If low prices are your competitive strength, it makes sense that you want to communicate this to your customer the best way you can on your website. Customers increasingly turn to price comparison sites like Shopping.com and Bizrate which pull up-to-date prices from participating merchant data feeds. But is displaying competitor prices on your own site a good idea?

Last week Zachary, a GetElastic reader from PlumberSurplus.com alerted us that a competitor was showing an incorrect price on a price comparison table on its product page. This was discovered by Plumber Surplus during routine price checks on the competitor’s site.

The competing site in question has since taken down the price comparisons. Plumber Surplus never contacted the competitor about it, the comparison tables just came down on their own. So we don’t know why the site decided to take them down, but I can think of at least three good reasons why ecommerce sites should avoid using price comparison tables:

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Should You Use Price Comparison Charts On Your Ecommerce Website? »

SEO guru Stephan Spencer contributed a great overview on tagging and its virtues for usability and SEO to Search Engine Land last week. Do check out Stephan’s entire article if you’re new to the concept of tagging, tag clouds and folksonomy.

Tags help describe various content. Basically, you can tag a blog post, product or photo with relevant keywords. When you want to check out all the posts, photos or products related to a certain keyword, you can click on the “tag” and voila! Usability-wise, visitors can navigate visually through a “tag cloud” (see the bottom of our page for an example) and even discover tags, whereas in a traditional dropdown menu or even faceted navigation this could get out of hand. Tags are great for SEO too, because your tags generate their own URLs, and each tag is a keyword-rich internal link to that page, reinforced by the tagged items themselves and the sitewide tag cloud, if you have one.

I took a peek at blogs from our list of 75+ blogs from top online retailers to “look who’s tagging” and as I expected, I can easily count them all on one hand. What’s worse, the ones that do are doing it WRONG!

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Effective Tagging Strategies for Ecommerce Blogs »

Every year, Internet Retailer releases its list of stand out retailers. Last year there were 50, this year 100.

Rather than highlighting who’s doing the most volume, the Internet Retailer Hot 100 list focuses on innovators and includes smaller retailers like Bestkiteboarding.com, chains, catalogers, online-only and brands like M&M’s.

The Hot 100 for 2008

Matt over at Ecommerce Optimization categorized the list and added some nifty graphs.

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Internet Retailer Hot 100 for 2008 »

It’s not uncommon for marketers to send promotional offers exclusive to their mailing list and registered users as a reward for loyalty or for granting permission to market to them. Or promotions could be targeted to certain customer segments This could be a free shipping offer, a special gift with purchase or a percentage or dollar amount discount.

In our last webinar on email marketing, an attendee asked how email marketers can avoid cannibalization of sales from customers or even affiliates who pass on the promos to the public. Jason recommended that coupons should have a set limit on them, whether it be a time limit or a certain number of redemptions. If your affiliates are the ones causing the trouble, you should revisit your affiliate relations strategy. (Shameless plug: we’re having affiliate guru Shawn Collins join us for our next webinar to discuss affiliate marketing, affiliate relations, etc. so be sure to sign up.)

That’s good advice for future promotions, but what about damage control on past campaigns?

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How To Prevent Viral Voucher Disaster - A Lesson From Littlewoods »

Kinset is one start-up that’s trying to bring leisure shopping to the ‘Net by replicating the real-life browsing experience with 3D virtual technology.

CEO John Butler explains that his product is different than Second Life as Second Life attracts hobbyists who invest time to learn how to move around in SL, how to dress themselves and creating their avatars, and from then on use the site for socializing. Kinset is meant to be a “no-learning” high fidelity retail space for actual shopping rather than fantasy.

The following is a quick 6 minute clip of Butler’s interview with Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe.

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Kinset Review: Im Not Sold on Virtual Shopping »

In his article titled “Better Web Forms: Redesigning eBay’s Registration” for Digital Web Magazine, Garrett Dimon critiques the eBay registration form and applies his web design and usability judo chops to show us what he believes is a more usable version.

Dimon’s revamp includes modifications to the introduction, section headings, subdividers, field and label relationships and some additional, minor tweaks.

Much of designing forms is about making a set of almost imperceptible changes that create a more natural and reader-friendly experience.

What I found most compelling about this article is Dimon’s eye-tracking comparison:

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eBay Before and After - A Lesson In Form Design »

Gift cards are the perfect solution to many shopping problems — your giftee is tough to shop for, lives miles away or it’s 11pm Christmas Eve and the only store still open is the Safeway (with a nice variety of gift cards hanging in the checkout aisle).

Whatever the reason, $26.3 Billion worth of gift cards will be given this holiday. Between 56% and 69% of shoppers will give at least one (NRF Gift Card Survey, Consumer Reports and Deloitte), with an average of 5 gift cards per consumer and 16% giving 10 or more (Deloitte).

Not only do people love giving gift cards, they love getting them. Gift cards top the wish lists of consumers polled by BIGResearch and the National Retail Foundation with 53.8% of adults 18 and older indicating they would like to receive them for Christmas this year (62% of women and 45% of men).

But 27% won’t end up using their gift cards according to the NRF survey (up from 19% last year). The most common reasons reported by respondents were “not enough time to shop” or “couldn’t find anything.” Other reasons include forgetting about them, losing them or not using them in time. This equates to around $8 Billion in unredeemed cards based on last years’ sales of $24.8 Billion.

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$8 Billion in Unredeemed Gift Cards a Win-Win for Retailers? »

Since the launch of the Facebook Development Platform, literally hundreds of applications have been popping up each day. It seems most of these applications will never be added beyond the developer and his Top 8 friends. And you may be wondering: What might possess someone to go through the trouble of creating a Facebook application?

Of course, some developers will slave themselves just to make something cool for the Facebook-o-sphere to love, enjoy and share with all their friends. But there are at least 4 other reasons:

• For Branding (You’re a development house or a popular brand)
• To Sell (Example: Where I’ve Been gets bought by TripAdvisor)
• For Specific Actions (Affiliate products like iLike linking to iTunes)
• For Page Views (If you’re selling banner ad space on your application)

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Who Makes $1 Million off their Facebook Application Every Week? »

Thanks again to Carolyn Gardner from Sitebrand for sharing her email marketing expertise with us this morning, and to Power Reviews for sponsoring the event.

If you missed the call, or if you were listening intently and would like to continue the conversation online, right here on our blog — here’s the Coles Notes version of the webcast:

UPDATE: Webinar now available. Or catch up on all our webinars in our archive.

INTRODUCTION

As email users, we expect and value emails that are timely, meaningful and relevant from people that we know and trust. Anything that doesn’t meet this criteria is considered SPAM.

Your goal is to create “Love Opportunities” where recipients WANT to open, click and buy from you.

Components of Email Marketing

1. LIST (Without a list, you have nothing)
2. OFFER
3. DESIGN
4. HOW YOU DELIVER
5. FREQUENCY

• Quality over quantity and integrity of your list — much better to have 40 opt-ins who want to hear from you than 200 that
• You don’t have to do what your competitors do. Just because Company X sends emails bi-weekly doesn’t mean you have to.
• Build, don’t buy your house list.
• Don’t send emails just because someone did a transaction. Many etailers do this but it leads to reputation problems and deliverability issues. You dilute the quality of your list with people who don’t want to hear from you.
• Provide an easy sign up process and don’t ask for too much information. Make this accessible from every page as people come to your site from links and search engines.
• Make your opt-in requests “prominent and irresistible.” Give a few benefits of subscribing (example: Air Miles)
• Link to a privacy policy.
• Set expectations. Make it clear on sign up page the frequency of your messages.
• Offer easy opt-out for subscribers. Don’t take it personal as people’s tastes and interests change. Much better to have a targeted list that’s smaller.

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12 Can’t Miss Email Strategies Webinar Recap »

Last weekend I decided to take advantage of the strong Canadian dollar and head cyber-South to Victoria’s Secret’s online store to spoil myself with some stylin’ sweaters. I spent over 2 hours comparing items, and shortlisted about 12.

Even though VS has a wish list feature, I admit that I used the shopping bag as a holding tank for products I like. I had two good reasons for this. I had an intent to buy, not dream, and I wanted to save the hassle of transferring wish list items to the bag.

After 2 hours, I needed a break and closed all my open tabs. I’ve been conditioned (or spoiled) by other online shopping experiences and I expected VS to remember my items when I came back. But alas, when I returned to Victoria’s Secret my shopping bag was empty! I fully had intention to buy multiple items (I had given myself a $350 budget), but my visit will ever be recorded by web analytics as an “Abandoned Shopping Bag.” Because the thought of starting over again is daunting, I just gave up.

How could my sale have been saved?

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Why Victorias Secret Lost A $350 Sale »