Free Marketing – Yes, It Does Exist!

I thought that this would be an excellent way to go into the 4th of July week for all online merchants = FREE Marketing, now isn't that nice?!? -- Ed

by Kevin Packler, Product Specialist at www.MerchantAdvantage.com

There are still ways to do some old fashioned free guerilla style marketing and the opportunities are growing.

1) "Froogle" aka "GoogleBase" aka "Google Product Search"

The biggest free shopping comparison engine is produced by the master of free goods, Google. Google Product Search, which is built on top of the GoogleBase platform. The GoogleBase format allows numerous options from customized product attributes to the feeding of the actual address of physical stores to be displayed on Google Maps. Google Product Search (GPS) takes over for the formerly known Froogle comparison engine, which was originally rolled out in 2002. For people who signed up under the Froogle banner, GPS is not as big as it once was. A significant amount of traffic was lost when the Froogle link was removed from the Google home page and replaced with Google Video. However, the GPS site is still bigger than most, and will certainly be making a push to rival Amazon.com and eBay by adding shopping cart functionality with Google Checkout. Even though large already, this is the current sleeping giant of comparison engines and marketplaces. Once a solid and firm direction develops, exponential growth will follow.

2) MSN Live Product Search Beta

This shopping comparison engine is another sleeper which seems to be on the heels of GoogleBase as a place to submit products with the possibility of expanding to other areas. MSN Shopping is already a large site, but this site should not to be confused with the MSN Live Product Search version. Some nice things about MSN Live Beta:

A. Backed by a large corporation, showing good long term prospects.
B. Relatively new, so there is limited competition from potential rival merchants.
C. Products are searchable by Google, so the listings appear in MSN Live’s search, and also as results in a regular Google search. This means essentially a merchant can have Google showing results not only from the merchant site and GPS, but also will show Live submissions in the same results query. This is potentially giving triple coverage for free!

3) TheFind.com

TheFind.com, like MSN Live, is also in beta stage but features a robust selection, and for the purposes of this article, this site is most importantly free. TheFind features the ability to have a bot scan a recommended merchant’s site and list the selection on TheFind. This can replace the work of having to configure a product file. Whether the site stays free depends on the company’s internal strategy, but for now it offers another great source of qualified traffic.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. READ everything above, it is simple and straightforward, and act on it!

Get More From Google Product Base Listings By Using Google Checkout

Many folks have asked me about Google Checkout versus Pay Pal.  The are competing products and both have their benefits. Here is Google's pitch for their product and it is a good product! Pay Pal also has its advantages...those to come next week! -- Ed

By Stephen Salinas, Google Base Support

As a Base user, you're probably well aware of the increase in traffic that Base listings can deliver to your online business. Now you can convert more of that traffic into sales with Google Checkout, a fast and convenient checkout process that allows customers to buy from you quickly and easily with a single username and password.

If you currently list individual products on Base-hosted pages, you can now place a Google Checkout "buy" button on each of your listings. Customers who use Checkout can buy from you quickly and securely – and you'll be able to use Checkout to process their orders and charge their credit or debit cards. Learn how to add Google Checkout to your Base listings.

Checkout can also be integrated into your own website alongside your existing process. Google Base merchants that accept Google Checkout on their sites get their product listings and AdWords ads badged with the Google Checkout logo in Google search results, which sets them apart from competitors and lets customers know that buying from those sites will be quick and easy. And until 2008, Checkout merchants pay no transaction processing fees. Learn how to offer Google Checkout on your site.

For more information about using Google Checkout with Google Base, visit the Help Discussion Group for tips from other Google Base users.

New Comparison Shopping Sites Keep Coming...Which is a Good Thing For Small to Mid-Sized Etailers

Below I paste a press release from PriceforSure,  a new shopping comparison site which I like and is going international. 

I am unsure of how many more shopping destination sites consumers need to find products but I do like that there are new shopping sites popping up that give small to mid-sized businesses an opportunity to reach new customers.  Others that have recently popped up the past few months and/or now feature shopping features on their site and accept product catalog data feeds from etailers include: Like.com, FindGift, ShopandPrice, HGTV Cooking.com, and many others.  I think most online etailers think that the only place they should feed their product catalog to get sales and brand awareness is to the major comparison sites they have heard of such as Amazon, Shopzilla, Yahoo! Shopping, PriceGrabber and others…think again!

My advice: wherever you can feed your product catalog, do it..including the bigger, more well known ones.  Once you do, use analytics, MerchantAdvantage has this all built in to its feed management soltuion, to analyze how those feeds are performing and then you can decide which marketing channels work the best for you on an ongoing basis.

Have fun -- Ed

From PriceForSure’s press release:

"PriceForSure, the leader of next generation of comparison shopping websites, will launch internationally on July 4, 2007. PriceForSure.com is designed to increase consumer buying power by enabling them to make smarter purchasing decisions.

PriceForSure.com will provide an educational and comprehensive online comparison shopping experience. We have combined the best of internet shopping with the latest technology available. Our goal is to keep the cost to the merchant minimal and customer service exceptional. Merchants have several services to advertise their products and consumers have multiple merchants from which to choose to make their purchases.

We distinguish ourselves from our competitors by targeting potential customers with our merchant controlled multimedia advertising features, such as live web-TV, video uploads, auction video capabilities, chat rooms, and blogs.

We are offer PPA (pay per action) and PPC (pay per click) options for merchants, which means that they pay only when consumers either visit their site or purchase from their site through the PriceForSure.com portal.

For more information:

Media Contact:
Director of Marketing
pr@priceforsure.com
Office: (404) 496-4860
Fax: (912) 826-4222"

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. New shopping marketing/detination sites are popping up in the marketplace weekly and they might be good places to experiment with getting new sales leads, sales, and increasing brand awareness.

2. There are lots of sites to feed your product catalog to -- why not try them all? Or at least some of them? There are tools in the marketplace that help you do this easily and then analyze how your market feeds are performing so you leverage these many marketing channels.

3. Be sure, at the very least, to send your marketing catalog datalog data to Google Product Base, MSN, and theFind.com, as they are free. 

4. Also check into: Amazon, Underbid, and Jellyfish as they are commission based and your only costs up front are setting up the feeds.

New Google Product Base (Froogle) Attribute Requirements: MPN, UPC and ISBN

Might as well here it straight from the source... Ed

By: Chris Azalde, Google Base Support

We recently added MPN, UPC,and ISBN to the list of required attributes for bulk uploads of the Products item type. Providing this information will help us rank items better and allow us to deliver more relevant results to our users. Starting today, we're asking everyone whose items are in the category of products and use these unique identifiers to begin including them for their items. As we will be using this information to categorize your items, please take particular care in the values you provide for these attributes. Only universally-recognized values should be included for these three attributes. Not including accurate values for these fields can have a negative effect on the ranking of your items.

For more information about these unique identifiers, please select the specific attribute below:

MPN or Manufacturer Part Number, is the unique part number or code for an item determined by the manufacturer for that product.

UPC or Universal Product Code, is a unique numerical identifier for commercial products, usually associated with a bar-code printed on retail merchandise.

ISBN or International Standard Book Number, is a unique numerical identifier for all commercial books. You can find your book's ISBN on the back of the book along with a bar-code.

If you have any questions about this change, feel free to discuss it at this Google Groups thread. You might also find the answer you're looking for on our FAQ.

Optimize The Consumer’s Experience On Your Site!

So you use keywords, adwords, shopping comparison engines, guerilla marketing and many other methods to get traffic to you online storefront…now what?

It is hard to stay ahead of the competition, and of all of the technology that exists today (most industry insiders refer to this new e-technology as Web 2.0, but we can just call it “the next great thing” and it includes video and new user experiences), to create a vivid, user friendly and easy online shopping experience but it is essential that you do focus on ensuring that once a customer comes to your online storefront that their experience is flawless. 

Why?  Simple, so they make a purchase, come back in the future and recommend you to their friends.

The steps to capture your audience have been successful so now it is time to re-focus your energy on ensuring that they love you site.

The specialized, global, e-tailing consulting and technology firm, Fry states: “Consumer expectations toward e-retailing are continually changing, but we’re entering another phase where their expectations are being raised dramatically because of the technical sophistication they are seeing in other areas of the web thanks to Web 2.0 technology and …These changing expectations are altering the way consumers expect to interact with retailers on the web.”

Today, there is little difference between store shoppers, online shoppers and multi-channel shoppers basically you have to recognize that any point you touch the consumer you better be able to service them flawlessly and, if you are multi retailer (both off line and online) that your online promotions drive them to your brick and mortar storefront and visa versa.  But let’s focus on making your online storefront more effective for this blog.

Fry says is best when offering ideas on how to make an online experience more special: “One of the expectations consumers now have for shopping online is that retailers layer in multiple shopping functions on a single page. For example, an apparel retailer can design a page progression where a shopper looking for pants can locate the desired item on a subcategory page and then purchase it, not just place it in the shopping cart, without having to leave the subcategory page and move to checkout.”

But this is not an advertisement for Fry, which can help with all of this, I am writing to help you do some of this yourself with some simple and executable ideas that you can do right now. Ideally, you should create a personal experience for a customer that is fun and “seems” unique to them.

When was the last time you returned to a store when you felt as though you spent a fair amount of money and were not treated in a special manner?  Answer: Rarely!!!

Unless it was the only store within miles from your house with the product you need.  And since we are talking online, you don’t enjoy that geographical advantage so you better make the experience special and the up and coming e-tailing generation expects it!

Some quick and easy ideas to implement are:

1. Make sure you know what landing page a customer comes to after clicking on your product FROM the shopping comparison engine.

2. Study that page carefully and make sure it describes the EXACT product they came to look for accurately and in a visual pleasing manner:

a. Are pictures accurate?
b. Are pictures just a manufacturer’s pic = do you have the means to specialize this pic?
c. Are your product descriptions accurate and vibrant or boring and typical?
d. Is the page laid out nicely and is it easy to get around that page?
e. Is it easy to go to another page?
f. Can you press the back button and get back to the shopping comparison engine?
i. This may take folks away from your site but is game all consumers know online e-tailers do and, frankly, I find it annoying.

3. Create “options” for the consumer to check out other products related to this product, so they can see different models of product similar to the one they clicked on.

4. Create “options” for the consumer to click on related products to this one. For instance, if they click through to your storefront from an add for a motor cycle helmet make sure you have a feature that shows them cool riding gloves, or pants, or shin guards that go with that helmet.  Better yet, create a color feature application that guides them to the best products that go with the helmet they like!

5. Create special, custom coupons for customers coming from that shopping search engine.  For instance, if the lead came from Shopping.com, have a coupon that says: “Welcome Shopping.com customer, we are glad you are here.  As a special gift to our Shopping.com clients you receive 5% off on any order more than $25.00. Thank you for shopping with us and please email us at johndoe@yourstore.com if we can be of any help”

a. While the above language may not be right, it is unique and is a way to eventually capture and keep a customer to whom you can market to into the future.  You can then tailor this to each lead that comes from other shopping comparison sites. You get the point.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. Getting traffic to your site is great but don’t ignore them while they are there.

2. Think like a consumer, what would you want to see when you come to an online site from a shopping comparison engine?

3. There are several ideas that you can implement on your own, especially if you cannot afford expensive third party consultants.

4. Improving your online storefront is an ongoing project, especially considering new technologies that are popping up everyday. Don’t panic, be patient, and be strategic…you can prevail!

eBay Stores: 75% credit on Final Value Fees When You Generate Leads on CSEs

It has been a wonderful past two weeks.  I was at Internet Retailer in San Jose and then at eBay Live! in Boston the following week – so much to learn and share with you all.  I just returned from New England and now am back in “muggy” but sunny Miami.  There is so much to cover and so please check back daily as I will be writing rigorously over the next few weeks to cover it all and provide good information to help etailers increase sales and brand exposure.

Let me start with some advice for ebay Stores sellers who can make some wonderful money back when they start to market their product catalog outside of eBay and generate leads coming to their eBay Store using shopping comparison sites and other marketing channels.  [For reference purposes shopping comparison sites or comparison shopping engines are referred to as CSEs and include over 100 that I know of, including the most popular ones as Yahoo! Shopping, Shopzilla, PriceRunner, Shopping.com, Become, Smarter, SortPrice.  For a more comprehensive list please see MerchantAdvantage at:

http://www.merchantadvantage.com/res_channels.cfm

How much money can you make back?

How about a 75% credit on your Final Value Fees when your marketing efforts generate sales of your eBay Store Inventory from these other marketing efforts. 

In essence, the credits that ebay will give you will probably end of paying for any money, time, and effort to set up marketing campaigns using the CSEs. 

So How Does This All Work?

1. eBay Stores typically get their consumers from the eBay community, not outside the eBay community, and that seems to bother the eBay community.

2. eBay wants to change this pattern and help eBay Stores generate sales leads from other marketing channels

3. eBay Stores typically have rapidly changing inventory, as compared to standard online retailers, often have limited supplies of products, and the products move quickly. Because of this, eBay Store owners overlook Shopping Comparison Sites/Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) as a viable marketing possibility as they understand that a catalog feed could easily become outdated too often.  But this is solved by…

4.  eBay allowing and encouraging their eBay Stores to append code to the product URL for links back to the eBay store from outside of the eBay community.

Why Should I Do This Now?

So, if you are an owner of an eBay Store and have the ability to quickly and easily send your most accurate inventory to CSEs, while automatically appending some code to the url, you would be a candidate for receiving a HUGE reward. Check out here to see how big of reward from eBay themselves:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/specialtysites/referral-credit-faq.html 

Suffice it to say that this is an awesome business proposal for any eBay Stores as it is BOTH FREE marketing and considered in my book as marketing for profit.

How Can I Do This Now Easily and Affordably?

To make things even more pleasant and easy, there are several companies that offer tool based products to help you set up these feeds easily.  These include FeedPerfect by Solid Cactus, SingleFeed by Brian Smith and MerchantAdvantage’s Channel Management with Chanalytics Professional and Lite, and Channel Advisor’s ShoppingAdvisor product. 

I recommend contacting all four companies and see where you get the best value, technical support, built in analytics, and also make sure you ask about transaction fees, revenue fees and set up fees when using their tools – you should not have to pay these fees – so don’t. 

There are also excellent service based companies as Channel Intelligence, Channel Advisor, and Mercent, but the small to mid-sized online merchant may not be able to afford their monthly fees, long term contract and revenue share.  They specialize on servicing the larger etailers and not eBay Stores.  MerchantAdvantage did announce a very affordable  “Lite” product specifically small retailers and for eBay Stores and ProStores Web Stores to feed their product catalog to over 100 online marketing channels, at eBay Live! so you might want to look into their product more closely, as they also have no transaction fees, no revenue share or no set up costs.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. eBay encourages its eBay Stores merchants to market their product catalog outside of eBay to help bring more customers and brand awareness to your eBay Store. 

2. Click here to see how you can benefit for a 75% credit on your Final Value Fees http://pages.ebay.com/help/specialtysites/referral-credit-faq.html 

3. Any eBay Store can send their product catalog data to other shopping destination sites easily and affordably to take advantage of this offer.

4. The limited investment to create a multi channel marketing campaign, when using a feed management tool (see above), coupled with eBay's offer makes a very compelling case that all eBay Store merchants should at least try multi channel marketing for a few months. 

“PHILFING” – Online Merchants Getting Caught And Annoying Customers = DON’T DO IT!

Today I bring you a report from across the pond (London) in regards to “PHILFING” = ‘purposely hiding what I’m looking for’. 

It seems that consumers are getting increasingly upset and annoyed with online merchants who think that their “sneaky” ways  actually work.  Some of the mentioned "no nos"are:

• imbedding hidden fees around the words “free delivery”
• holding back real cost of extras until the last minute, and
• surcharges for paying by credit card.

These practices actually result in losing customers, trust in your brand, friends telling friends that an online storefront is not honest, and results in losing a customer forever.

How annoyed are online consumers? How about 93% of 2,400 web users surveyed by a report commissioned by More Computers…does that make online merchants stop to think?  I hope so.

To make matters worse, an online merchant who engages in these “sneaky/annoying” practices, puts immense pressure on CSEs, and other online shopping destination sites, who market an online merchant’s product catalog.  Why?

1. CSEs find it difficult to maintain a level playing field when listing prices
2. You hurt the brand name of the CSE representing a “sneaky/annoying” online merchant
3. You add undo burden (i.e., resources = costs) on CSEs and shopping destination sites to manage a “sneaky” online merchant to ensure that they are not annoying their customer base.

Bottom line:

• consumers are smarter than online merchants
• consumers communicate everyday about the best places to shop and not to shop
• consumers have thousands upon thousands of resources to find out about “bad business practices” by online merchants
• there is no way to stay ahead of being “sneaky” and I don’t recommend trying.

Not all online merchants are “sneaky”, but enough are to merit a survey with alarming results by a very successful online retailer.

My recommendation:

“Make money the old fashion way….earn it!”

And, if you wonder what I mean by “earn it”, in the world of ecommerce, here are some helpful tips:

• ensure that your site offers prices upfront with no hidden fees
• be upfront about shipping charges -- please don’t charge $5.00 to ship a $2.50 product = “sneaky”
• have excellent, thoughtful and sincere short-term, mid-term and long-term follow up strategies for a client who buys a product
• ensure that you have excellent search features on your site
• update site pictures, product descriptions, and other features weekly or bi-monthly
• offer specials to your clients who buy a product, and
• outdo your competition by inventing fun, creative value-added ways to benefit your potential customer not “duping/gouging” them on the last checkout page

If you adjust your management philosophy, from the top down, to “earning and keeping” your client’s respect, you will be surprised what wonderful ideas your entire team comes up with to reward clients and still make money.

And if you do this, they just might tell their friends how wonderful you are day in and day out.  You only have one time to make a first impression, don’t blow it!

Happy Memorial Day Weekend.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. PHIFLING = 'purposely hiding what I’m looking for’ = don't do it. 

2. Online merchants suffer if they dupe their clients with hidden fees and "dubious" offers.

3. Don't be "sneaky" and try to make extra monies by not being upfront about shipping and other aspects of an online purchase = the consumer is smarter than you think.

4. In a recent survey of 2,400 conusmers 93% hated "sneaky" online merchants.

5. Before you enagage in "PHILFING" consider:

• tha the consumer catches on quickly
• the benefit of a little revenue against the long-tem loss of client
• bad PR
• hurting your brand
• hurting the brand name of CSEs and other marketing channels who market you

6. Earn your revenus by being more "honestly" creative in helping a consumer and rewarding them to shop with you rather than "duping or gouging" them on your check out page.

Value of CSEs: Revenues, leads and more...!

Many of our customers ask the obvious and simple question of me everyday that I thought I would attempt to answer for all of you. Their question is:

Q: What CSEs or marketplaces should I market in to get more revenues?

I am not a psychic and if I knew the answer to that off the top of my head I could make lots of money, right?  You would all just hire me to find the right shopping comparison sites to market to and then pay me a commission fee on all your sales. In the absence of foretelling the future, the answer to the question is really not that complicated and can be broken down to three areas:

1. Getting your products to the right shopping destination sites
2. Capturing click-throughs to your site, and
3. Getting the click-throughs to lead to sales and/or leads for future marketing efforts

First, you have to ensure that you send your feed to the marketing channels that work best for your type of products. This means that you should understand that if you sell electronics you might do better marketing your products at ShopandPrice.com and BuyersEdge.com than listing them just on the larger sites as Shopzilla.com, JellyFish.com, Pronto.com and Shopping.com.  If you sell “gift” type of items then setting up an account with Gifts.com might work better than just sending your feed to the popular Yahoo! Shopping.  Because no one can say what shopping destination site will work best for your business, I recommend trying a few sites and analyzing how they are performing.   [My white board has over 95 shopping destination sites form which to pick - email me if you want a few suggestions]. You may be surprised to find that listing products on a smaller shopping destination site like PriceRunner.com Become.com, and GolfPricer.com (yes, very niche) will give you better results.

Second, once you have listed your products don’t panic if you get a lot of click-throughs and no sales.  Maybe you got some click-throughs on one product that led to sales on a related product. Maybe you captured a valuable e-mail address from a person that did not buy today but to whom you can market to into the future.  Know all of the advantages of marketing into shopping destination sites which include: sales, brand awareness, and leads for future “direct” marketing efforts from your email address!  If you get no click throughs, maybe your data feed is not working properly, maybe your product descriptions and/or pictures are not very exciting, maybe you are listed on page 10 and no one ever goes to page 10 to find a product. Maybe that is okay, as you are not paying for clicks but getting some free advertising. Whatever the reason, there are reasons, so look into all of them before you stop working with a shopping destination site to see how you might get some click-throughs.

Third - sales! This is the Holy Grail and why most merchants use shopping destination sites. Yeah, you knew that and you are asking why am I am reminding you of something that is so obvious.  The reason I refer to it is because a click-through that does not lead to sale MAY NOT be the fault of the shopping destination site that sent you the lead. 

Some questions to ask of your site are: When the click-through came did that potential customer come to the right landing page and was that page "boring"? Did my website make it easy for the lead to buy the product? Did my website generate suggestions for other products to purchase? Does the search feature on my website generate interest about my company? Did the lead just not have time to buy now but might into the future? Did my website make it easy and inviting to come back to into the future?

Of course, some online shoppers simply visit your site to compare prices and check you out and thus are not immediate customers.  But there is value in this type of lead and you should have tracking methods to know who these folks are and what shopping destination site sent them to you.
 
Why?

So you can market to these leads into the future and create a more interesting/enticing product description on the shopping destination site that sent the lead.  The lead did come from them and thus people are noticing you and maybe you just need to tweak a few things to get the lead to ultimately buy.

If you have any questions about any of this just email me at ed@etaildtail.com.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. There are over 95 shopping destination sites (this is just my list) from which to choose to market your products.  Test some out and don’t think that only the top 5 ranked by traffic are your only solution.

2. Click-throughs that lead to sales are GREAT, click-throughs that lead to no sales may not be so bad, if you understand how to track them and follow up.

3. Once you have a click-through now it is up to you and your website to keep the lead and figure out creative ways to turn them into a customer or potential buyer.