Every day I get about 8-15 retail emails from various e-tailers. Yesterday (US Election Day) it dipped to about 6, but 5 of those 6 referred to the election in their headlines:
Which One Will YOU Choose at Comp-U-Plus?
Fat Brain Toys Projects a Winner!
Happy Pre-Holiday Savings - Plus, Elect Free Shipping
Election Day Specials: Free Shipping Deals…
You Voted! Shop Our Best Sellers + Free Shipping
As you’d expect, fewer retailers sent emails on Election Day - voters were busy enough at the polls and glued to the news. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with having an Election Day sale, but I don’t see anything special about it either. What’s interesting is none of these campaigns segmented me out as a Canadian.
Kudos to Fat Brain Toys for actually holding an election - for the 2008 Fat Brain Toys Award.
Delia’s subject line including “You Voted!” sounds like they had a […]
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Well, it appears that November 1st has come and gone and Shopping.com is the only Comparison Shopping Engine daring to drop their rates for the Holiday Season. Other major players still plan to increase their rates (per usual) for the holiday season. However, Shopzilla is offering a small concession by postponing the rate increase from Nov 1st to Nov 20th - a few extra days is always appreciated.
Regardless I am still interested in how Shopping.com’s rate decrease will work for them over the coming 2 months. Specifically as retailers have come to realize Shopping Engines are a “must have” advertising avenue will they find the extra ads for the same spend on Shopping.com is worth additional attention, or not? And while budgets may be decreasing with the tight economy we see percent spend on Comparison Shopping Engines remaining steady, regardless of CPC increases or decreases… my guess is none of […]
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With the holiday Christmas shopping officially underway, and many holiday shoppers using the internet to ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline) - offering ship-to-store services to online customers is a competitive advantage to multi-channel retailers.
Here are some tips to ensure a satisfying online and offline experience of your ship-to-store service for your customers:
On-Site Messaging and Usability
Because ship-to-store is a key customer service, it needs to be communicated well throughout your site (to remind customers you offer it, and to inform first-time visitors about it, regardless of which “landing page” attracts the visitor — it might not be your home page).
Wal-Mart does a great job at branding its “Site-To-Store” service throughout the site, and even uses a unique icon for it - including it in the navigation header, search and category results and product pages:
Navigation / Header
Category Pages
Product Pages
Estimated Arrival Date
Wal-Mart also uses an estimated arrival date for […]
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Elastic Path is in the news again — the Financial Post’s Entrepreneurs undaunted by global slowdown highlights Elastic Path as one of the 60% of 200 companies surveyed by KPMG LLP that plans to expand globally despite the economic slump.
As technology brings the world closer together, more entrepreneurs are seeking to expand by introducing their products and services to foreign markets. Some look to the United States while others see opportunities in far-flung regions of the globe.
A recent study by KPMG LLP shows that despite the slumping economy worldwide, nearly two-thirds of private company owners in Canada intend to forge ahead with global expansion plans in the next five years.
Many that have made inroads outside Canada are enjoying consistent success. Harry Chemko, chief executive officer of Vancouver-based Elastic Path Software Inc., and Jason Billingsley, vice-president, innovation, built the business into a $10-million company, with 85% of its revenue […]
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If you’re new here, welcome! And thanks for subscribing to Get Elastic. Friday is Blogger Digest day where we highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.
Being Halloween and all, let’s start off with Negotiate FAK or Bleed to Death - the latest entry by Maxim Mironov who blogs regularly about how to save millions by optimizing your ecommerce fulfillment. Don’t be scared if you don’t know what FAK stands for, Maxim explains it.
Alexander Interactive examines several recent articles regarding free shipping this holiday season, including USA Today, the New York Times and Ad Age and provides 8 solid recommendations in its white paper Free Shipping: Holiday Hit or Headache?. (This link points to the online version, no download required).
On the Practical Ecommerce blog, Brian Getting tackles the web designer’s nemesis - cross-browser compatibility problems with his own 3 group […]
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Last Halloween we actually commissioned a local caricaturist to cook up something out of his Doodle Labs, and the result was “Ghoulgle!”
Since we have about 5,000 more subscribers this year than last, I figured we could get away with posting this one again. (If you caught this in your feed reader the first time around, we thank you for pulling through an entire year with us, and if you email your physical address to linda.bustos @ elasticpath.com, I’ll pull a Rackspace and send you a hand-written note).
Although today’s posts are a departure from our usual content here, don’t worry - we’ll be back tomorrow with regularly scheduled programming (Friday’s Blogger Digest) and ecommerce tips, tricks and treats (I mean, trends) on Monday.
Next Free Ecommerce Webinar…
Multi-Store Retailing Online: Perks and Pitfalls November 19th, 2008 @ 9am PT/12pm ET
Panelist: Jason Billingsley, VP Innovation, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend…
You may also like […]
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From the press release:
Revenue for the Interactive Services segment grew 14.7 percent to $62.6 million. Segment profit was $12.8 million compared with $8.7 million during the same period a year earlier.
The growth at Interactive Services is attributable to increased user traffic and higher referral fee revenue at Shopzilla, and an increase in energy switching activity during the period in the United Kingdom for uSwitch.
This compares with Q2 revenue of $66.9 million and segment profit of $15.1 million (PDF link).
These results are a positive sign for the industry in the face of Shopping.com’s troubles as reported by eBay in its Q3 2008 call.
The results are also a bit of a surprise to me…if Shopping.com was really affected by “changes made by search engines that disrupted shopping’s traffic.” (from the eBay Q3 Earnings Call), why wasn’t Shopzilla? Were these “changes” to PPC listings or organic listings? I believe that eBay was probably […]
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Hat tip to Chad White’s Retail Email Blog for finding this email from Crutchfield’s CEO Bill Crutchfield, which is also available on the Crutchfield website.
As Chad puts it: “In light of Circuit City’s woes, Crutchfield wants to reassure their customers that they are well-positioned financially to survive the current recession—and therefore safe to shop at this holiday season. They have a pretty reassuring story to tell.”
Dear Valued Customer,
The international financial crisis is weighing heavily on all of us. As consumers, one factor that we all need to consider is the stability of the companies with whom we do business. In the current economic climate, many retailers will stumble and some will even fail. For that reason, I personally want to explain Crutchfield’s unique situation.
For many years, I have been concerned about the growing credit bubble. It was obvious to me that it was unsustainable and […]
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If you follow Get Elastic and the ecommerce marketing world, you won’t want to miss 2 back-to-back webinars by our friends at Sitebrand, Future Now and Marketing Experiments:
Your Website and First Time Visitors…Friend or Foe?
Presented by Sitebrand and New York Times best-selling author, Bryan Eisenberg
Thursday, October 30 @ 2pm EST, 11am PST
First time represent on average 60 to 80 percent of all visitors, with a conversion rate significantly lower than site average. They’re also the most expensive visitor to your site. So making your site the first time visitor friend versus foe needs to be a top priority.
Learn key steps to converting first time visitors, including:
1. Using data to build first-time customer personas
2. Building messaging that engages first-time visitor segments / personas
3. Mapping site real estate around your messaging
4. Launching your cycle, watching results, and planning for […]
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How will the uncertain economy affect consumer spending this holiday season?
Today’s post is a roundup of recent consumer research and forecasts on how much consumers expect to spend, what they’re looking for and where they plan to get it. It’s interesting but not surprising how some results really vary and even contradict each other (e.g. gift cards are hot, gift cards are not).
This research can’t make decisions for you but it might help you think through your customer segments (and personas) and consider how different types of consumers (what motivates them in a tough economy) experience your site/email offers and messaging.
For example, if you are Musician’s Friend and your customer typically buys music supplies for themselves — if gift givers love to give apparel and gift cards, you might market to your existing customer pushing those items along with an incentive like a gift card rebate to use for […]
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