Some E-commerce Statistics You Might Enjoy

Firstly, I do realise that it's 2am EST, but genius never rests!

In all seriousness—my never ending research, and a touch of insomnia, led me to an interesting goverment website. If you haven't seen this already, head over to http://www.census.gov/eos/www/ebusiness614.htm for some interesting statistics on how the e-commerce market is growing.

We are in encouraging times! While the brick and mortar retail industry is trudging along at 4-5% growth anually, barely beating the rise of inflation, e-tailing is growing an average of 25% year over year since 2000.

Check out their latest summary of 2005 to see where your particular online industry lies. Read More...

What Everyone Ought to Know about Google Analytics

The new Google Analytics is out, and I must say, it's very nice. We can finally see the full referring url without having to apply some kind of hack to the tracker code!

Track everything about your visitors including location, browser, referrer, frequency, and a whole lot more. GA also has some pretty advanced paid search (a.k.a. SEM - Search Engine Marketing) conversion tracking and analysis. Unless you're running a million$/year paid search campaign, you've got all you need.

If you don't already have Google Analytics on your website, I suggest you set it up asap. Instead of reading me blab about how great it is, you should head over to google.com/analytics and check it out for yourself.

Note to our Laris Merchants: If you have not yet set up google analytics on your site, please give us a call for help getting started.

Side Note: I'm not sure when "SEM" (Search Engine Marketing) became a popular term, but I see many of the experts referring to it as such now. To relieve confusion, SEM, Paid Search, and PPC (in a search engine context) are all referring to the same thing. Read More...

Some New Shopping Comparison Site Technologies

I haven't touched upon shopping comparison sites in a little while, because we've actually only been seeing marginal success from them in our own projects. However, there are a few new developements I thought I should note.

Shopzilla has a brand new homepage. From an idealistic marketing standpoint, it's amazing. I think they may have taken web 2.0 design and conversion techniques a little too far to where it's no longer pleasing to be on the site, though. I think what really bothers me (and others on the Sell Center Team), is that the whole thing seems to be off-center.

In other CSE world news, MPire has released a new set of widgets that display eBay and Amazon listings. The widgets compare prices, show trends, AND allow you to make referral money. The CEO is apparently boasting that their widgets convert an average of 5% more than Google Adsense. They're actually pretty neat and definitely worth taking a look at.

Read More...

EBay Allows Embedded Video Again

Just a quick note: eBay announced that embedded video is again allowed in eBay listings so long as its hosted on one of its approved sites. While I have not personally tested video in listings, some of our clients claim great success. Read More...

EBay buying Stumble Upon for $75 Million?

If you read the WSJ, you should have seen an article yesterday about eBay's rumored acquisition of StumbleUpon for $75 million. Scot Wingo from Channeladvisor actually has a very interesting post about it on his blog at ebaystrategies.blogs.com.

I'd like to add another theory into the mix. EBay has been spending a lot of time and money trying to bring back the "fun" of eBay for buyers. At the expense of their reputation with sellers, they have been making a strategic move back to the Core auction format.

With Stumble integrated into the eBay system, eBay enthusiasts could vote for their favorite eBay listings. Then using the eBay toolbar, you could "Stumble" upon cool eBay listings, bringing back some of that "fun" (and more press about Jesus-shaped cheeses) that eBay is trying so desperately to reacquire.

It's just a theory, but it seems to fit with eBay's current disposition. Any other eBay theorists have any ideas? Read More...

EBay Feedback 2.0

Well it seems that everyone is talking about feedback 2.0, so it looks like I'll have to post something to keep up.

I'm not really sure what all of the fuss is about. It seems like a fairly good system, almost CSE (Comparison Shopping Engine)-like.

Here's what *I* think you should take away from the change:

1. Ebay is trying to build more trust through a model that online shoppers should be already familiar with - stars and ratings based on a scale. Unfortunately, I think they only took a baby step. This might have been a worthwhile change in 2003. At least they're moving in the right direction.

2. Customer service is now more important than ever in the highly competitive sectors of eBay. Sellers who dropship products that come from large dropshippers will gain an edge with high customer service and great FB2.0 ratings.

3. Sellers who have a niche following and plenty of repeat buyers should stop fussing about FB2.0 and keep running their business the way they are running it.

From some of my discussions with our clients, I believe it's important we keep from letting this over-hyped minor advancement to eBay's system from averting our eyes off the prize: a sustainable competitive advantage in today's ever-evolving world of multi-venue e-commerce madness. My next post will be more insightful; I promise! Read More...

A Nice Upgrade to Our Office, Cheap!

This is a little off topic, but we just switched over to a $20,000 phone system running through a $15,000 router, and you know how much it cost us? $0.00. Ah, the beauty of technology!

Some of our techys have been experimenting with an open source VOIP PBX system called trixbox (trixbox.org), which is basically an automated bundle of Asterisk, FreePBX, Linux, Apache, MySQL, and a bunch of other things. If that's a foreign language, I'll translate: we built a fully function corporate phone system out of old computer parts and open source free software.

We also built a router to handle all of the new VOIP network traffic using spare parts and an open source firewall, pfSense (pfSense.org).

To top it all off, we cut our monthly phone bill by 75% using a VOIP provider named Vitelity (vitelity.com).

There were a few kinks, however, that could not have been solved save for our resident networking and Linux expert. Make sure you have an expert handy if you ever consider replacing your traditional hardware.

We did have to buy a few really neat Cisco 4940 phones for $100 a piece on eBay (retails for almost $500 each), but we then sold off our old phone system, on eBay of course, and broke even. Read More...

Some New Technologies from eBay

It seems like a few of Max Mancini's initiatives are finally showing up around the eBay site. Or, if it's not him, another division of eBay might actually be doing something useful! Below I've posted some of my favorite new eBay innovations...

eBay To Go (togo.ebay.com) is a new gadget that you can drop into your blog or myspace page. There are three different kinds - single item, multiple item, and search. I pasted one of the gadgets below as an example.



eBay Wiki (www.ebaywiki.com) is a new compendium of user created articles about eBay and selling on eBay. As a wiki, the articles are also edited/updated by the user community to allow the knowledge to evolve.

You may also want to check out Project San Dimas (http://projectsandimas.com/), a new desktop eBay program. Apparently they are targeting the hard core eBay buyers who want to browse eBay quickly and easily, keep track of their favorite stores, keep in touch with other buyers, and other features geared for the expert user. Read More...