For you PPC rockstars, if you want to go after the long tail of gift finding search this holiday, you can build a massive keyword list using this keyword permutation tool, which will create just under 12,000 keyword phrases to bid on. Permutations are all the possible combinations of your first, second, third terms and so on.
Disclaimer: I’m just posting this to show you what’s possible, this is not a recommendation for your search campaign. You have to consider whether it’s worth your time to manage these keywords - setting bids, creating Ad Groups, selecting landing pages, writing ads etc. I almost want to say “for entertainment purposes only…”
How To Use The List
Copy and paste the keywords from the spreadsheet below and paste HOLIDAYS into List 1, GIFT TERMS into List 2 and RECIPIENTS into List 3. Don’t check off stemmings, and check off “Exact […]
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Later this week, Jason Billingsley will be presenting a Star Wars themed talk titled: E-Commerce “Must-Haves” and “Should Haves” for the Small, Medium and Growing Business at Online Market World. I had a peek at the slide deck, and I have to say it looks entertainingly brilliant.
This session is one of 3 that make up the Online Market World eCommerce Technology Module (thanks to Bernardine Wu from FitForCommerce for pulling this all together). These sessions are of special interest to E-commerce managers, IT managers, Web/hosting/infrastructure managers, CFOs and lead web design/development managers.
Here are the details:
Focus: While e-marketers, e-merchandisers and customer experience managers are focused on the storefront-like customer experience, the e-commerce/technology manager needs to keep the infrastructure operating flawlessly while providing the flexibility and adeptness to offer up the customer experiences and e-commerce capabilities needed to stay competitive. This module will cover relevant topics important to e-commerce/technology professionals […]
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I honestly hate sitting through the eBay Town Hall meetings, but John over at ColderICE seems to enjoy it, so I’m taking the lazy man’s approach to this and posting a link to his post.
John, posted an audio segment on his TwitWall (don’t ask) about eBay’s marketing plans for the 4th quarter. It looks like they are committed to Internet advertising through Google; et al, coupons and PR — I’m just overwhelmed by that plan.
Here is the link. Give her a listen and then give me your 15% in the comments section.
It looks like they have already begun the adwords campaign.
Just my 15%
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One of the many retail emails I subscribe to is Rampage, which recently notified its mailing list of a new brand called Golden State (separate e-store).
I’ve been a long-time follower of Chad White’s Retail Email Blog, and recall he’s commented a couple times on introducing sister brands in his AM Inbox column, including Gap’s Piperlime, Oriental Trading’s Terry Village and Harry and David’s Wolferman’s brand.
Gap / Piperlime
Oriental Trading / Terry Village
Harry and David / Wolferman’s
Chad said of the Oriental Trading example:
Oriental Trading gives us a good example of how to introduce your subscribers to a sister brand with a dedicated email. First, the email arrived with its usual sender name and address, so it’s instantly recognizable as coming from Oriental Trading. Second, it carries their usual Oriental Trading logo and header—again, guaranteeing that the email is recognized as coming from Oriental Trading. And third, they offer […]
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As eBay continues to struggle and small sellers search to find a home for their product, Bonanzle seems to getting some traction and growing nicely.
Some Recent Stats:
Nearly 3,000 users (on Sept 19th they had 1700)
122,000 listings (on Sept 19th they had 58,000)
Alexa Ranking is 225,199 an improvement from 344,257 on Sept 19th.
They are averaging 3,000 unique visitors a day and 4,000 visits with 40,000 page views on a daily basis.
Most importantly, GMV (General Merchandise Value) is growing daily
According to Bonanzle:
Bonanzle sellers, eager to escape eBay’s moves against smaller stores, have collectively rolled up their sleeves to help build Bonanzle as their new home. Bonanzle Forums are regularly filled with sellers collaborating on grassroots marketing ideas, including one recent thread that had more than 50 sellers volunteering their personal time and resources to promote Bonanzle. As Bonanzle seller cleosgreatdeals puts it, “The unique item market is what Pierre had in mind for […]
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Agenda for the PeSA/ECMTA conference to be held in San Francisco on Oct. 1st. This event is free with pre-registration.
10:00 - 10:45 eBay
10:50am - 11:35am Overstock AuctionsSpeaker: Doug Minnick, Director, Overstock AuctionsTopic: New vision and product enhancements at your requestDescription: Enhancements to Overstock Auctions will include increased fraud protection, checkout process improvements, more third-party integrated payment options and the addition of bid cancellation and retraction. Overstock Auctions plans to integrate many of the site changes as early as November in time for buyers and sellers to capitalize on them during the holiday shopping rush.
11:40am - 12:15pm Amazon ServicesDescription: How to sell your products on Amazon, best practices for selling over the holidays, and new Amazon Services to help you grow your business.
1:00pm - 1:30pm VendioSpeaker: Michael Levit, EVP Marketing, Vendio and DealioTopic: Multi-Channel Selling StrategiesDescription: There are more selling options than ever ranging from large marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, to a comparison shopping sites, […]
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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.
Thanks to all our awesome blog subscribers, we crossed a major milestone of 5,000 subscribers this week!
This week’s roundup covers 2 weeks as Jason and I were gallavanting last Friday with the Zappos crew in Henderson, Nevada. It was an awesome time, such a neat company. We were in the area for Shop.org that week and you can catch up with my posts for the Shop.org blog here. We could really use some discussion around the carousel navigation debate, who’s brave?
The blogosphere was set a-buzz after Google came out to recommend not using rewrite for dynamic URLs. Many webmasters and search professionals were skeptical that it was good advice, and Rand […]
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Amazon DevPay is pretty cool. It allows developers to use Amazon’s billing and account management to layer their own business models on top of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Developers using DevPay include SmugMug (for SmugVault), Wowza Media Systems, Red Hat, and SearchBlox.
Earlier today we rolled out a brand new release of DevPay. The new release has two important new features, lower fees and reduced risk.
How, you may ask, are lower fees a feature? Well, it turns out that many developers would like to use DevPay to simply pass their actual AWS charges through to their customers without marking them up. The new release makes this possible because the 3% DevPay fee is now charged only on the value added by the developer. There’s still a 30 cent fee for processing each payment.
The new fee structure will be of value to developers using DevPay on top of EC2 because […]
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With all the talk about impending layoffs at eBay and Yahoo, I thought it might be a good time to read what Guy Kawasaki had to say, about laying off employees back in 2006. He directed the post to executives, about how to effectively layoff employees, so many of his ideas sound a little harsh. I honestly think, if layoffs are to happen then he makes some very valid points. Layoffs are already harsh, so don’t botch the layoff and make it worse. Hopefully eBay and Yahoo managers take some of these suggestions to heart as they prepare for the coming layoffs.
Some key quotes:
#3 - “Move fast. One hour after your management team discusses the need to layoff employees, the entire company will know that something is happening. If you think you need to layoff people, then do so because it’s unlikely that a miracle will happen. Once people “know” […]
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This is a guest post by Maxim Mironov of OptimaLogica.
Are you an adventurous person? Have you ever dreamed of finding a pirate chest full of treasure? Well, I’ve got a secret map pointing to the treasures hidden inside your own company. You’ll need to dig a bit, but any pirate treasure that’s worth finding is certainly worth doing a little digging for, right?
Verifying your latitude and longitude
Print out your Profits and Losses statements for one of your slow months. Express your numbers as percent of Net Revenue and compare with these benchmarks:
COGS
Shipping Cost
Lost Revenue = Gross - Net (cancellations, returns, damaged in transit, fraud etc.)
Most retail companies, regardless of product mix, can keep Gross Margin at 35%, Net Margin above 10% and grow at 50% a year. Are you there yet? Hold tight, off we go!
Island of COGS
I bet your Cost of Goods Sold is lower than you […]
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