What?!! It’s true. Many of the biggest and most popular online retailers with fat SEO budgets are not showing up for their own names or valuable keywords in Google search results. Most don’t even know it. How can this be?

All the major search engines offer a .com search engine and a number of country-specific engines, like Google.ca, .co.uk, .com.au, .fr, .de and so on. These are local search engines, and often use geo-IP targeting to show the local search engine as the default when a searcher lives outside the United States.

If you’ve never seen a localized search engine, this is what it looks like:

As you can see, a searcher has the option to restrict search results to only pages from his or her country. This is particularly helpful for searchers who are performing transactional searches - they’re looking for products to buy. Using the general “search the web” will often deliver US sites which requires the shopper to dig through the sites looking for shipping information and costs. Searching only pages from their native land, searchers can save time and discover online stores they purchase from over and over again.

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Top Online Retailers Not Showing Up in Google! »

In case you missed it on TechCrunch the other day, Google is now showing search boxes within SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for some of the larger online retailers like Amazon, Zappos and Office Max.

The boxes only appear for certain keywords, for example “amazon” and “shop amazon” but not “amazon books.” Zappos shows up for “zappos shoes” but not “zappos shopping.” For other sites, adding “shop” or “shopping” to the site name won’t trigger a search box at all.

OfficeMax should be pleased that this works for them but not for Staples and Office Depot, at least it makes them seem a bit more important? I noticed that Target and Walmart get a search box, but not Sears. NewEgg, Radio Shack and BestBuy get one, but not Circuit City. Ebay and Overstock also are left out, which is a bit of a head-scratcher.

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Search Within A Search - Good Idea? »

The holiday shopping season is now in full swing, and while there’s still plenty of time for online shoppers to receive their orders by Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa), not receiving an order on time is a concern for consumers. Great online stores ease the fears by providing holiday shipping cutoff dates and making this information easy to find on home pages and product pages. Let’s take a look at some examples:

Bed Bath and Beyond

Tagline: “Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates”

Bed Bath and Beyond dedicates some central home page real estate to its holiday shipping information:

And it’s not limited to just Christmas, either:

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Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates Make Good Ecommerce Usability »

Hey ecommerce fans, Halloween’s quickly approaching and in case you haven’t decided on what to be this year, we’ve lined up ten costume ideas from Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Etailers of 2006:

Aberzombie and Fitch

Amazon Woman

Freddy’s of Hollywood

J. Crow

LL Cool Bean

NASCARface

Skullastic

Tiger Woods Direct

Vanilla Ice.com

Frank Zappos

Artwork by Elton Hübner

Available at “Underworld Armour!”

Bones and Noble - First Runner Up
Northern Ghoul - Second Runner Up
Lizard Claiborne - Miss Congeniality

Got your own suggestions for runners up? Drop us a comment!

Subscribe our RSS feed to be the first to know when we post a very special full-color (and funny) Halloween tribute to our favorite search guys on Monday the 29th.

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Top 10 Ecommerce Halloween Costumes »

Zaz Lamarr hearts Zappos. She really does.

On her personal blog Writing, Cooking, Life, Zaz gives testimony of exceptional service from an online retailer back in July:

“One bright, extraordinary note in all of the sad stuff of the last few weeks - in May we had ordered several pairs of shoes from Zappos for my mom. She’d lost a lot of weight, and her old shoes were all too big. She had a whole new wardrobe of clothes in pretty colors, that fit, so I wanted her to have some pretty shoes that fit, too, when I took her up to Oregon to stay where her sister is. Out of seven pairs, only two fit. Not bad considering she’d never been this thin, so I was winging it, and the return shipping is free.

The rest were here waiting to be returned. Because of various circumstances - lost label, my mom being hospitalized and me being away, the shoes were never sent back. There’s a time limit on the return of 15 days. Remember this. When you do a return to them, they pay the shipping, but you have to get the shoes to UPS yourself. Remember this, also.

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Good Customer Service Still The Best Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Strategy »