Next Generation Shopping

During the retailer forum session at Search Engine Strategies NYC a member of the audience said “I have a store that I just started up. Right now we are in the $0 dollars sales area. What are some tips for getting started with an E-Commerce store?”

A great summary response from the panel covered a majority of the avenues for building from the ground up.

• Build links and SEO – Long term initiative, no shortcuts.
• Advertise on Search Engines (SEM) - Instant results; Testing and basic analytics is important.
• Utilize Available Services in the Shopping Vertical

• List on Google Base / Froogle - Results dependant on product being sold. 
• Sell on auction sites, specifically eBay and link back to your e-commerce store in the description – Short term
• Sell on marketplaces like Amazon zShops, or Ebay Express
• Use Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (free setup) to power the site

• Easier/Cheaper to get listed in Yahoo! Shopping search engine

• Datafeed Optimization (DFO) - Be found for more search terms.  Shorter term initiative.  (See SingleFeed for a good solution).

I’d also suggest that new merchants should try to announce some initial promotions and get free exposure through deal or coupon sites. And don’t forget getting friends and family to help spread the word.

[Entry related to the Retailer Forum session held at Search Engine Strategies 2007 NYC.]

I placed my first order using Google Checkout last night. I was hesitant to try Google Checkout, but in the midst of an impulse buy I decided to give it a whirl. I picked up a Iomega 250 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive from RitzCamera for $19.95. This great product deal came curtiosy of a listing found at SecretPrices.com as the normal price is somewhere upwards of $250+. SecretPrices also had listed a coupon for $10 off $20 at RitzCamera, only valid when using Google Checkout. So the grand was $9.95 for the drive, plus shipping. Not sure if it was a price mistake or what, but the product was removed from Ritz’s website only a few hours after my purchase. Update: RitzCamera cancelled my order stating that the item was “out of stock”. Oh well!

The whole process for Google Checkout was straightforward and simple. It seemed easier than using the relatively clunky RitzCamera checkout interface itself (which has given me problems in the past when using FireFox). Of course you it seems you need a Gmail account to use the service (which is still by invitation only?).

After the purchase you can keep track of your order using the Google Checkout History found in your Google account. Also, Google also allows you to refrain from giving out your Gmail email address and just having Google forward information on from the merchant.

Technorati Tags: google checkout, gmail, ritzcamera

It seems that the Google PageRank system is in the midst of updating its rankings.

Darren Rowse (aka ProBlogger) has just reported that there is a Google Page Rank Update Rolling Out. A few hours earlier Andreas Kraus reported the same thing. There are some predictions that it will officially occur between July 7th and July 11th. More predictions on the exact day are going on at WebmasterCorner.

A good tool for PageRank prediction checking can be found here at iWebTool.com.

Technorati Tags: google, seo, pagerank, google pagerank update

Today I was busy all morning and most of the afternoon was spent on the road so I didn’t have time to browse the Web. Please forgive me, what was I thinking? When I finally hit up my computer, I quickly realized Google launched its new service… So naturally I started to look look into. Hmm, I thought, maybe I’ll write an entry about it… That’s when I realized (with Technorati having new posts tagged “Google Checkout” occuring every 5 to 10 minutes or so) in about 6 hours I had missed hundreds of blog posts. Seriously, its crazy.
Anyhow, it is very interesting to note the widespread perspectives seen across the blogosphere.

Here are 10 selected articles and the basic perspective from it about Google Checkout:

1. The New York Times - Google Aims to Speed the Online Checkout Line
   “For merchants, one concern is whether Google’s system, which is unfamiliar to users, will reduce the number of people who complete purchases on their sites, a measure known as the conversion rate.”
   
   
2. TechCrunch - Google Checkout offers low-cost transactions for sellers; what’s in it for me?
   “I like having a store of money in my PayPal account and automating monthly subscription payments. Neither of these appear to be an option with Google Checkout. I don’t know why I’d use Google Checkout over PayPal if I had a choice, and if I don’t have a choice I’m liable to resent it. Maybe someday all this data on my shopping habits will be used to better serve ads I’m interested in via Minority Report type billboards, Google style. I don’t know.”
   
   
3. ReveNews - Google Checkout Steps Up To the Plate
   “So, it all boils down to more advertising spending on Google AdWords, by affiliates as they get squeezed out more by Google, and from merchants because they may actually save money by doing it. Sounds like a win-win for Google.”
4. Mashable - Google Checkout Isn’t a Paypal Killer
   “All in all, it’s a smart play, but not the person-to-person Paypal killer some of us were hoping for. At least, not yet.”
5. Search Engine Watch - Google Launches Checkout, not the Rumored GBuy
   “For now, using Google Checkout will be a no-brainer for smaller merchants with limited budgets, as the program provides a valuable service for very low cost and offers additional benefits for advertisers. More established merchants may well want to wait to see how successful the program becomes before jumping in, keeping a close eye on the positioning of competitors’ ads who are using Checkout to see if their ads are getting a boost from consumers clicking through more frequently.”
6. Performancing - Google Checkout, Too Little, Too Late?
   “There are no person to person features in this at all yet, and there isn’t even a great deal in this for ecommerce transaction competitors such as Worldpay to be worried. Had any other company announced it, even Microsoft I think it would have been met with yawns. If you want to sell digital products off your blog and you participate in Adwords advertising it will be worth giving the service a look over, transaction fees can take a bite out of your profits. Anyone else, well, this is not the service we were looking for.”
7. PostBubble - Checking out Google Checkout
   “The bigger picture here is that this is setting up a battlefront for things like CBG. Google wants to control and they are beginning to pick their battles. We are seeing the directions Google is going and they are aiming to control markets in a step by step fashion with little moves like Google Checkout.”
8. Make You Go Hmm - Google Checkout worth checking out
   “For buyers, the only bad thing I can see is concerns over possible transaction privacy. Will Google use our buying history to show us more targeted ads? Amazon is the king at this strategy, so it wouldn’t surprise me but I can see some people being worried.”
9. Mathew Ingram - Google Checkout — future of micro-payments?
   “It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Google Checkout could become the fast and easy micro-payment system that many Web-heads have been anticipating for so many years.”
10. O’Reily XML Blog - Google Checkout API
    “Along with Checkout API Google also released Order Processing API, Notifications API and Merchant Calculations API to support the order processing features so you can move an order through the fulfillment cycle: capturing the payment, marking the order delivered, and so on.”

The O’Reily post is the most interesting to me from a technical standpoint, so I threw it in at the number 10 spot. I will be exploring the API shortly myself and am interested to see its possibilities.

Sorry I would post the other gazillion links, but you might as well head over to Technorati to see what the rest of the blogosphere is saying.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to put in my thought on this whole thing. A very interesting, yet not so unpredictable move by Google. Hmmm, well still too early to for me to make any serious remarks. But Google having my credit card information, makes me scared… Wait they already have it… Probably along with logs of everything else I have done over the past several years of my life. Damn.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google checkout, GBuy, web 2.0, ecommerce, google api, google checkout api

March 28th was the first of the Web 2.0 Awards. Its now June and I finally got to taking a closer look at all the sites. What I found most humorous was that most of the sites are still in Beta, and some hadn’t even launched at the time! It will be interesting to keep tabs over the next several months and see which die out, and which become solid businesses.

Below is my review of just the “Retail” awards section:

First Place: Etsy

I’m a big fan of the site and the concept. The layout of the page is beautiful, and gives a very cutting-edge look… Great, except for it requiring Flash. After spending some time on the site, I realized why it had won. A niche ebay, with all the perks of Web 2.0! The Etsy marketplace covers a niche market of only unique handmade items. It lets users shop by by color, place, time and material. Features include tagging by materials used and general keywords. PayPal is integrated as the main payment system. Some additional layout features utilize Flash and remind me of Cooqy, which was created using Laszlo. Anyway, not only is Etsy’s layout very tight, the concept is equally as good. I’m not the only fan though. Pete Cashmore of Mashable seems to like it and Justin Lee posted that he does as well. Nice job, hope it does well.
Second Place: Threadless
The second runner up was Threadless. Another well-designed site. My first impression was that it was bit crowded for my liking, but still nice. It is described as “A collection of tee shirts submitted and rated by the public. Over 60000 designs have been submitted and rated, over 400 have been chosen to be printed and sold on the site.”

The site seems to have a fairly big community following, and a lot of quality submissions. For users looking to make a purchase, the site not only shows a preview of the T-Shirt, but also show people wearing the shirt. I think that is huge for the community to have related pictures of real people wearing the gear! Or in the case of this one, a image/drawing of what Michael J. Fox would look like wearing the shirt. I included it because I’m personally a fan of Back to the Future and found it humorous.

Third Place: Wists
The third runner up was wists. Wists is social shopping site similiar in usage and layout to Kaboodle. This type of shopping is definitely an interesting concept, although I haven’t found it all that useful myself. Look for these sites to continue to grow in the future. I do plan to do a post on the emerging trends and technology of social shopping used as a basis for sites like Kaboodle, Wists and recently MyPickList.

As for Wists, I hope they are really busy, because their blog and specifically their blog post about the award is really skimpy! It almost looks like splog.

Honorable Mentions

• 43deals 43deals.com
• aytozon aytozon.com
• Darmik Darmik.com
• DealMine dealmine.com
• Pricenoia Pricenoia.com
• wazima Wazima.com

Reference: http://web2.0wards.org/

Strange that nothing was posted about the Web 2.0 Awards on Mashable nor ProgrammableWeb. Those are my two general sources for Web 2.0 related topics. Oh well!

This whole Web 2.0 Awards project was organized by Kat Ortland of SEOMoz. Read more on her personal blog. I congratulate Kat on a job well done and in covering so much ground! Now here are the…

Changes I would to the Awards

.. ClipFire for 43Deals

If I was Kat I would have choosen ClipFire.com over 43deals.com. They are both a work in progress, but ClipFire is a much cleaner layout, and although could use some enhancements, generally has its act together. 43deals.com is also an innovative idea, but the site seems sloppy, and many irrelevant deals come up.

Note: 43Deals has had a face-lift and cleaned up a lot since I began writing this post a while back. But I still feel ClipFire wins out based on community involvement and general ease-of-use factors.

.. SecretPrices (or even EVrewards) for DealMine

Ok, so this is totally biased. DealMine is rewards based, whereas SecretPrices involves more common discounts such as coupon/rebate and promotion offers. DealMine.com is an interesting idea, but it definitely doesn’t give me the Web 2.0 feel. And the design is far interesting, especially the implementation of the Shopping.com API. I think a nicer choice would have have been to select evreward.com which tells the users where they can find the best cashback options.

Next Year…

Maybe I will submit a site next year, but I wonder what the awards will be called then. Will that be Web 2.1 Awards or Web 3.0? Or Web 2.0.1 RC 2 w/ HotFix 3… Yeah, sorry that’s my Microsoft developer background kicking in.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Awards, Etsy, Threadless, Wists, ClipFire, 43Deals, SEOMoz, PayPal, Shopping.com

Last week Yahoo and eBay announced a broad partnership. What’s next? Yesterday a report of Microsoft considering a bid to buy eBay. Keith Regan from E-Commerce Times reports

“Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is considering making a bid to buy eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) , according to a published report, a move that could dramatically alter an e-commerce , Web portal and search space already in a state of flux.”

But why eBay…

“The Post reported that Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates favored eBay over Yahoo as a takeover target because of the technology that eBay would bring to the table, including its PayPal online payment system and its Skype VoIP subsidiary.”

Ok, guess that makes sense.

Read the full post at E-Commerce Times.

Technorati Tags: ebay, microsoft, yahoo, ebay microsoft merger, ebay yahoo partnership

I have been looking for a useful Search Engine Marketing application that uses the Google Adwords API. I came across (via the ProgrammableWeb blog) a project that the guys at Webreakstuff are working on called Siteblimp. Apparently it aims to combine the Google Adwords API and Y!SM API (Yahoo! Search Marketing API). Thats pretty cool and sounds very powerful. If you add the Wordtracker API to that, you could have one powerful SEM tool!

I wish I had more time to look into the Search Engine APIs, but I don’t… And it seems the Webreakstuff guys are already having their own problems with creating the Siteblimp tool using the Y!SM API…

“Siteblimp is a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign management web application with some innovative features. Initially, the goal was to support both Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) but for reasons we’re about to explain, Y! support was dropped.”

They go on to say the Y! developer support for this particular API is horrible. Strange, Y! seems to generally has good developer support and you would think they would want to concentrate on an important API like Y!SM. Oh well, I’ll keep dreaming.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Adwords API, Yahoo, Yahoo search marketing, API, Wordtracker

Brian Smith over at ComparisonEngines.com is attending Google Press Day. He mentioned a resource, amonst others, on his blog that Google is releasing called Google Trends. I did a few e-commerce related searches on it to give it a try… Then a quick search for “Mobile Shopping” immediately caught my attention. Here is what the City-based breakdown looks like:

Look at that… The majority of search is coming from India. Other cities have much less search volume, and no US city is even in the top 10. I then recalled reading somewhere recently about the importance of mobile commerce in India… Oh yes, eBay just launched eBay.in Affiliate Program, now I remember. Directly from their May 2006 newsletter:

“As internet entrepreneurs, India and the eBay.in Affiliate Program represents an attractive global opportunity to website publishers. India, with a population of approximately 1.1 billion, and with just over 39% internet penetration, represents a large opportunity for affiliates. eCommerce is exploding in this English-speaking, technologically sophisticated market. One thing to consider: mobile applications and SMS are vital components of internet usage in India.”

My first time reading it I was thinking yeah, yeah. Now I’m thinking up how to get in the game!

Final Note: While the trend data from Google appears to be very useful, although my experience with it has been short to this point, it is also important to note the discrepancies between similiar keywords such as “price comparison” and “comparison shopping”. It can give you a good idea of what different regions and cultures refer to similiar terms as, which may be important in your SEO or SEM campaign. Using it in conjunction with the Overture keyword tool, and WordTracker could become a very powerful combination.

Technorati Tags: mobile shopping, mobile commerce, eBay India, google trends, SEO

My previous post on Google Ads and Penalization led me to this one. This post contains a question I hope to get some feedback on regarding Penalization of using Web Services.

How does a developer utilizing web services, specifically a Mashup developer, avoid getting penalized for duplicate content? Is this a real issue?

If severe penalization for duplicate content exists, this may effect those utilizing web services / APIs as data sources to create mashup sites. Especially using ecommerce web services and affiliate datafeeds, developers are contractually bound to use some exact content. The data provider is licensing the developer to utilize their content, however, my theory is that Google may see this as duplicate content. An example is an Amazon Associate using Amazon’s E-Commerce services to serve product, pricing, and review information.

This post from Search Engine Journal from Joe Duchesne back in July of 2005 reveals some interesting details:

“[…] Google is concerned about revolves around affiliate programs. It has been common practice for high traffic websites to establish an affiliate program. Affiliate programs themselves don’t worry Google. What it doesn’t like though, is for an affiliate program to take a template and then offer it to its base of affiliates to use. Some of the higher traffic websites end up with thousands upon thousands of duplicate websites all promoting the very same things and, according to Google, not offering any real value to the internet community. A website offering this type of cookie cutter website can easily find themselves de-listed by Google as happened to Template Monster a while back. […]”

So we know straightout affiliate, “cookie-cutter” type sites will suffer in Google. But my question is should this type of content be penalized, even if there is some original content in the mix? And is it already being penalized?

Another SEJ post, by Christoph Puetz, sheds some light into this area for us:

“On pages where duplicate content is being used, unique content should be added. I do not mean like just a few different words or a link/navigation menu. If you (the webmaster) can add 15% - 30% unique content to pages where you display duplicate content the overall ratio of duplicate content compared to the overall content of that page goes down. This will reduce the risk of having a page flagged as duplicate content.”

Ok, so add unique content. That might be a bit tricky for our site SecretPrices.com which consist of over a million dynamically generated pages! But we are definitely looking into ways to add unique content on portions of the site.
Christoph then goes on to say:

“Will this guarantee that your website stays in Google’s index? I don’t know.”

Great… So basically we’re back at square one!

Matt Cutts recently had a blog post about Notifying Webmasters of Penalties. I posted a comment, so I’ll see if he gets back to me on it. Eithier way the post is pretty informative, so I would suggest checking it out.

Personally, I’m not going to count on any great amount of organic Google traffic for any sites created based strongly on web services.

Here are some related readings:

• How To Avoid The Google Duplicate Content Filter, Search Engine Journal
• Duplicate Content can get You Banned, Search Engine Position
• New Duplicate Content Filter at Google, ThreadWatch

Does having Google Ads help your site with indexing and rankings? Maybe a kind of a you help me, I’ll help you thing going on? At first it seemed a little strange to me, but who knows anymore… My question is:

Is there any benefit, in rank or indexing, for running Google Adwords?

Earlier I reported that some people noticed Googlebot was found to be working in conjunction with Google Ads (mediabot). But does it go further than that? An interesting post entitled Are we being penalised by Google? from the guys at TicTap, a mobile shopping service, questions the relation to Google’s indexing methods and web sites serving Google Ads. Now it may seem a bit far fetched, but who knows… Let’s say, hypothetically, Google gives a little boost to sites using Google AdSense. Multiply the amount Google would be making exponentially, and wow, no wonder Google stock is selling for $400+ a share…

Now hold on a second, I am not jumping to any conclusions, but business-wise it would make some “Sense“. Of course, ethically it’s a different story… And also it would imply that they are “evil”, which they promised not to be!