Bloggers Digest - 4/18/08

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger declared Tuesday Blogger Appreciation Day, and many thanks to Robert from GrokDotCom for including me and Jason on his faves list. I didn’t get a chance to post a comparable list here on Get Elastic, but we did do a post a while back that lists ecommerce bloggers and resources.

We also recovered this week from some Wordpress glitches that resulted in our About page disappearing and then appearing in your RSS feed. My apologies, we weren’t trying to self promote here. But I did receive several new Twitter and Facebook friends as a result and it truly is great to put faces and names to subscribers. Check out the About page to connect with Jason and me through social networks.

• EtailDetail asks: Will New York Sales Tax Legislation Kill Ecommerce?

• Should a Website Show Its Precious Algorithm takes a look under the hood of Amazon, Last.fm and StumbleUpon’s recommendations algorithms and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of giving users clues into how recommendations are made.

• Every online retailer wants to recover abandoned shopping carts - and as many as possible. Eric Leuenberger shares some of his own testing and findings that it’s best to send recovery emails 2-4 hours after the cart is abandoned (provided you captured an email address, of course.)

• An interesting news item on Zappos’ business strategy including its new product categories, and its strategy to have no sale items on Zappos.com, rather to use its acquired 6PM.com brand to sell sale items.

• How do you craft the BEST product name for your shopping engine feeds? Love Your Feed gives you the goods.

• And don’t forget the SEO benefits of data feed optimization.