A few weeks ago I sat on a social media panel at Vancouver’s Massive Technology Show. Little did I know that the social media expert sitting to my left was also a talented cartoonist. I recently discovered Social Signal’s Noise to Signal comic series, and wanted to share my Top Eleven with you. I highly suggest you sign up for the feed if you like what you see:

Blog King

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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.

Greetings from the Canadian Rockies! This will be a quickie Bloggers Digest as I’m in Banff, Alberta this week and have not had much time to pour over Google Reader (I feel so out of touch). I thought I’d open it up to you this week also - please link to your favorite ecommerce/Internet marketing post of the week (even if it’s your own) through the comments. Perhaps we’ll all discover some new feeds to add to our RSS readers.

Jason Billingsley was also away this week at Shop.org’s Spring Online Marketing Workshop in Scottsdale, Arizona. If you attended and caught Jason’s session, please leave a comment too.

I also want to apologize as we’ve been having issues with our spam filter - many legit comments are getting auto-disapproved and I must approve them manually. If your comment doesn’t show up right away it may take a day or so for me to manually approve it. Thanks again for your comments, we really appreciate hearing from you.

• I’m up here in Banff for a new media for broadcasting and television conference, so we’ve been discussing breaking technologies in interactive TV, mobile, widgets and more. More and more I’m convinced that we’re going to see video emerge as an essential ecommerce element the way we consider product images and multiple image views essential today.

  Rishi from BetterRetail.Blogspot.com spotted a TechCrunch article about Shopflick. Shopflick is a social shopping engine where you view video clips posted by sellers about their stores and products. Users can bookmark, tag and share videos like YouTube, and you can purchase from seller stores like eBay. Currently in Beta, this will be one to watch.

• Big news for the analytics world, Yahoo has acquired IndexTools. Eric T. Peterson shares his opinion on what this means for webmasters and the analytics industry. Be sure to catch next Thursday’s webinar with Eric if you want a chance to pick his brain on analytics for online retailers.

• A big welcome back to Matt from eCommerce Optimization, who has been MIA from blogging. He’s back with a bang, having spotted Google Products listings within regular Google results in a new fashion - I’ve been wondering when we’d see something like this, looks like it’s underway.

• What’s the difference in click through rates and time spent on site for each of the top 10 positions on the first page of Google results? Here’s a nifty chart. You may be interested in this too: Zappos’ repeat customer/sales per customer data, 2001-2006. Rishi, where did you get this?

• Are you an online retailer interested in SEO? Rebecca Kelley wants to know what you expect from SEO-based talks at Shop.org conferences. Jason Billingsley and I would also love to hear your suggestions. Please leave a comment here.

• The Google Webmaster Central blog posts a public service announcement of sorts on how to recover when your site has been hacked. It’s a good idea to bookmark this article, although I hope you never have to refer to it.

Following at least 50 blog feeds, most of which are not specifically about ecommerce, I aim to select standout information that online retailers would enjoy and learn from.

I hope you enjoy this week’s picks, there’s a little something for everyone.

• Hard up on topic ideas for your ecommerce blog? Jennifer Osborne from Search Engine People has the cure with How to Come Up With Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries, using rugs as an example.

• Don’t forget to Optimize Your Blog Post Titles. Andy Beal gives a good rationale for doing so, and my recent post on Problogger on re-optimizing your blog posts shows you how to use analytics to make intelligent keyword decisions for your titles.

• Sarah Bird, Esquire posted a very thorough article about Managing Risk and Legal Issues for Merchants and Affiliate Marketers. Bookmark this.

• Another affiliate marketing must-read is Anti-Marketing and Reputation Management for Affiliates from Copybrighter. Learn how to protect yourself from affiliates who drag your brand through the mud with negative ads and content.

• Zen Cart Optimization shares a case study on event marketing, with a March Madness and NCAA Basketball promotion that realized conversion rates of over 26% at its peak. If you missed our holiday marketing webinar, you might want to check that out along with the summary blog post.

• GrokDotCom’s Daniel McGuigan spotted design tweaks on Amazon product pages that improve scannability - a very important element in web usability.

• Grok’s Peter Lee proves that not all Facebook ads suck using Virgin Air as an example. You may also enjoy Facebook Ads Deconstructed: 11 Tips for Marketers.

Amazon is testing new waters in mobile marketing with its Text-Buy-It technology launched earlier this week. The new service allows customers to check prices from their cell-phone completely through text messaging - bypassing the need to access the mobile web (many people still don’t have web access or incur extra costs per web page viewed). Most if not all phones are text-ready and in general it’s not complicated to figure out.

Since Amazon undersells most brick-and-mortar retailers and is aggressively expanding its product line (including wines), physical stores could turn into local showrooms for Amazon’s inventory - only to help push customers towards an Amazon conversion.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Text a product name, search keyword, UPC code or ISBN number to “AMAZON” (262966)
Step 2: Amazon sends back a numbered list of products and prices matching your search
Step 3: If you find the item you want in stock and at a favorable price you can click the number beside the result to buy
Step 4: Amazon calls (not texts) you back with final details of your order
Step 5: You confirm or cancel your purchase, provide an email address and select a preferred shipping speed

While customers can’t access features that makes Amazon famous like customer reviews and cross-sell suggestions, this is likely going to be a very popular service that could really nail local retailers - the country is in a recession, businesses are already feeling the pinch and customers are more price sensitive.

No word on super-saver shipping options for multiple purchases or if purchases made within a certain time period can be combined.

We can thank Amazon for pioneering many innovations in ecommerce and now mobile commerce. This is certainly an exciting development for discount retailers like Overstock who could develop similar services. It could also work well for etailers that sell items carried by other retailers and can’t compete on price, but have earned loyal and passionate customers through rewards programs, great service or word-of-mouth (Zappos is a good example).

Online retailers like NetShops and Rugsale are using a third-party service called ShopTogether, where customers can…you guessed it…shop together online.

This also has amazing potential for personal selling from your live chat customer service reps.

This is what the ShopTogether interface looks like:

Get Started

Invite a Friend

You can see what your friend is viewing, share favorites and have live chat. It’s easy to click on the items to jump right to their product pages.

This has the potential to take live chat to the next level. Your customer service representatives offer suggestions (out of stock alternatives, accessories, cross-sells and up-sells) which the customer can click right through to and ask further questions. The customer service rep would be able to probe the customer and then make recommendations. Of course the customer service rep would need to be as knowledgeable about your website and its products as any in-store sales associate.

Throw web cams, telephone or VoIP into the mix, and you get pretty darn close to the brick-and-mortar experience.

The ShopTogether site is currently closed for maintenance - so no word on how to contact the company. But we’ll keep our eyes peeled for a relaunch - or competitors offering similar services.

What do you think? Will we see more sites going this route or is this too costly to work? Would you enjoy shopping this way if you needed help with a purchase?

Dear Get Elastic Readers: We had some issues with Wordpress last weekend that resulted in a number of glitches with the site while the platform upgraded. Among other things, we lost our About Us page. Thanks to all who dropped me a line to point that out, and a new and improved About page is now in action - including links to my and Jason’s social media profiles (StumbleUpon, Twitter, Sphinn and Facebook). Have a fabulous weekend!

• One of the coolest discoveries I made this week was a new ecommerce podcast by SLI Systems. Check out the first two episodes with guests from Nebraska Furniture Mart and Vermont Teddy Bear Company. You can also subscribe through iTunes right now.

• Have you checked out our archive of the Get Elastic Ecommerce Podcast? If you’re a relatively new subscriber, you might wanna kick back with your favorite bevvie and make it a Blockbuster night.

• For you web designers, Alexis Brion examines the look of log-in boxes with 6 examples of good and bad design.

• Love the title of this one: 7 Most Likely Reasons Your Search Traffic Sucks from the SEOmoz blog.

• Rebecca Kelley from SEOmoz sat in on a PPC webinar and has an excellent summary of it. Very interesting points on how to handle Google’s Content Network.

• Bronto Software has teamed up with Return Path for a 3 part series on sender reputation and deliverability. This week’s post on image suppression and how it impacts deliverability is very insightful.

• If you sell through comparison shopping engines, check out Scott Wingo’s piece on managing long tail terms.
  

Credit card companies protect consumers against credit card fraud by taking care of disputes whether they be incorrect amounts, credit card fraud, stolen credit cards or if the merchant never delivered the goods, or faulty goods.
These refunds are called chargebacks. Not only are they disappointing, but they can be downright dangerous to your online business, putting your merchant account at risk if you receive too many.

As an online retailer, you face the threat of customers that make a purchase, file a phony dispute with their credit card company and keep the merchandise and their money. And credit card companies have the right to pull that money from your merchant account (credit card companies don’t cover the cost themselves) – leaving you without the product and without the cash.

Common Credit Card Chargeback Cons

There are 5 common chargeback tricks that dishonest customers may pull:

1. Claim merchandise was never delivered.
2. Claim merchandise was returned, but the merchant never refunded the money.
3. Claim order was cancelled but shipped anyway.
4. Claim merchandise was damaged or otherwise unsatisfactory.
5. Claim they were not the one who ordered the product (credit card fraud).

Chargeback Comebacks

After disputes are filed, the customer’s credit card company will conduct a two week investigation. But your chances of winning the dispute are greatly improved if you follow this advice:

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Well it’s Good Friday and most of you are not in the office, so kick back with some egg nog (oops, wrong holiday) and enjoy this week’s Bloggers Digest. I do hope you take the time to check out my contribution to Problogger this week: Almost 7 Ways to Re-Optimize Your Blog Posts. There’s also a post on YouMoz by yours truly: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Store Blog.

• Justin Palmer does it again with his home-run 10 Steps for SEO-ing Product Pages

• DJ Waldow’s Sender Reputation: What is it and Why Should You Care? is a must-read for email marketers.

• Manoj Jasra blesses us with his Ultimate Google Analytics Resources roundup.

• Patrick Altoft shares his Guide to Geo Targeting for SEO and Usability. The last paragraph has some great advice on avoiding duplicate content problems for online retailers running country-targeted sites: write unique content for each site!

• Alan Rimm-Kaufmann wrote a fantastic article for Search Engine Land full of tips to help your landing pages load faster, as we recently discovered is a factor in your Google Adwords Quality Score.

Have a great long weekend!

Yesterday we posted on tracking affiliate sales placed by phone, and today we’re going to address two other marketing channels you may need to track if you take orders offline.

The simple solution is to ask customers where they heard about your offer / website. The problem is often customers don’t remember, or even worse can give you incorrect information. But there are at least 8 alternative ways to track conversions from PPC or catalog orders.

Serving Different Toll-Free Numbers

Use a script (like JavaScript) that serves up different phone numbers based on a referring ad network or other PPC engine (example: Google AdWords or Price Grabber). You typically would use one toll-free number per ad network, but you may want multiples if you want more specific campaign traffic (i.e. Valentine’s Day AdGroup separate from general AdWords or Google Search ads vs. Content Network).

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