sub-category regardless of marketing vendor.

cm_ite=J70538

The most atomic level - the item number or SKU. You can clearly see the item number or "ite" in the tab to the right above the product name, in this case "J70538".

COOKIES

Cookies are used to track behavior and store relevant attributes about a surfer. All legitimate ecommerce shops make these cookies non personally identifiable information (PII) meaning any data associated with a cookie cannot be tied back to an individual. The one exception to this rule is Google where I see my email address as one of the cookie attributes tracked, albeit is noted as "secure" by my browser.

In most browsers you can go see what a cookie is tracking by going to main menu of your browser (click on its name in the top tool bar), then click on Preferences, then click on Security, then click on "Show Cookies". I find it fascinating (and a tad worrisome) to see what people are tracking. I think there is probably some correlation between an organizations online moxie and the number of cookies it drops and the variables it is tracking within those cookies. Here is a quick rundown of what I found on my computer for a few of the top sites:

Google
- 3 cookies (1) .google.com (2) www.google.com and (3) www.googleadservices.com
- The cookie ".google.com" tracks 22 variables.
- The cookie "www.google.com" tracks 10 variables.
- The cookie "www.googleadservices.com" tracks 2 variables.
- Google could be tracking up to 34 different things every time I use their services and it looks like probably more if I click on the adwords ads often enough.

Overstock
- 2 cookies (1) .overstock.com and (2) www.overstock.com
- The cookie ".overstock.com" tracks 9 variables.
- The cookie "www.overstock.com" tracks 5 variables.
- Overstock tracks some cool stuff in there like original visit (guessing this means the website you first came to them through), surftype (guessing this means basic surf types like search and/or browse), lastvisit (a date stamp that changes based on when you last visited the site - a key recency metric) and much more.

Other sites drop fewer cookies, almost always at least one, and track fewer variables.

PIXELS

Pixels are pieces of Javascript usually included in the footer of web sites. It is easy to see by clicking "View" in the menu bar of your browser and click on "View Source". Skimming through the code can show you any sites SEO strategies, implemented technology from third parties including clickstream tracking software like Omniture or Google Analytics.

I will keep posting interesting tactics from time to time embedded in cookies, URLs and Pixels. These are powerful pieces of technology that drive our industry and help ecommerce companies improve every users shopping experience and give those who employ them intelligently a significant competitive advantage.