Though it’s hidden amongst a jungle of other links, products and calls to action - Amazon has a Bestsellers department. On the Amazon.com home page, scroll down to Features & Services / Amazon Exclusives / Amazon Bestsellers (or just click our link).

You’ll find every category that Amazon offers (which is pretty much everything) and even sub-categories.

And you’ll notice you can select the Most Gifted and Most Wished For items, based on Amazon’s tsunami of customer tracking and purchase data.

For example, if you’re in the beauty category, you can see the top 3 wished for fragrances are Vera Wang Princess, Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue and Marc Jacobs Daisy.

Comparing to Sephora’s best seller list, this is pretty good data.

So What?

When you understand what customers’ most desired and most gifted items are, you know where to focus your SEO efforts at the product page level as we approach the holiday season. And by SEO efforts, I mean link building.

If I were Sephora, I would head over to the search engine and scope out the ranking situation (making sure I’m signed out of my Gmail account so my rankings aren’t skewed by my frequent visits to the Sephora site). Now it doesn’t really matter what position you are in the results - results may vary based on a searcher’s location, browsing history (personalized search) and exact keyword term (rankings may differ for “vera wang princess” vs “princess vera wang”). And there’s always room for improvement when it comes to link building.

But you want to get an idea of which pages you are competing against. Is it Amazon? The manufacturer’s site? A popular blog review or shopping engine? Also, you want to know if you have a hope in the North Pole to actually rank for the product. If you’re not on page one or two, you may want to think realistically about your chances. Or, aim for a less competitive search like “buy vera wang princess” or “princess by vera wang.”

Okay, keeping with our hypothetical Sephora case:

Sephora is doing really well, and it’s tough to outrank the manufacturer site but we’ve seen it happen. Also, assuming Sephora’s competition reads Get Elastic and is embarking on link building campaignage as we speak, Sephora must protect its position. The key will be to build links (and start soon), and here are some ideas to accomplish this.

Leverage the Blog

Sephora has, in my opinion, one of the better retailer blogs out there. It actually has several posts linking to its Marc Jacobs Daisy page. But linking from a new blog post that includes “Marc Jacobs Daisy” in the title tag and URL will give extra topical relevance to the link. I’d go ahead and write a post on how it’s one of the top sellers, what customers have to say about it or which celebrities wear it.

Blogger Outreach

Why not make a list of influential beauty bloggers and send them a free Vera Wang Princess bottle or sample to review? As long as the review is appreciated but not required, I don’t see how this would violate the “don’t buy links” rule. Of course, I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments.

It works for quirky lounge chair maker Sumo. Top Internet marketing and advertising blogger B.L. Ochman calls Sumo’s blogger outreach smart marketing:

Sumo has used blogger outreach to get their furniture reviewed, and it’s smart marketing. Sending chairs to bloggers is cheap; effective because you feel like you need to review something that costs more than $100; and, unlike a book, way too big to ignore once it gets to your house. They didn’t send some stupid press release, or cutesy pitch. They just sent an email asking if I’d like to try the chair and review it, with a link to the site.

Sumo ranks quite nicely for terms like “lounge chair” and “bean bag chair,” thank you very much.

Search for Conversations

Who’s been blogging about Vera Wang Princess? Two tools I like to use to find out are blog search engine Technorati and reputation monitoring tool Trackur. These both have advantages over Google Blogs search.

Technorati shows you an authority score (higher is better), so you don’t waste time checking out low-quality blogs:

And Trackur lets you bookmark items with “Add to Favorites.”

You may discover some interesting things, like this blog that actually did link to Sephora:

But as you can see in the status bar, the blogger buggered up the link with a cut-and-paste so it reads http://http//www.sephora.com/browse/product.jhtml?id=P212915&shouldPaginate=true&categoryId=5625 which sends people and search engines to a dead page.

Sephora should send this blogger a heads up, and some form of thank you for linking (coupon or free gift). And to build a relationship, ask if she’d like to be an official reviewer for Sephora products on her own blog.

Help a Reporter Out

Get on Peter Shankman’s HARO (Help A Reporter Out), a thrice-daily mailing list of press opportunities. I’ve seen requests for sources from reporters from major news papers, magazines and even network TV morning shows. Several calls for products for gift ideas have come through. Getting on the list to receive the notices is easy, sign up here. You could get a link or great word-of-print marketing.

Don’t Forget Value Propositions

Sephora not only ships for free over $50, but also has free return shipping.

This should be in the title tag / meta description. Especially for searches like this:

This will also improve click through for searches without “free shipping” as we discussed yesterday.

So try out Amazon Bestsellers for the category/ies you sell - and remember, you can apply this insight to email marketing campaigns and merchandising strategies too. If you have additional link building tricks, you may want to keep them close to your chest. If you’re brave and already in the holiday spirit, you may want to share them in the comments here *wink.*

And before you ask why you should bother building links to product pages that may get dropped from your site in a year or sooner, come back tomorrow. We’ll explain how to handle this.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
Register to Attend...

You may also like these similar posts:

• Ecommerce SEO Hack: Free Tool to Hone Your SEO Strategy
• Yes Virginia There Is a Santa Claus & He Searches for Free Shipping
• Ecommerce SEO: How To Plug Free Shipping Traffic Leaks
• SEO Tips for Special Holidays
• 153 Places to Market Your Blog

We mentioned yesterday that people search for “free shipping.” There’s no doubt.

And people search for products with “free shipping” as a modifier.

Guess what else they search on? Your store name plus free shipping. And who ranks? Often affiliates, deals and coupon sites.

Check out the related searches suggested by Google when you search for “free shipping.”

Let’s click on “free shipping JC Penney”:

Now, JC Penney needs a page optimized for “free shipping” so it would rank #1. Of course, JC Penney doesn’t need to offer free shipping all the time to have its own dedicated page. The page just needs to exist, all the time, as a landing page for “free shipping jc penney” traffic.

These searchers are going to find the coupons one way or the other, so why not have a landing page (perhaps a sub-section of customer service) that shows which products qualify for free shipping at any given moment, and has a link to an RSS feed for future free shipping offers, or an email sign-up link? Then you can even segment these cheapo-s out into their own bucket in your email campaigns (I’m kidding, but I’m not kidding).

And don’t forget keywords in the title tag: “JC Penney Free Shipping Offers.”

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
Register to Attend...

You may also like these similar posts:

• Yes Virginia There Is a Santa Claus & He Searches for Free Shipping
• Zappos Secret SEO Sauce For Branded Pages
• SEO Tips for Special Holidays
• Ecommerce SEO Hack: Free Tool to Hone Your SEO Strategy
• Cart Abandonment: Nipping FUDDs in the Bud

Free shipping offers consistently top surveys of what customers want from online stores. And people do search for “free shipping,” and most often in November / December - as you would expect.

Now I’m not saying you have a hope in the North Pole of ranking for “free shipping” alone (though Amazon, Zappos, Shoes.com and Shoebuy have succeeded). The point is people really care about free shipping, even to search for it in search engines. And if you offer it, you should flaunt it when customers do searches for the products you carry — in your title tags and meta descriptions.

Even if you’re not ranked number one in the search results, if your offer is more attractive than the highest ranking link, you can win the click.

And if you offer other guarantees or customer-friendly policies, throw them in too. Yay, Zappos!

We can also assume many customers will append their product searches with “free shipping”:

PS this goes for PPC ads too, “free shipping” in the ad copy is a great offer that would likely increase click through rates. Just triple check that your landing page repeats the offer and the promotion applies to the product and the geographic area the ad is being shown. Don’t bait-and-switch. Same goes for your title tags for your organic listings. And only add the offer to the pages the offer applies to.

PPS If you want exposure on the sites that do rank tops for the term “free shipping,” you contact them to submit your offers or start an affiliate relationship. The top 3 are FreeShipping.org, FreeShipping.com and Shopping-Bargains.com.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
Register to Attend...

You may also like these similar posts:

• Ecommerce SEO: How To Plug Free Shipping Traffic Leaks
• Zappos Secret SEO Sauce For Branded Pages
• Attracting Canadian Online Shoppers
• Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates Make Good Ecommerce Usability
• Ecommerce SEO Hack: Free Tool to Hone Your SEO Strategy

Win FULL conferences passes to these events + Bonus prize

	Event: Shop.org Annual Summit 2008 Prize: 1 Free Full conference pass Date: Sep 15-17, Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, Las Vegas, NV Value: $1,725 Agenda | Register * Jason Billingsley of Elastic Path Software is speaking at this event
	Event: Online Market World Prize: 2 Free Full conference passes Date: Oct 1-3, Moscone West Convention Center, San Francisco, CA Value: $650 x 2 = $1300 Agenda | Register + 20% discount (applied at end) * Jason Billingsley of Elastic Path Software is speaking at this event
	Event: Search Marketing Expo (SMX East) Prize: 1 Free Full conference pass Date: Oct 6-8, Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, New York City, NY Value: $1,595 Agenda | Register * Linda Bustos and Jason Billingsley of Elastic Path Software will be at this event
	Prize: A signed copy of Avinash Kaushik’s must have book “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day”

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It’s simple. Tell us what prizes you want (please only request those events you can actually attend) and follow the instructions below:

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Write a post telling us why you should win or simply help promote the contest. Leave a comment with a link to your post and you will get 5 entries.

Draw Date: September 3rd, 2008

Hurry! Tell your co-workers right away. We want to see you at these events!

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
Register to Attend...

You may also like these similar posts:

• Free Ecommerce Consultations + Party With Us in Chicago!
• Search Day Sponsors for Mid-Market eTail
• $95 Landing Page Handbook FREE For Get Elastic Readers
• Meet at Online Market World in San Francisco
• Sneak Peek at Elastic Path 6 Ecommerce Software

Just a heads up, Jason and I will be away next week at Search Engine Strategies San Jose. But never fear, we’ll still be cranking out content for you every day. To run with the search engine theme, we’ll have a 4 part series next week on holiday SEO for online retailers. So stay tuned.

• We love Google Analytics hacks, and Allaedin Ezzedin from E-nor.com posted a great tutorial on how to track user interaction with forms. Via Web Analytics World.

• Rand Fishkin shares a link building a-ha moment: buy misspellings of your domain and redirect them to your site. If anyone links to you with the wrong spelling, you still get the link credit. Rand has examples including 600+ links pointing to wikpedia.org.

• Justin Palmer provides 11 creative tips to increase repeat visitors. (Didn’t I predict top 11 lists would be the new 10?)

• Chris Marriott reminds us that it’s high time to plan for the holiday season’s e-communications. Indeed. Time to kick off the flip flops and get cracking on Christmas marketing. Again, come back next week for 4 full days of holiday SEO tips for online retailers.

Announcements

Startup company Thingfo is looking for online retailers interested in adding “social shopping” features via a new widget that integrates with major social networks to drive loyalty and virally market your site. If you are interested in testing their solution free of cost, contact CEO Mike Grishaver. mike@thingfo.com.

Upcoming e-commerce related webinars:

Web Personalization – What It’s NOT and Why You Should Care
Sitebrand
Thursday, August 21 11am PST

Always Be Testing” Webinar: Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action
Tom Leung, Business Product Manager at Google and Future Now Inc.
Wednesday, August 27 9am PST

Sign up for the next Elastic Path webinar and win 1 of 5 signed copies of New York Times bestselling author Bryan Eisenberg’s Always Be Testing! Bryan will be joining us on September 11, 2008 at 9am PST for I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Sign up today.

Jason and Linda On the Road:

Jason and I will be making appearances at several upcoming shows and conferences. We’ll be posting our itinerary soon and if you will be attending any of these events, it would be great to connect.

Have a great weekend!

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
Register to Attend...

You may also like these similar posts:

• Bloggers Digest 8/8/08
• Bloggers Digest - 7/11/08
• Bloggers Digest 6/27/08
• Bloggers Digest - 3/21/08
• Bloggers Digest 2/15/08

Disclaimer The participation by FitForCommerce or Bernardine Wu is not meant as an endorsement of Elastic Path and/or its products and services. FitForCommerce received no payment, sponsorship, or other consideration for this webinar.

eCommerce Diligence - Ten Steps to Choose an eCommerce Technology

Requirements Diligence

Knowing what want and what you need

• Clarify business, operational and organizational drivers
• Conduct competitive and best practice analysis
• Document your starting point
• Determine and prioritize your requirements

Selection Diligence

Knowing what’s out there so you can make the best decision for you

• Decide on the best solution model/type
• Create a long list of 5-10 providers
• Send an RFP and review responses
• Narrow down to a short list
• Final Diligence
• Negotiate with finalists – and SIGN!

Requirements Diligence

1. Drivers

Clarify business, operational and organizational drivers

• Assess yourself, take a hard look at your own business
• Map out your operations including business flows, system context diagram
• List out pain points, points of failures, SWOT
• Agree on your business objectives
• Include vision, metrics, competitive advantages
• Take the opportunity to re-engineer your business
• Improve your processes
• Re-evaluate your products/services
• Better define your target customers
• Think about a redesign
• Set concrete, measurable objectives for your eCommerce business
• Understand your people and your culture
• Involve your company’s key stakeholders
• Document and socialize!

Example – If you have a very customer-centric culture, then any partner you choose should have as equal a focus on customer excellence. Even if you have a small ecommerce team, if you have 1 or 2 tech-savvy hands-on team members, then any technology you choose should have enough flexibility to put control in the hands of your techies.

Regarding HiPPOs (Higest Paid People in your Organization), how do you achieve buy-in?

Bernardine suggests you identify who the HiPPO is early on and include winning this person over in your strategy and documentation. If your CFO only cares about spend, pitch on ROI. If it’s a visionary focused on brand or results - identify them very early on and include it in your strategy.

2. Analysis

Conduct competitive and best practice analyses

• Check on the competition
  • See what you like and don’t like
  • Decide what you want to include and want to avoid
  • Check competition in your category, but also mindshare or budget competition
  • Think about what’s needed to give you a competitive edge – short-term and long-term
• Learn about “Best Practices”
  • Network with peers
  • Research the industry
  • Reach out to experts in the field
  • Read voraciously
  • “Play” with other great sites
  • Use quantifiable data as much as you can

Decide what you like and don’t like on other sites. Your "competition" isn’t just other sites in your category, it could be other businesses targeting the same audience, or even other channels - brick and mortar or catalogers.

When you network with peers, find out what worked and what didn’t - don’t be afraid to ask for real numbers.

3. Starting Point

Document your starting point

• Create a baseline
• Don’t assume anything
• Be clear on your starting point
• Detail your metrics and functionality
  • Web analytics
  • Sales/marketing analysis
• Document your current processes
• Revisit ‘why’ something is done the way it is
• Know the Voice of the Customer - survey, customers will tell you where you are and that can be different than where you think you are

If you are getting help from a systems integrator (SI), should you just listen to them? When you ask a group to evaluate for you, there’s always going to be a bias - even if it’s not intentional. SI’s may not necessarily hit all the important areas. If the SI is more experiened with licensed format, the recommendations will be slanted to a licensed solution vs. hosted and vice versa.

Ideally if you seek outside help, you will either choose 3rd party help that is not related to any of the vendors OR solicit opinions from multiple SIs.

4. Requirements

A common mistake is to work out requirements after choosing a provider. Bernardine advocates doing your requirements way before you choose a delivery method. There may be some features that are essential to have at launch, and other features can be rolled in at later stages. Go through this process, although painful, as diligently as you can.

Determine and prioritize (must have, should have and road map) your requirements

• Define them at a detailed, feature-by-feature level
• Create use cases and user personas
• Include systems, data and processes your eCommerce system will integrate with
• Create workflow designs, screen mockups to show how your site will operate
• Include requirements for managing the site
  • How products are loaded and manipulated
  • How pages are changed
  • How promotions are managed
  • How orders are managed, fulfilled
  • How customers are handled
• Prioritize your requirements
  • Rank them in numerical order
  • Rate them as nice-to-have and must-have
• Use ‘use cases’ to describe ‘how’ it should work

Some tips: clearly state not just the feature, but how the feature will work. If it’s a wishlist - can the list be emailed? Must you have an account to create a wishlist? Will there be product recommendations and low inventory alert emails sent to the wishlist creator?

It’s possible you’re thinking of features that your customers don’t even want or need. Survey your customers and discover what they want from your site.

You don’t want to cut and paste a list of features because you probably won’t use them all, and they may not be relevant to you. Unnecessary features carry cost - it might be money, management overhead or more responsibility.

Selection Diligence

5. Approach/Model

Decide on the best solution approach or model based on your business drivers

• Do a quick overview of different types of DEPLOYMENTS and different types of SUPPORT that are on offer
• List the pros and cons of each
• Determine the type of solution you need
  • In-house
  • Consultant
  • Point solutions
  • Platform solutions
    • On-demand
    • Licensed
    • Licensed with hosting
    • Custom
  • End-to-end solutions
• Your “long list” of providers should have the same type of solution, might include different technology and point solutions that need to work together
  • An exception is if you want to see the differences between types of solutions and you need information from vendors in order to get that
• Your list might include multiple technologies/providers needed to work together

If you do not have in-house technical skills, nor do you already have a partner or sub-contractor that you trust to provide technical expertise and execution, then you will need to rely on a provider that offers their solution on-demand or ‘for rent.’ Managing your own servers and software may not be right for you right now.

Also, unless you have particularly sharp and inexpensive tech skills in-house, buying code or renting the technology is usually better than re-inventing the wheel. Besides, why not rely on technology that’s been tested and beaten up by many others before you? The important thing is to make sure you’re deciding which way to go based on your needs and limitations, not based on a few vendors that you like. When there are competing goals between your techies and your marketing/management, it’s important to select a solution that provides site administration tools to each user. For example, a marketing manager can manage promotions and warehouse manager can manage shipping from the back end without relying on programmers.

6. Long List

Create your “long list” of 5-10 providers

• Research your options in Guidebooks (IR Buyer’s Guide), trade shows, relying on peers and consultants, FFC Provider Directory
• Send out preliminary email, including (if available):
  • Your business objectives
  • Your annual online or company revenue
  • Budget range
  • Project timeframe

State any unique requirements that might eliminate some providers, e.g.:

• Multi-sites, multi-language/currency
• B2B, purchase order flow
  subscriptions/continuity configurators

If you’re researching vendors, it’s a good idea to attend the biggest trade shows. Excellent shows are Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibilition every June, Shop.org Annual Summit every September and eTail East and eTail West.

If you’re looking for marketing solutions go to search marketing Search Engine Strategies (SES) or Search Marketing Expo (SMX). Go online and check out the exhibitors in advance. Also look at the content. Look for upcoming events.

7. RFP / RFQ

Send an RFP/RFQ and review responses

• Create your Request for Proposal/Quote, including:
  • Detailed requirements
  • Workflows
  • Designs
  • Business Drivers
  • Relevant competitive analysis
  • Relevant best practices
• Set expectations
  • Your business objectives
  • Your budget range
  • Your timeframe
• Offer a Q&A period with a deadline
• Give providers 1-3 weeks to respond, depending on the type of product/service
• Start a tracking document
• Stay in contact with them

Don’t be surprised if a third to a half decline to bid on your RFP – especially if you have a tight time frame or a tight budget. It’s always a good idea to call them anyway to find out more about why they chose to decline.

Another tip: checkbox RFPs don’t leave room for explanation why a feature isn’t available. It’s possible customizations are available as a custom build. Leave room beside Y/N field for explanation. How is the requirement delivered? Is it configurable? If so, who does it? How long does it take? If you don’t provide this do you have a point solution to recommend? Are you partnered with any of these point solutions? Allow vendors the ability to describe the parameters, whether yes or no.

8. Short List

Narrow down to a “short list” of 2 to 5 providers

• Eliminate obvious mismatches
• Compare apples to apples
  • Create comparison table to put responses side by side
  • Add your commentary or scoring
  • Color-code your scoring to denote the rankings and ratings you created
• Factor in costs
  • Provider implementation, license fees, upgrades, support
  • Your overhead - servers, bandwidth, in-house staff, consultants
• Schedule presentations
  • Be sure they demonstrate live sites
  • Walk through the administration tool
  • Understand what limitations exist
  • Ask for a test account
• Involve all key stakeholders in these evaluations
• Come prepared with questions and concerns – ask, ask, ask!
• Follow up

Don’t be too quick to eliminate providers based on a few ‘wrong’ answers – check with them to make sure they understood the question or to find out why or how you could mitigate it or alternatives.

Then ask for presentations and demos - this may be 1 or 2 rounds. Make sure to meet the team in person, more than once. Meet the sales and operational person. Ask questions, don’t be shy.

9. Finalists

Final diligence for the final 2 or 3 providers

• Select 2 or 3 finalists based on fit
• Ask for proof
  • Check client references and live site examples (at least 10 examples)
  • Ask for their client list (or get it from the web) and call them to get their perspective
  • Get proof points or proofs-of-concept for all their stated capabilities and promises
  • Have questions prepared for the client references and ask about any limitations they have encountered (with the product and with the services)
• Meet the team that will be supporting your project
  • Even if it means interviewing multiple candidates
• Get a look at their “roadmap”
  • Find out what is in the works and when they expect to have it
  • If your implementation is dependent on new development, get clarity on what and when
• Get everything in writing

When checking live sites, beware of making visual judgements. For example, if you see a checkout process on a live site running the platform you are evaluating, don’t assume that the technology operates that way - it just might be how that particular site implemented it. Go back and ask the vendor questions.

The proof points you want are more about the "guts" of it. When you ask for proof points, ask for a test account so you can play around with the administrative tool or promotions engine. Kick the tires. If there’s no demo available yet, ask for proof of concept.

Also think about how the solution will improve team or customer experience.

10. Decide and sign

Because things happen and 11th hour and fallouts happen, go the distance with your top 2. You don’t want to have to start all over again if there’s a problem with your first choice.

Also remember no solution is perfect and the industry is young; most providers haven’t figured out total excellence in service.

Negotiate, decide and sign

• Manage your own expectations; nothing is perfect
• Build in time and money for scope creep
  • This is where YOU might expand your requirement list
• Don’t discount the intangibles
  • Take into consideration the fact that you feel a particular provider is a better cultural fit with your organization
• Determine your top 2 contenders and start negotiating; you should be happy to choose either one - the difference comes down to personality or pricing
• Get written documentation
• Negotiate with your top 2 until you are comfortable
• Ask for help with the agreement or contract
• Sign with the one you feel best fits your needs

Make sure you meet the team you’ll ultimately work with including deployment and support - it’s not the sales team.

Pretend you and the point person will be taken off the project the day after you sign - you want to make sure everything is spelled out in writing and very thorough.

Questions

How much value is there in asking customers what they want? What if they’re not the most sophisticated demographic?

It always helps to identify pain points, and ask what features they would like to see. You are unlikely to get technical answers, but you’ll get functional ones.

Survey your top 100 customers. Involving them in your redesign and upgrade decision making can even increase loyalty because they feel their opinions matter to you. Remember they may be loyal to you, but they ARE aware of your competitors’ strengths too.

With the multitude of options for platform providers, a lot have (or say they have) the right functionality. How do you determine who’s good vs. who has all the "good answers"?

It all goes back to detailed requirements and parameters. By getting into details, you’ll find out what is true vs. what’s Memorex. Talk to the sales and the engineer.

If your shortlist looks kinda long (more than 5-6), your requirements are not detailed enough.

There are a couple of options to go out and find help with the legwork of requirements gathering. Along with FitForCommerce, other options for consultants include B2C Partners or Forrester and Gartner analysts.

Another thing is lots of new ecommerce vendors are entering the market. Do Google searches, read other retailers’ blogs etc. Also, lots new vendors will use PPC advertising because it’s quick visibility.

What about solutions that emphasize certain pieces of functionality like social media and web 2.0?

When it comes to making a technology selection, it’s not so much whether you should be doing XYZ, it’s whether there’s the capability to do it in the future. When looking at innovations, make sure you have already covered the basics - don’t choose a tool because they’re strong on web 2.0 but don’t have solid catalog management and shopping cart.

How do you find out if a solutions provider is good when they don’t have a large portfolio?

Depends on if you want to be a guinea pig. Know your appetite for risk. If there are NO references, proceed with caution. Don’t let up on the diligence! Find proof points if references are not close to what you do or need, or ask if they can show a proof of concept.

Win 1 of 5 Copies of Always Be Testing!

Sign up for our next webinar and win 1 of 5 signed copies of New York Times bestselling author Bryan Eisenberg’s Always Be Testing! Bryan will be joining us on September 11, 2008 for I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But… and learn:

• Where and how companies should begin testing
• How do you get corporate buy-in
• What exactly you should test
• Secrets to maximize returns on testing investment (tools, people and process)

Go from a culture of having to “always be right” to “always be testing!”

Thursday, September 11, 2008
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT Sign up today.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
Register to Attend...

You may also like these similar posts:

• How to Choose eCommerce Technology
• Aberdeen Market Alert Analyzes BEA AquaLogic and Elastic Path
• How to Choose Ecommerce Software and Technology - Internet Retailer 2008
• Aeroplan Case Study and a Press Release to Match
• Internet Retailer Magazine Juiced on Breville’s Ecommerce Success

I was recently forwarded this email from Amazon calling for customer reviews - not just textual, but customer photo and video reviews.

Dear {customer},
Thank you for your recent purchase from Amazon.com.

We invite you to submit a review for the product you purchased or share an image that would benefit other customers. Your input will help customers choose the best products on Amazon.com.

It’s easy to submit a review–just click the Review this product button next to the product.

Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder, 60-Minutes (Black) (Purchased on 06/03/2008)
by Pure Digital

…or share an image.

New on Amazon! Grab your video camera or webcam and add video to your customer review. Click on ‘Review this product’ above to upload a video or find a different product to review.

Need help?

If clicking the button above doesn’t work, you can review your product by following these simple steps:

Go to Amazon.com and navigate to the product.
In the “Customer Reviews” section, click the “Create your own review” button.

We hope you found this message to be useful. However, if you’d rather not receive future e-mails of this sort from Amazon.com, please opt-out here.

Please note that product prices and availability are limited time offers and are subject to change. Prices and availability were accurate at the time this newsletter was sent; however, they may differ from those you see when you visit Amazon.com.

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Amazon.com, 1200 12th Ave. S., Suite 1200, Seattle, WA 98144-2734.

Reference 9702130

Please note that this message was sent to the following e-mail address: emailaddress@emailservice.com

Here’s what Amazon does right:

• Thank customer for the purchase.

• Mention submitting a review benefits fellow customers.
• Give clear directions how to participate.
• Give options - text, images or video.
• Show an image of the product to jog the memory.
• Offer a plan B if the link malfunctions for whatever reason.
• Offer an opt-out of future review requests.
• Remind customers that prices are subject to change, so they don’t feel jilted when the item is $5 cheaper than when they bought it.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
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You may also like these similar posts:

• Post-Purchase Trigger Email Examples
• Do Customer Submitted Photos Add Value?
• Ecommerce Innovation: Videos That Sell
• Saving Sales From Negative Customer Reviews
• Amazons Novel Way To Build Customer Loyalty

Bluefly’s Flypaper blog uses a similar approach in its video podcast. At any point in the vignette, you can click the “Click to Buy” button and it will show a list of items appearing in the video. Click on any thumbnail and you see the product’s description, price and a Buy Now button. Or you can go back to watch the rest of the video. (Don’t click, these are just screenshots)

This is awesome.

Does anyone know of solutions providers for this type of technology? If you do, please let us know in the comments.

If you’re interested in staying in the loop on emerging video trends and retail, there’s the newly launched Video Retailer blog and listserv called Video Commerce Consortium on the topic.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

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You may also like these similar posts:

• Video Valets: An Ecommerce Trend?
• Trigger Email: Asking for Customer Reviews & Video Reviews
• Media Coverage: When You Got It Flaunt It
• Martin + Osa Launches Shop-By-Outfit + Video
• Bloggers Digest 1/25/08

Why must customers turn to social networks and forums like Yahoo Answers? Because the sizing charts on these web sites don’t answer these questions well enough.

Tools like Shoeline’s Return-o-meter and Bazaarvoice’s Ask & Answer product can help you communicate this, as can ratings and reviews. But if you survey your customers post-purchase, or have “fit testers” try on your clothes, you could report a statistic “X% of customers describe this brand as true-to-size” and report this close to the sizing information.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
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You may also like these similar posts:

• Using Product Images to Reduce Size and Color Fears
• Social Commerce on Product Pages - Why Not?
• Sizes In Stock - Great Usability for Your Clearance Section
• Can Product Images Improve Conversion? Showing Products in Context
• Browsing Usability: Overstock Blows Amazon Away

It’s 8/8/08 and I thought it would be fitting to have 8 links this week:

• Avinash Kaushik has an incredibly detailed post on
  how to use Google Trends for competitive intelligence. Bookmark this.

• We hate it when you waste money on PPC, and so does George Michie from the Rimm Kaufman Group. He reminds us that average PPC ROI can hide diminishing returns at higher ad spend levels. High level stuff. Of course, to complicate things, an astute commenter pointed out that life-time value of a customer can off-set the high cost of PPC.

• How “free” is your shipping? Maxim Mironov from Optimalogica shares 4 common errors in budgeting for shipping, and how to avoid them.

• While we’re on the topic of overspending, Justin Palmer writes of 10 Costly Assumptions that impact your ecommerce performance.

• Looking for ecommerce talent? Looking for work? The Rimm Kaufman Blog has an interesting interview with Harry Joiner of Ecommerce Recruiter and Online Retail Jobs, who recruits director/manager and VP level talent for ecommerce firms.

• Chad White shares some gold nugget takeaways on email marketing from Etail East in Washington, DC this week.

• Invesp’s Khalid Hajsaleh has compiled a list of 8 Essential Elements of Successful Category Pages, complete with colorful examples.

• It’s hard to be humble when you retired before you graduated Jr. High. Meet the Copy God, quite possibly the funniest sales letter spoof I’ve had the pleasure of linking to. Via GrokDotCom via Robert Bly.

Bonus Links

For you webinar junkies, upcoming webinars you don’t want to miss:

Special Clinic: Optimizing PPC Ads, Part II (LIVE)
Marketing Experiments
Wednesday, August 13 2pm PST

The Art & Science of Choosing Ecommerce Technology
With Bernardine Wu, CEO, FitForCommerce and Elastic Path Software
Thursday, August 14 9am PST

Web Personalization – What It’s NOT and Why You Should Care
Sitebrand
Thursday, August 21 11am PST

Always Be Testing” Webinar: Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action
Tom Leung, Business Product Manager at Google and Future Now Inc.
Wednesday, August 27 9am PST

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
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You may also like these similar posts:

• Bloggers Digest - 8/15/08
• Bloggers Digest - 5/16/08
• Bloggers Digest - 5/2/08
• Love Your Landing Page: Tips to Increase Ecommerce Conversion
• Bloggers Digest 7/25/08

The book is split into 2 parts. The first covers Search Engine Marketing which speaks to SEO, PPC and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). The second explains Web Performance Optimization which covers improving web speed, CSS, AJAX, Javascript optimization. The intended audience are web marketers, developers and business managers.

Website Optimization is a great reference handbook for online retailers to have kicking around the office. It’s not only got something for everyone on your ecommerce team, from your business managers and marketers to your web design and development geeks. It offers a survey of every discipline so that unless you’re a ninja in all these areas you will learn something valuable.

Though I found a bit of the CSS/AJAX stuff a bit technical for me as an Internet marketing type, I was able to glean enough of an understanding of the most common performance issues and CSS, AJAX and Javascript problems that I would know what to suggest to design and development experts on my team. I particularly enjoyed the depth of tips on video optimization, as video is very important to blogs and user generated content, and is becoming more common on retail product pages and user-generated content.

Seasoned SEOs and PPC managers will find the content in the search engine marketing section elementary but will benefit from the CRO and web performance chapters. This is important, because PPC Quality Score and potentially organic rankings are affected by page load time, and search marketing professionals need to understand how to optimize client sites, even if they don’t execute it themselves.

Another benefit of this book is its freshness. This is important because web optimization is a moving target. Many of the footnoted references were accessed online as recently as June, 2008. The references themselves are also valuable. Because many are online you can follow up in more-depth.

Andy King is the CEO of Website Optimization, a consulting firm specializing in website performance, search engine marketing, PPC and conversion rate optimization in Washtenaw County, Michigan. His latest book is available at O’Reilly or your friendly neighbourhood online bookseller.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
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You may also like these similar posts:

• Conversion Rates Misunderstood
• Book Review: Web Design for ROI
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• Dodging Duplicate Content Filters While Assisting Affiliates
• Bloggers Digest - 4/4/08

Boasting 4,285 subscribers, pennypranks’ channel is #2 on all of Youtube for new subscribers this month. Great job Office Max!

Here are 3 examples:

HILARIOUS HIDDEN CAMERA PENNY PRANK IN RESTAURANT

HILARIOUS HIDDEN CAMERA PENNY PRANK IN JEWELRY STORE

HILARIOUS HIDDEN CAMERA PENNY PRANK AT USED CAR LOT

Here’s what we can learn from this effort:

• A memorable star. The curly-redhead is funny and has that Will-it-Blend-host-character.

• Very short introductions. The shorter and sweeter you can keep your introductions, the better - especially for a series of videos. Office Max gets right to the point so no matter which of the series a viewer watches first - he or she will get the “gist” of the series’ theme, but it’s short enough to not be repetitive and annoying in future installments.
• Relevant humor. The content is funny, entertaining and related to an actual sales promotion that is happening.
• Call to action. The campaign includes products and a URL to buy products after every video. Again, this is short and sweet.

Anyone can do something like this, even on half a shoestring budget.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
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You may also like these similar posts:

• Friday Chuckle: Top 5 Youtube Ad Parodies - VOTE PLEASE!
• Social Media in Plain English
• Friday Chuckle: What is Podcasting?
• Another Doh for Office Max
• The Secret of Social Media Marketing Webinar: A Recap

If you’re hungry for more affiliate tips and commentary, check out our related posts on affiliate marketing.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

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You may also like these similar posts:

• Reminder - Affiliate Marketing for Online Retailers Webinar Next Week
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• Dodging Duplicate Content Filters While Assisting Affiliates

Bernardine is the founder and CEO of FitForCommerce. FitForCommerce is a consulting and coaching firm that helps online retailers understand their ecommerce project requirements, and match them up with vendors and solution providers that best fit those requirements. In short, when you’re planning a redesign, re-evaluating your ecommerce platform or other technology solutions, FitForCommerce helps you figure out “what you need and where to find it.”

On August 14, Bernardine will be presenting The Art & Science of Choosing Ecommerce Technology. She’ll be with us for a full hour, including time for attendee questions.

Bernardine shared a lot of good advice already in her quickie 4:30 minute interview with Jason:

Here’s a summary of the interview: (these are not exact quotes)

What is the number one ecommerce innovation?

Make sure you have your basics covered first. There are lots of great bells and whistles 360 degree views, blogging and rich imaging, but first you need to nail your basics: SEO, SEM, a functioning site, checkout with as few clicks as possible, strong branding, proper use of email and trigger emails and crisp and clean product images.

What would you tell someone who is re-platforming and not sure what process to take?

Do your due diligence! You wouldn’t buy a stock or take a job without doing your homework. The same goes for choosing an ecommerce platform. Due diligence means kicking the tires and asking the tough questions. (FitForCommerce uses a list of 2,000 questions).

It’s like going on eHarmony and choosing a mate. The devil’s in the details. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself 3 months into a project and realizing oops, something wasn’t there.

What about ecommerce RFPs?

RFPs are like religion – some people love them and some hate them. To be done well, you need to know the beginning with the end in mind. Know your requirements and what kind of site you want. Have your requirements written out, all the specs for your site and that’s your RFP. All the providers that you talk to should be able to look at your requirements and tell if you’re a fit for their solution or not.

When writing an RFP, should you do it in house or with a consultant?

Looking for outside help is important. Leveraging someone else’s expertise, an outside party who can handle the legwork can make things as painless as possible. They can also advise you on the right delivery model? On-demand, licensed software or a hosted hybrid.

So make sure you don’t miss this webinar. Even if you’re not in the market for new technology today, chances are you will be within the next couple of years. You will learn:

• How to figure out what your eCommerce strategy and needs really are
• How to research eCommerce best practices and technologies
• How to define and document your requirements
• How to assess the responses from the eCommerce solution providers; compare apples to apples
• How to select from your ‘short list’

Plus, just for registering you’ll also receive all 30 of FitForCommerce’s “eCommerce Best Practices” for eCommerce Platforms, Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing, to name a few. After you attend, you will also receive all 30 of FitForCommerce’s “eCommerce Key Questions” to assist you in assessing eCommerce solution providers.

Sign up today. And for some instant gratification, check out our own whitepaper on How to Write an eCommerce RFP.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
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You may also like these similar posts:

• How to Choose Ecommerce Software and Technology - Internet Retailer 2008
• How to Choose Ecommerce Technology & Software
• Do You Know How To Write An Ecommerce RFP?
• Free Ecommerce Consultations + Party With Us in Chicago!
• Consultative Selling from the Trenches - Get Elastic #10

• Judging by the response we get from our posts on web analytics, you’ll enjoy GrokDotCom’s Beyond the Dashboard: 5 Tips for Data Diving in Google Analytics.

• This was actually from last week, but it’s still fresh information: Avinash Kaushik’s for-dummies guide to tracking cookies.

• According to Nielsen Research, 49% of consumers plan on spending less due to the economic squeeze. Need tips on how to create urgency in a bad economy?.

• Future Now also has a free white paper on how to market in a recession.

• Sitebrand’s Carolyn Gardner reminds us that you can’t focus on driving traffic through email and search and neglect customer retention. Keep the sales funnel top of mind!

• Stop selling products! Tips for communicating benefits, not just features, from Robyn at Blue Acorn.

• Should you use the word “voucher” or “coupon” on your checkout page? Does it encourage shoppers to go looking for your coupons on the web? How can you minimize this behavior and keep the coupon code field? Find out on the Rimm-Kaufman Blog.

• How do you re-engage email subscribers? Bronto has some tips, using Shop.org as an example.

• Exciting Commerce has a nice writeup on Vente-Privée (Private Sale) clubs like RueLaLa.com that are gaining popularity in the US (though popular for a while in Europe). These member-only clubs serve as online sample sales for designers and high end brands, combining the excitement of deep discounts and the urgency of a limited quantity of items available.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
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You may also like these similar posts:

• Bloggers Digest - 7/11/08
• Bloggers Digest - 7/18/08
• Bloggers Digest - 12/21/07
• Bloggers Digest - 3/21/08
• Bloggers Digest 2/15/08

If you’re smart and lucky, you named your site your main-keyword-dot-com and you get search traffic from visitors who use their address bars as search engines. For example, a search on “reusable bags” sends you automatically to “reusablebags.com” which sells…you got it, reusable bags.

Other types of type-in visitors could be:

• Loyal, repeat customers

• Late stage buyers who’ve already visited your site through search, PPC, email or affiliate link but needed time to make the purchase decision or comparison shop
• First time shoppers pre-sold from a newspaper article, blog post, social media reviews or word-of-mouth

Type in traffic may even be your highest converting traffic. This post will cover how to create a direct traffic report in Google Analytics, and how to compare direct traffic conversion against your site average. Plus, you’ll learn how to exclude IP addresses for non-customer visits.

How to Access Direct Traffic Reports in Google Analytics

We’re interested in looking at trends in direct traffic to see if the strength and awareness of your brand is increasing over time. Here’s how you get the trend data:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account and click on “Traffic Sources” and “Direct Traffic” in the left hand menu.

You’ll want to make sure you change the default date range to your last quarter, or the past year:

After you change the first date box, don’t forget to click in the second date box once to make the “Apply” button live, then click “Apply.”

2. Changing your graph to “Month” will show you an average figure per month, rather than each daily or weekly record. Believe me, this is much easier to work with. Just remember the figures are monthly averages:

Rolling over any point will show you the month average. The above image is Photoshopped to show you the year over year growth in type-ins for Get Elastic. Comparing this July’s traffic over 2007, I see the blog’s direct visits grew 330%, from 2152 per month to 7142.

3. Compare your direct visit conversion rates to your site average. If you click the little arrow beside “Visits,” you can make some pretty useful graphs.

In this case, we’re going to compare the type in segment to overall Goal 1 conversions for the past year. (Stay in “Month” mode)

The graph will even show you the spread between site and segment (not just for type in, you can use this for other segments of traffic like search engine and keyword):

Don’t Forget IP Filters

But there’s likely another type of visitor you’re tracking - yourself! One thing that can really mess up this metric is tracking your own IP address and the IPs of others who frequent your site but are not customers. These visits could represent SEO, PPC, web design and IT consultants, employees’ home computers, the office IP block, SEOs and other web consultants, ecommerce bloggers (wink) and even competitors.

Direct traffic is not the only stat that suffers when you neglect to filter IP addresses. As mentioned in 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics, it also:

• Understates your conversion rates. Your direct type-ins could be your highest converting traffic source, but tracking visits from employees, stakeholders and consultants dilutes your real conversion rate for this segment.

• Overstates average time on page. You think your visitors are reading every jot and tittle of your copy, when it’s really your marketing team.
• Messes up your Content stats. Your “Top Content,” “Landing Pages” and “Exit Pages” will may be skewed by tracking the wrong visitors.

How to Filter IPs in Google Analytics

Once you’ve gathered all the IP addresses you need to exclude, go into your Analytics Settings, and find the Filter Manager in the bottom right:

You can also filter a range of IPs or use an advanced, cookies-based filter in your office which will compensate for dynamic IPs.

Then add each filter, naming each one intuitively so it’s easy to make edits in the future.

If you add a filter after reading this post, keep that in mind when you create reports in the future. Your direct traffic could drop significantly after creating the filter, and you can’t apply the filter today and change yesterday’s data.

Your trends may not show an upward trend, either. They may spike seasonally or after certain promotions you ran, help wanted ads or other “buzz” about your company. It really depends on you and your business.

I Know I Should Be A/B Testing But…

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
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You may also like these similar posts:

• Stop Google Analytics From Stealing Your Valuable AdWords Keyword Data
• Why You Should Turn On Google Analytics Site Search Today
• Conversion Rates Misunderstood
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There are a few reasons you might consider adding Amazon Checkout to your roster of payment options, including:

• Access to 81 million (no, I didn’t forget a decimal) people already hold Amazon accounts. This is roughly 30% more than PayPal. Customers would not have to create a new account to checkout with you, nor share any additional personal information. If a customer has multiple billing and shipping addresses on file with Amazon, that can be very convenient for the customer.

• Through IP-targeting, Amazon can recognize Amazon.com customers and display the 1-Click checkout for them.
• Show cross-sells and upsells in your cart. And if you show Amazon products in your upsells (eww), you can earn Amazon Associate commissions.
• Call it a halo effect, but having the option to checko