Anthony Comments on ClickTale: Spy on your Website Visitors

Our very own Marketing Director just tipped me off about a great tool he discovered called ClickTale. It lets you spy on your visitors by taking actual videos of their interactions with your site, in real time! This is seriously a game changer for the marketing world.

He was excited enough about it that he wrote a blog post right after telling me about it. Check out his post here: http://www.dailymarketingblog.com/2008/09/click-tale-analytics-tool-spy-on-your.html Read More...

Dammit. URL redirection for SEO blunder...

Well, we just had one of those "Splat! Coulda had a V8" moments. We didn't realize our clients' e-commerce platform was not avoiding the duplicate urls SEO problem. Here's a quick background on duplicate content and url redirection.

Duplicate URLs
Google hates duplicate content. They also happen to consider http://www.yourdomain.com completely differently from http://yourdomain.com. So that means you could possibly be splitting your google juice betweent the two domains without even knowing it, making it twice as hard to do SEO work.

Soltuion: URL Redirection
Now, this is not a journey for the feint of technology. If "Apache" and "Mod_rewrite" sound like a helicopter followed by some techno-babble, make sure you hire someone for this.

You'll want to PROPERLY redirect your urls in a way that google can understand. To do this, you'll tell them that the site has permanently moved to another url. In other words, you'll send google spiders a "301" error. Just like 404 means "not found", 301 means "permanently moved".

Well, in our case, the urls were being redirected, but not using the proper 301 designation. So it looked like it was working, when in fact we were getting screwed and our SEO efforts thwarted. Even fooled the silly SEO tools that show SEO friendliness.

Moreal of the store: Check google to make sure that "site:yourdomain.com" has the same amount of pages indexed as "site:www.yourdomain.com". If the number is different, you probably have a url redirection problem. Read More...

Live Blogging from Rocketplace in Vegas

Just got out of the first session with a rep from eBay. I missed the first 30 mins but it sounds like be was just going over recent changes and some to come.

The questions part was interesting. Not quite as fierce as I would have imagined. Here's the concerns sellers expressed:

1. Even free shipping is not improving dsr's enough. eBay rep suggested they must be doing a lot of international, and he was willing to do an analysis to find out.

2. eBay's email correspondences still say "tracking number" for usps. Many sellers expressed buyer confusion and bad dsr's because they expect more traking info than the DC number provides.

Will update this post further later in the day. Off to the next session

Sent via iPhone

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Adam Morris speaking at RocketPlace Conference Next Week

Do not miss your chance to register for the AsWas RocketPlace Conference! If you want to hear some of the most cutting edge information about eBay sales and growing your business, this is the place for you. Even our own Adam Morris, CEO of Sell Center, will be presenting, along with an All-Star List of other experts. There are tons of learning sessions and ample opportunities to network over the 3 day conference.

The conference starts Wednesday, September 10 and ends Friday September 12. You can click here for Pricing details. The event is being held at the beautiful Rio All Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Don’t miss out on this incredible event! Hope to see you there!

P.S.! Debbie just sent me a discount for being referred from us. If you use the Discount Code ROCKET when registering, you’ll receive $100 off the registration price! Read More...

Major EBay Shipping Policy Change for Non-US Sellers

eBay just changed a fundamental feature regarding their shipping policy. Now, sellers need to use the integrated eBay calculator or flat-rate shipping. You can read more here:

http://auctionbytes.com/cab/cab/abn/y08/m09/i02/s02

What wasn’t specified in that article is that the rules changed further for International Sellers. You can see the following chat with an eBay representative confirming that international sellers can only use fixed or flat rate shipping.



This is a very significant change for many sellers all over the world. One of our customers said it best,

“…they are not that stupid at eBay… They do understand that it does not cost the same to ship to NY and California, and therefore, displaying with a fixed rate is almost impossible”.

It will be very interesting to see how this affects international sellers’ profitability.

Read More...