We usually don’t use our blog to do any promotion of company products or commercial events (and we constantly hear how unusual and great that is for a vendor - thank you for recognizing). But, since so many of you are trying to get ahead with your online retail stores, or have clients in the space, we figured you might be interested in a sneak peek of the next version of our ecommerce software.

Be the First to See Elastic Path 6

New Features Help You Sell More, Work Less.

Date: Thursday, September 27th, 2007
Time: 9 am Pacific / 12pm Eastern

Register to Attend the Webinar

Elastic Path Software is preparing to release the highly anticipated ecommerce platform Elastic Path 6, featuring new capabilities like:

• All-new backend customer service application
• Multi-store management
• Gift certificates
• Pre-orders and Back-orders
• PayPal Express and Google Checkout integration
• Enhanced in-site search
• Warehouse management tools
• Exchanges, Returns and Refund management
• Fulfillment auditing
• Security enhancements

Be among the first - join our product manager and lead developer for a SNEAK PREVIEW of the new features and architecture.

Click Here to Attend…
(Space is Limited)

Webinar Agenda

09:00 - 09:15 am PT: Brief Overview of Elastic Path 6
09:15 - 10:00 am PT: In-Depth Look at New Features
10:00 - 10:15 am PT: Questions & Answers on New Features
10:15 - 10:45 am PT: Architecture & Design with Lead Developer
10:45 - 11:00 am PT: Questions & Answers on Architecture

Bring all your questions for the live Question & Answer period.

## End promotional message - Continue with good, useful online retail focused content ##

This post is a summary of a session I sat in on at last week’s Shop.org Annual Summit.

Web 2.0 – Intermediate
Brett Hurt, Founder & CEO of Bazaarvoice
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder and EVP of Marketing, Ice.com
Matt Corey, VP of Marketing, Golfsmith International

The first slide states that “shoppers are turning to each other” — meaning that faced with limitless choices for where to buy and what to buy which can cause “decision paralysis” and a general distrust of marketing messaging, people turn to each other for product testimonials and recommendations to make a purchase decision. And now this can be done on the Web instantly and on a larger scale than offline.

Continue Reading »

In case you “missed” it (or even if you caught it), this is a recap of Chancellor’s Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California, Riverside Donna Hoffman’s keynote speech titled “The Evolution of Customer Experience: 10 Trends You Can’t Afford to Miss.” Here’s the rundown of what Hoffman believes will drive the move from Web 2.0 to (you knew it was coming) Web 3.0.

Most folks still don’t really know what people mean by Web 2.0, let alone Web 1.0 or 3.0. If you Google these terms, you’ll get a variety of opinions. Hoffman presented a simple definition of Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 in terms of how users interact with the available Web technologies:

• Web 1.0 refers to the Web as data, text and images. Users can read and search.
• Web 2.0 ushered in sharing and participation (forums, blogs and so on). Users can interact and submit their own content to cyberspace.
• Web 3.0 is a move towards a “semantic Web.” A concept that the Web can understand itself and user intent through artificial intelligence and perhaps human powered search.

Alright, jargon out of the way, why should etailers care about Web 3.0 ecommerce trends?

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This post is part four our Social Media Guide, a companion post to our presentation “Self-evolving eCommerce: Using Consumer Generated Content for Fun and Profit” at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas.

The referee indicates whether your play was a success or not. Sometimes it is a touchdown, sometimes just a field goal. Other times you will have dropped the ball.

1. Reach

• Traditional metrics (views, time spent, bounce rate)

2. Influence

• Trackbacks (people linking to post via blog)
• Blogosphere or news mentions (use Google Alerts)
• Technorati authority

3. Affinity

• Number of subscribers (Feedburner)
• Number of comments

4. Increases

• Search engine position improvements
• Referrals leading to sales

This post is part three our Social Media Guide, a companion post to our presentation “Self-evolving eCommerce: Using Consumer Generated Content for Fun and Profit” at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas.

The offense is running the play that was called and looking for a few key blocks.

1. Participate

• Comment on blogs
• Link to other bloggers and social media creators (Ego-capital)
• Join blogging networks - MyBlogLog

2. Open Up

• Open commenting
• Don’t pre-moderate
• Use spam filters like Askimet or Spam Karma to weed out the “buy XYZ now” comments

3. Distribute

• RSS is key (Learn about RSS: RSS in Plain English)

4. Sharing

• Web 1.0: Email this to a friend
• Web 2.0: Add bookmarking links like “add to Facebook” on Chapters

5. Seeding

• Make friends with influencers (see point #1)
• Mine Technorati
• BuzzLogic (identifies sphere of influence for markets - starts at 12k/mo)
• Submit to social sites (Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, etc.)

6. Social Shopping

• Roundup of social shopping sites

This post is part two our Social Media Guide, a companion post to our presentation “Self-evolving eCommerce: Using Consumer Generated Content for Fun and Profit” at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas.

The Offense is on the field lining up, getting everyone in place to snap the ball.

1. Contributing

• Sponsor other people’s social media (Toshiba on Ask a Ninja)
• Responding to social media that’s already talking about you

2. Text

• You already have it (newsletters, training, ads)
• Outsource (mommy bloggers)
• White Paper: Blogging for Retailers (and Podcast)

3. Video

• Leveraging the video content you already have (Zappos TV ads)
• ThinkGeek USB Doorbell
• Blendtec - Will it Blend

4. Audio

• CoutureCandy: StyleCast & CelebCast

5. Interactive

• Jockey - Stop Squirming

6. User Generated

• UK Company - Sloggi Underwear Best Butt Contest

TIP
Spend time on titles: Copyblogger Guide to Effective Headline Writing

Get Inspired
110 Ways Retailers are Using Social Media Marketing

This post is part one of four from our Social Media Guide, a companion post to our presentation “Self-evolving eCommerce: Using Consumer Generated Content for Fun and Profit” at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas.

Planning is the coach of a social media campaign. You must understand the field and generate a strategy for scoring.

1. Buy-in

• Brand advertisers have an easier time with this (way more viral campaigns for brands than retailers)

2. Generate ideas

• Keep a notebook (Google Notebook is useful, so is pen and paper)

3. Identify angle

• 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)

4. Pick channel (blog, video, podcast, interactive)

• appropriate to budget
• appropriate to timeline
• appropriate to angle

Ask A Ninja shares his views on social media in What is Podcasting?

What is Social Media?

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves.

Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. The social media sites typically use tools like message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, communities, wikis, weblogs etc. (source: Wikipedia - Social Media)

4 P’s of Social Media: What We Can Learn from Football

• Planning: The Head Coach
• Producing: Pre-snap
• Promoting: Post-snap
• P-measuring: Referee

Many online retailers are itching to explore the powerful and mysterious world of social media marketing, this was confirmed by the number of social media focused sessions at Shop.org this week. Etailers who want to catch the new wave of online marketing rather than be washed away may find examples of what’s possible and who’s doing it helpful in the planning of new social media marketing ventures. So here’s a list of 110 examples to check out.

FACEBOOK Applications

aerie by American Eagle*
BlueNile Wishlist*
Steep and Cheap*
Zappos*
Threadless
Threadless Plus

*Internet Retailer Top 500

Continue Reading »

The entire blogging community has jumped on the BlogRush bandwagon, and we are no different here at Get Elastic. A-list bloggers are adding this new blog traffic widget to try and generate additional exposure for their blog content. How does it work?

Simply add the BlogRush widget to your blog and for each visitor your blog recieves, you will earn a credit to display one of your posts headlines on a related blog in the network. It reminds me of the old Webring days.

The treat is, there is a MLM component to it, and you will also receive credits for people who sign up for the service - up to 10 levels deep. That is some serious velocity. At first I was hesitant as the posts did not seem that related to the topics we cover here on Get Elastic, but over the past 24 hours it has actually gotten better. I have started to discover some excellent blogs from post titles appearing in the widget. I have actively clicked through and found the content engaging enough to subscribe to the feed.

As more blogs are added to the network, I believe it will get even more accurate and this widget will become a mainstay like the MyBlogLog widget has become.

So, take a look at BlogRush to generate blog traffic in a very easy and passive way. If it doesn’t pan out, it is easy enough to remove it right? Sign up to get started.

* Note: links to BlogRush contain a referral ID - if you sign up, you become part of our extended network and we get extra credit. If we can pull reports on who signs up under us, we will blog about our network and you will get a high quality link from us.