eCommerce and

Welcome to this week in eCommerce and Entrepreneurship, take a look cause the world of eCommerce is getting more interesting by the week.

• Brainstorming for keywords can be tough especially if you or your search marketer has hit their own form of writers block.  Search Engine Journal put out a list of tools to help with keyword generation. 
• “The Churchill Club of Silicon Valley just wrapped up one of its most anticipated events: the Annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate. Five well-known and opinionated venture capitalists weighed in on what trends will take flight and what trends will fizzle out in the months ahead.” …more 
• I am not a fan of the Dallas Mavericks nor am I really a fan of Mark Cuban, not for any particular reason other than the fact that I am a Laker fan.  As a fan of the competition, one tends to feel a little sour towards the Mavericks owner.  As you may know though, he is one of us, an ecommerce nerd.  This week he pondered about how to beat Google, and what he came up with may interest you. 
• It is no secret that companies have discovered that employee health and well being cuts out on the amount of sick days used which cuts costs and increases productivity.  What about the employees that just plain play hooky?  Well a new technology has surfaced that can detect when an employee is lying over the phone.  From the article: “The technology means someone phoning in for a sickie will speak not to a sympathetic secretary but to a computer set up to check whether their voice is steady and reliable.” 
• In response to New York tax laws, Overstock.com has cancelled all relationships with affiliates in New York.

As you can tell I have been on a Google Webmaster Central kick lately. The Google Webmaster Central blog has collected some of their best and most informational posts and created the 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts. Seeing this collection has reminded me of some of the search engine optimization and search engine marketing hot issues, some of my favorites being...

Flash Best Practices 

While many were glad to see Google address this, flash has been something that many SEO's stay away from like the plague. While there are several acceptable methods for optimizing a flash website none are particularly easy and sometimes results are hard to glean. There were always questions as to whether the search engines would accept these optimization techniques or whether they would learn to read flash, both seem to have been addressed over time.

The Supplemental Index 

I remember several tools which could be used to see how many pages a website had in the Google supplemental index and I remember even more posts and discussions as to the use of the supplemental index and getting web pages out of it. I think many released a sigh of relief when Google disbanded its use so that website owners had one less thing to worry about. 

Duplicate Content 

The mention of duplicate content and penalties associated with it used to be a huge issue for many, especially those with larges websites which may have several overlapping pages. I was more than relieved when I learned that no penalties were actually associated with duplicate content but simply Google selecting which page to show for related searches. After many have spread the word about duplicate content this is still an issue that comes up and needs clarification. Many SEO's are still addressing duplicated content in that removing it or fixing the problem is great but getting Google to select the right version to show in searches may be more important. 

In my last post about showrooms I discussed the question “Who decides what the customer wants to see in a showroom?” We will wrap up this series of showroom questions today, with the last question I proposed, “How can the manufacturer showroom dollars be better spent?”

It’s no secret that manufacturers partner with wholesalers for their showroom space. It’s the details of the incentive programs offered for that space that are written on the backs of napkins, a give and take relationship that is entrenched in the plumbing industry’s brick and mortar traditions.

So how can those incentive program dollars be better spent to reach a national, nay international, market with a complete breadth and depth of product? If you have read my previous posts you may have guessed that I would answer this question with the statement: “partnering with smart eCommerce retailers”.  Smart eCommerce retailers have the ability to showcase an entire product line to a robust demographic.

Search Engine Optimization

Organic search engine results may not cost marketing dollars in a traditional sense, but the cost of a successful SEO campaign isn’t cheap. A successful SEO campaign at minimum will take manpower, research, link building, and analysis.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked by potential suppliers why they shouldn’t just throw up a web site on their own. There are certainly plenty of examples of that.

It takes a lot of smart people working 40+ hours a week before you turn the heads of Google, Yahoo, AOL, or MSN. Semoz.org’s Rand Fishkin comments on What Makes SEO & SEM So Damn Hard.

Advertising Campaigns

Ranking well organically on Google, as well as all of the major search engines, can make a significant impact on an advertising campaign, Google specifically commands the most market share of any search engine and therefore can make a huge difference.  Google continues to grow and so do the dollars spent on keyword marketing campaigns. Competition gets nasty when you’re talking about less than 11 advertised spots on the first result page of any given Google search. Actual cost of advertising dollars aside, which is a significant cost, keyword management takes time and resources as well. Just look at the number of blogs on the subject.

But the payoff of smart SEO & SEM is priceless; consider the following screenshot for instance…

 

Kudos to our SEO team; 10 of 15 results in the above search direct the customer to PlumberSurplus.com.

For this search on Google, we are the top sponsored link, and the top three Google Product search results, and the top organic result.  The same search returns results for our product on Amazon, AOL Shopping, and multiple comparison shopping engines.

Comparison Engines

Some comparison engines are built around a customers desire to get right to the bottom line: the product they are searching for at the best possible price. Aggressive incentive programs, like offering free shipping, rebates, gift rewards, the entire product offering, etc. assure successful results in the retailer’s ability to provide the product at a reasonable market price. Further, this drives out those competing exclusively on slashing price, in that they may not have all of the items the consumer is looking for or the ability to ship in a fair amount of time with proper packaging, or qualified customer service representatives; allowing those of us with a complete compliment of core competencies to better build the products branding.

Co-Operative Promotions

Who doesn’t like a great deal?  From our experience we know that our customers do.  The cost to the manufacturer to run a traditional promotion goes beyond lower product margins; it can be some of the items that I listed above such as rebates, gift rewards and more. Getting the promotion to the wholesaler with supportive promotional materials is significant. This is not the case for eCommerce, we don’t need physical banners to hang or flyers or handouts, all of our ads can be done electronically, without additional printing or shipping costs. PlumberSurplus.com recently ran a President’s Day Free Shipping co-operative promotion on our Belle Foret offering for one week. This simple promotion saw an increase of 44% in sales over the prior week with no upfront cost.

Link Bait

Incentives go beyond simple dollars in a co-operative business relationship. Simple gestures like providing authorized retailer links from the manufacturer’s web site are invaluable. Jennifer Laycock explains that these links convey a stronger message than “here’s where you can buy our product”.  Rather, it’s a recommendation of the services that follow the click.

Conclusions

The use of the internet is a daily reality for an estimated 301,139,947 end users. Manufacturers across our country spend their day turning out products that are identifiable as A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s.  In lemans terms their most popular product offering is referred to as their A’s and B’s and so on.  In one Supply Chain Manager’s opinion it’s time for those same manufacturers to look beyond the traditional distribution to market and consider a few select eCommerce napkins.

Take a look at this week’s recap in eCommerce.

• The Microsoft and Yahoo deal has floundered, but Microsoft has a plan B.  Plan B includes making the case that search advertising is overrated and that display advertising is the wave of the future.
• Earn more than $3000 a month in Paypal Payments?  Find out how you can save money here. 
• eCommerce gurus are gracious enough to give tips to the rest of us about how to deal with information overflow. 
• On May 15th 2008 say goodbye to “Hello”. 
• While the Lakers may be smashing the Utah Jazz in the NBA playoffs, Carlos Boozer has other reasons to celebrate.  Overstock.com just signed the NBA All-Star to a four year public relations campaign. 

If you didn't already read Challenges of an Internet Retailer’s VOIP Implementation, then you may want to take a quick glance at that post to catch up on our previous issues.

Our decision to use the Grandstream GXP-2000 phones for our VOIP users had been haunting us for some time when a friend of mine recently “donated” a spare Cisco 7960 and a few Polycom IP phones to use. I was naturally excited to plug in phones that I knew were renowned for quality and performance. Both phones were well documented in the TrixBox community and I fully expected to be up and running in minutes. So I gave the Polycom’s a whirl: plugged them in, checked the IP address, logged in to each phone through a web interface and updated all of the settings that I expected to make them work with our TrixBox (version 2.5) implementation. Easy. They worked well. Done.

Then, excited like a kid at Christmas, I jumped over to the Cisco 7960, plugged it in, checked the IP address, opened a browser… “cannot display the webpage”. Oh. OK. So Cisco doesn’t have a user friendly web interface for the 7960. No problem. So I dove into settings on the phone. Cisco makes a great product and from the granularity and variety of options, it’s clear that this phone can be customized to work well with our system. So I manually plugged away on settings using the phone’s dial pad and rebooted the phone. Now, the phone won’t register with the TrixBox host. Hmmm. Everything seems correct. Maybe I missed a period somewhere… nope. So I tried changing a few settings and rebooting… nope. So I tried changing settings a half dozen or so more times…nope. OK, going to the TrixBox forums. A search for 7960 yields 469 results. OK, no problem. So I dig away, reading through numerous setup walkthroughs.

Finally, I come across a forum where a user posts a setup question relating to the same issue that I am having. He posted on 12/22/2006. The first reply to his post is a “bumped” response that was posted on 3/24/2008 with a very simple solution.

Seriously? It took 15 months to find the solution? Wow.

So, I didn’t want anyone else to have to go through the trouble of digging, here’s what got my Cisco 7960 to work with my implementation of TrixBox:

1. From the TrixBox command line, type “setup-cisco” 
2. Open http://trixboxhostname/maint 
3. In the Asterisk menu, select Endpoint Manager 
4. Click Cisco phones then click Add Phone 
5. Select the appropriate extension, phone type, and enter the phone’s MAC address 
6. In the Asterisk menu, select Config Edit 
7. Click /tftpboot then click SIPDefault.cnf 
8. In the edit window, find:
   
   • # NAT/Firewall Traversal
     nat_enable: "0"
   • and change the “0” to “1” (This is the step I was missing)
9. Manually configure your 7960 to point to your TrixBox host’s IP for tftpboot
10. Reboot your 7960

Tada!  It should work.

This week, "The Official Google Analytics Blog" posted an article dedicated to website optimization.  The article, authored by Laura Melahn from the Google Analytics Team and Jon Stona from the Website Optimizer Team, focuses on optimizing websites for conversion utilizing Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics.

Early on in the post, the authors clarify the difference between website optimization and search-engine optimization by defining both terms.  In this clarification, Google defines search engine optimization as the following:

• Search-engine optimization means adjusting the content of your site so it ranks higher in the list of search results for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.

Now, it's no epiphany that Google's definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses heavily on site content, since the user experience exiting Google is at the top of their priority list.  However, the noticeably absent elements of raw link juice, anchor text weight and domain authority is interesting.  In general, when site owners think about Search Engine Optimization, as Google mentions, their primary objective is to be sure that their site "ranks higher in the list of search results for a particular keyword or keyword phrase".  However, for the most part, the term Search Engine Optimization is utilized in association with this goal, namely ranking higher, versus in association to an attribute that contributes to this goal, such as adjusting content.  This goal can be reached by improving a healthy amount of arenas, only one of which is site content.  Although Google's definition is likely accurate from a historical perspective, if Search Engine Optimization has become more synonymous with ranking higher than with adjusting content, and ranking higher is influenced by a slew factors, some of which arguably have more or less influence than content, maybe the definition of Search Engine Optimization should be something like the following:

• Search-engine optimization means adjusting the content of doing things like W, X, Y, and  Z to your site so it ranks higher in the list of search results for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. 

Where W might be "adjusting content", X might be "building inbound links", Y might be "earning domain trust", Z might be "creating new content" and so forth.

This definition focuses on the goal and includes some of the attributes that contribute toward reaching that goal.  This approach would certainly align with industry practice.  Companies that provide Search Engine Optimization services typically provide a laundry list of ways for you to spend money.  Many firms who tout themselves as Search Engine Optimization companies provide a slew of services, including "adjusting the content of your site".  However, few firms run around touting themselves as, say,  a Link Building company, and provide search engine optimization (content adjustment) services as well.

Maybe it's just semantics...

These come out on Friday’s so I’d like wish everyone a happy Cinco de Mayo now, while we take a look at my favorite highlights in the exciting world of eCommerce.

• The “R” word is being used more and more frequently as of late, but not all industries are feeling the hurt of higher gas prices and harder economic times. 
• Think that an online retailer that claims they have a 20.9% conversion rate is bogus?  Marketing Pilgrim explains what they are doing to experience this kind of success. 
• The New York tax law was the buzz of the industry last week, but online retailers are fighting back with lawsuits. 
• There is so much to think about and research when thinking about expanding abroad.  This blog put some valuable articles in one post. 
• Kindle is finally ready to ship!
  

The promotional potential in packaging and shipping a product can be immense, when materials are utilized correctly. PlumberSurplus.com used to offer each of our suppliers branded packing tape.  Each package they shipped for us, they would use our tape, with our logo on it. It was a great selling point, suppliers loved it, and we got our name plastered on thousands of shipments that went to the United States and Canada. Sounds like a win–win situation right?

Wrong.

Let me recap for you the problems we ran into. First, we started growing so quickly that we could hardly keep our suppliers stocked with enough tape. We seemed to continuously have boxes of branded tape on order from our vendor. Second, what had been purposed as a several hundred dollar promotional opportunity quickly became a several thousand dollar promotional opportunity. We were willing to keep supplying the tape, and did, in fact, for a few years until we started monitoring returns. This was the third and final problem. We began to notice that our returns were coming back, not with our branded tape used as a seal across the box, appropriate for branding our name on the box, but it was being used to hold boxes together! Any promotional aspect went right out the window when the tape was so overlaid that you could not read the text. We began to closely monitor returns for “tape abuse” and found that many suppliers were taking advantage of the branded tape. We decided to pull the branded tape from suppliers, and instead asked that they use the traditional clear packing tape that they use on the rest of their shipments.

Now, this is not to say that if you have only a couple facilities that make up your shipping departments, that you cannot control the use of the branded tape in such a way that it holds promotional value. In fact, in our infancy the branded tape was a great feature for us to utilize. 

Anthony Abram has written several articles on, and or related to, packing tape, and its promotional benefits. I would recommend reading them before making your decision.

In his article “Packing Tape Facilitates Commerce” Anthony strongly emphasizes the use of tape over other box sealants, and branded tape over clear packing tape. I would agree with him on all points, until the promotional value becomes mute due to abuse. He even explains how the packages are prime real-estate for your logo. 

So, how does PlumberSurplus.com take advantage of the prime real-estate we have from shipping thousands of products around the country? We have began investigating the use of branded stickers, much like you already see on boxes. Kohler uses an embossed foil sticker, UPS utilizes colored stickers to designate different levels of services, and many other manufacturers use branded stickers to complete their packaging. A sticker offers the same promotional potential as tape. You can put your logo, contact information, slogan, etc. on the sticker, and you can better monitor their use by instructing that suppliers are to put one sticker on the top of each package. You can even monitor their use, down to the sticker by tracking how many stickers each supplier is sent, how many orders they have processed and the number of boxes used per order. In this example, you would be able to tell when a supplier is running low because you will be able to see that you sent 500 stickers, and they have shipped 450 orders, with one box used per order.

As far as cost goes, from our research, the difference between the cost of tape on a box, and the cost of a sticker per box is miniscule. If you are questioning the promotional potential for your company in branded tape, the main factors to analyze are cost and who is going to be using it. If you have control over the output, branded tape is a great promotional avenue.

What’s in a name? err, well, what’s in changing a name?

If you’ve been living in a cave you may not be aware that we recently launched OutdoorPros.com.  Ok, given the budget for our PR blitz you may get a pass on being up to speed with our new site.  There’s lots to discuss related to the strategy behind this new venture and the execution of our plan, but I’d like to boil this post down to one of the more practical aspects of this step in our growth.

When our plans to launch into a new industry began to take shape my mind quickly began running through some of the ancillary components of the effort.  Sure, we needed to build the site, establish supply, prepare marketing campaigns, and so forth, but we also needed to decide how to organize our business entity, finances, accounting, and banking around two, at that time distinct, businesses.

Long story short, we ultimately decided to create a parent company to house our various website businesses.  This decision combined with other factors has thrust us into the throws of upgrading our accounting system, changing banks, and establishing financial and operational reporting and metrics at the parent and child organizational levels.

Wow, that’s a long intro to present a few tips I hope are helpful if you find yourself in a position to change your business name.  You see, in the midst of all these dominoes, one task was to change our name and form the parent/child entities.

Our business machine has been chugging along for a while now and when I dove into our files titled “business formation”, “operating agreement”, “meeting minutes”, “business license”, etc. I quickly found myself in a pile of paperwork.  After having plowed my way through, with much help from fellow blogger Ellen, we nursed our paper cuts and got the process completed.  So, without further ado, here are the steps/tidbits presented in the order we attacked the change:

1. Make sure you can secure the necessary domain names and do so.  This is obvious to the online community by now.  If you can’t get the domain names, and I’m not talking about some slightly off version of them, pick a different name. 


2. Depending on the type of business entity you have, ours is an LLC, it may be wise to document the meeting minutes when members voted to accept the motion to change the company name.  Along these lines, this would be a good time to challenge your business type given that the new name may represent significant changes.  It may be time to grow out of that sole proprietor status and into a single member LLC, or an S-Corp.  Consult your attorney and accountant; we certainly did before deciding to stick with the LLC. 


3. Consider updating any Operating Agreement or Partnership Agreement you may have.  We were able to add a simple addendum to make the name change.  It’s a simple process and can keep the flow of changes well documented and straight forward. 


4. And the fun part… here is an overview of some agencies we dealt with to make the change, as a California LLC:
   
   • We filed with the Secretary of State to change the name of the LLC to the new parent company name.
   • We were able to keep our existing Federal Employer Identification Number (EIN) but needed to change the name.
   • We were able to keep our existing State Employer Identification Number (SEIN) with the Employment Development Department (EDD) but needed to change the name.
   • We filed for Fictitious Business Names, or DBA’s, in the name of the parent company and the two sites we currently operate with the new parent company as the registrant.
   • We filed for a business license in each Fictitious Business Name.
   • We updated our seller’s permit with the Board of Equalization.
     


5. Finally, plan a fun afternoon of errands.  The county building, the city building, the post office, some shady underground newspaper company that writes your credit card number on a post-it with a crayon, and you are done!
   

I am happy to say that today is intern appreciation day at the SurPlex.  An excellent lunch, a basketball tournament, foosball and video games will be enjoyed this afternoon; I, for one, am quite excited.  Let’s get down to the business of eCommerce, and check out my updates for the week.

• Free sales-tax will no longer be a benefit of shopping online in New York. 
• Amazon uses friends to help create product recommendations, and a few other tools you may not be aware of. 
• Blockbuster throws Netflix for a loop by offering to purchase Circuit City. 
• Apple may be more susceptible to economic slow down in the United States because of their presence is strongest here as opposed to overseas. 
• Microsoft is testing Live Mesh, a system that enables users to synchronize their handheld devices and computers by way of an internet based application.