Google Checkout's Effect on Hits and Sales Part II

In April, I wrote an article on Google's push for Checkout adoption and it's impending effects on business. While we have noticed some increases in paid search hits on our campaigns with google checkout enable vs campaigns without, it was very difficult to measure any real results.

It seems that Google has done some of that work for me, as reported by Ina Steiner from Auctionbytes:

"Google's SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg said many advertisers are reporting much higher click-through rates when using Google AdWords with Google Checkout, as much as 60% higher than without Checkout."

While "as much as 60%" doesn't really tell us anything useful, at least they are recording measured increases.

Also interesting was this statement, "Rosenberg said advertisers have decreased the cost-per-click by over 31% with Google AdWords and Google Checkout." It seems that you can be lower in the rankings for paid search, but still get the click since you have a huge 3d GC button under your ad.

Any sellers out there have any 1st hand counts of implementing google checkout? Read More...

EBay and Paypal Changes that Will Affect your Holiday Sales and Q1

Why, oh why, does eBay have to mess with things during the most important months of the year. I don't think I'll ever understand it. I've been reading a lot about the recent and upcoming changes to eBay and PayPal, and I decided I should compile a list of ones that will affect business as we know it.

1. PayPal recently announced it will be delaying "select" transactions for up to 24 hours. From what I've heard thus far, buyers are not notified of the delay via email. I have heard reports that it shows up in the buyer's PayPal as "pending." I think this change is going to drastically increase customer service emails and wreak havoc on your DSRs (Detailed Seller Ratings).

2. *Sigh* EBay announced it will be making major changes to the checkout. It sounds like it will actually be a beneficial change, but why change the buyer experience at such an important time? Luckily for our Laris E-commerce Management Software users, you won't be using eBay's checkout anyway ;).

3. EBay Neightborhoods - EBay is dabbling in mixing social networking with e-commerce. While this is definitely the way of the future, and one of my favorite parts of today's web 2.0 revolution, eBay didn't really hit the mark here. They got the social networking part down, combining eBay groups, guides, and discussions, but the e-commerce part is lacking. It just diplays a complete mess of listings with little organization. For this to be at all useful to boost sales, they're really going to have to do a lot of work on the e-com module within Neighborhoods.

While this change actually won't be impacting your holiday business much as it is now, it's something to look into as it evolves.

4. Some Good News!!! EBay is actually slashing rates on insertion fees for the next two weeks by 33%. Auctionbytes.com reported that a major factor in the decision was to "see what happens" and also to ensure that sellers will be pushing a wide variety of inventory for the holiday season. NOW is the time to test out product lines for the holidays on EBay.

5. EBay is testing longer BIN options on auction style listings. Normally, a BIN will disappear after the first bid is placed, making it useless to to a BIN on an item that normally gets a lot of bids. The most prominent experiment seems to be on the Austrialian EBay site where they are leaving the BIN available until the bidding reaches 50% of the BIN price. I'm game for this one =). EBay is currently testing difference variations in a few categories on the US and Canada sites.

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That's all for now. As if you didn't have enough to think about going into this holiday season, right? Just make sure to keep these points in mind as you refine your sales planning. I'll be continuing to cover the impact of changes to the selling environment as we head through Q4 and into Q1. If you have anything I missed, please share it with everyone in a comment! Read More...

Why Your E-commerce Website Needs a Blog

Whether you're a beginner in running your own website to sell products, or a master of the SEO arts, you can boost your traffic and your sales using a blog. Trust me; this works. We actually use it all the time to give our sites a boost.

Why a blog?

1. Search engines believe that content is king. What better place for fresh content than a blog? Put a few links from your blog to your e-commerce website. Google will rank those links fairly highly since the content on the blog is fresh and related to your website.

2. Blogs can be a big part of your linking strategy. If you get links to your blog, it will build the reputation of your blog with Google, who will then in turn pass on some of that rank to your website.

3. E-commerce websites have very little extrinsic search engine value. Sure you can work on your on page elements (keyword density, url optimization, h1 tags, etc), but it's very hard to develop an external (linking) strategy. This actually makes it very easy to beat out your competition. Even if your internal SEO is not quite as good as a competitor, you can beat them fairly easily with content.

What should I blog about?

You can write about anything related to your website. If you sell rims, write about different finishes or fits. If you sell clothes, write about your niche's latest news. You can even take the easy way out and just find content written by others and summarize it on your blog (giving credit to the original author, of course).

How do I set up a blog?

For those of you who have never touched PHP before, I recommend Blogspot (now owned by google). If you can handle installing a script (it's very easy I promise) onto your own host, definitely go with Wordpress. I actually never would have set up my blog here had I known how much cooler wordpress is.

Ok, I have a blog. Now what?

I'm going to be posting an article in the next few minutes as a followup to this in our Learning Center titled "Social Bookmarking, a Blogger's best friend." We used to go through so much arduous work to promote a blog and build traffic to it. That is, until we joined the web 2.0 revolution and realized how easy it is to build a following through social bookmarking. Visit the Learning Center to learn more! Read More...

New Releases at Sell Center!

Normally I don't blog about SC since most of my readers are not necessarily clients of ours (yet), but we have released some really cool stuff in the past couple of days!

1. The new Sell Center Website is here! Go take a look at www.sellcenter.net. It's really cool; I promise.

2. The Learning Center - This is a brand new project to compile articles on a wide array of topics from eBay to search engine marketing to taxes. The content is written by the experts at Sell Center and our partners. This will be an ongoing project that will (hopefully) produce the largest resource and community for online sellers.

3. Laris Wiki - We’ve created an entire database of support documentation, setup procedure, and best practice articles to help our clients. Using the popular wiki format, we were able to interlink them together to make finding the help you need a breeze

4. Sell Center Community - Not exactly a new release, but we’ve given it a new look, more funtionality, and tied it into The Learning Center. Let’s see if we can make this a great community to share and collaborate with your fellow online sellers. Read More...