eCommerce and

If you are reading this then you made it through Black Friday and Cyber Monday… Congratulations!

• MySpace users may want to know what Michael Wolff, a friend of the author of the new Rupert Murdoch biography, is saying about them.  Michael was interviewed by BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine and in an effort to make his point about the value of MySpace he stated, “I think it is--if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.”  To get a more complete understanding of Wolff's opinion here is the full article.
• WebGuild posted a presentation by French consulting firm FaberNovel.  The presentation outlines Google's strategies from a high level perspective.  WebGuild realizes that the presentation has inaccuracies, but it’s interesting nonetheless.





• You know how some phones can recognize the song you are playing and make it available for download even if you don’t know the artist, title etc.  Amazon is experimenting with a similar function called “Amazon Remembers” and is rolling out the experimental tool with their new iPhone application.  According to the article, “The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals."
• The Silicon Alley Insider posted a study by TubeMogul which shows that website visitors that view video don’t pay attention for long.
  
• Motrin may want to poll consumers before putting an ad on Twitter ever again.  They recently turned off a large consumer audience with this ad.  Moms were the obvious target audience, but it backfired.  Statements like, “Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion," and “it totally makes me look like an official mom” caused blogging moms to complain to Twitter about the ad.  A surprised Motrin promptly took the ad down.  In Michael Leis blog he evaluates the strategy behind the ad and areas where Motrin can improve.  Leis makes a key point when he says, “Motrin’s messaging came at a time when many people were reconciling the real pain of the financial realities of this holiday season.”

Previous installments of our “Affiliate Watch” series have had a strong focus on improvements that can be made by the affiliates.  We have touched on design, functionality, best practices, content and more as it pertains to publisher improvements.  Last month ShareASale hosted the ShareASale Annual Think Tank, which proved to be valuable for both publishers and merchants.  Part of the conference was dedicated to merchant evaluations of their programs by handpicked affiliates.  Publishers that evaluated our program were forthcoming, thoughtful and constructive.  In an effort to share the knowledge we came home with I decided to focus this month’s affiliate post on improvements, changes, and strategies that can be adopted by the merchant to improve their program for their publishers.

To Review or Not: Approving and Declining Applicants

At the time of the conference our program was set up for manual approvals.  Having our program set up this way meant that we would view the affiliate websites prior to acceptance and would then actively approve or decline the websites based on our review.  One of the recommendations that we received was to set the program up to auto approve affiliates.  This method has benefits and detriments associated with it.  One issue was saw was that we could potentially accept a publisher that we wouldn’t want representing our company or our product offerings.  On the flip side we realized the advantages given to the affiliates that were accepted right away.  If an affiliate applies for a program then they are most likely focusing on expanding their marketing efforts, if they have to wait for an approval they are likely going to move on to another merchant that doesn’t make them wait to get started.  By the time their approval is sent they may have already moved on to another category, focus, etc. and may never end up marketing a merchant’s product.  In addition to the auto approval include banners in your approval emails so that the publisher immediately has content with which to work.  While we still have to be careful about who markets our websites and products, it’s much easier for the affiliate manager to review the website when they convert since the majority of publishers in your program may never do so.  If the affiliate is not in compliance of your terms then managers can end the relationship at this time.

Pump Up the Bio

Your merchant bio is one of the pieces of information that an affiliate will review before applying to your program.  Identify program features that are appealing to potential applicants and make sure that they are listed here.  One piece of information that we were missing from our bio was that we allow PPC advertising, while we have certain restrictions many publishers are excited to see this.  A couple of other carrots we added were our average order value (AOV) and our conversion rate, both which can give the publisher an idea of how well they can do under our program.

Merchants Be Aware

I hope that all merchants review affiliate orders every month and reverse commissions for cancelled sales, if not then this is a good place to start saving money.  For all merchants that are on more than one affiliate network know that it is possible that you have paid duplicate commissions to affiliates for a single sale.  Also note that if a publisher is in your program on both affiliate networks they are likely getting paid duplicate commissions for every sale they refer.  We have found that best practice for solving this issue is to award the commission to the affiliate with the last click before the sale.  Many affiliate networks can assist merchants in setting up parameters to make this possible.  In doing so the merchant is considered to be selectively choosing when to display tracking code.  So while this is considered best practice and the fairest way to pay out commissions some networks do not allow merchants to selectively display their tracking codes.  If you are on one of these networks then you can either manually review the transactions on both networks and review your data to see which affiliate should receive the commission for the transaction, or chalk it up to a loss.  Depending on the size of your catalog and your program this loss could be far greater than you may suspect.

Now is the time when we would normally give actionable take-aways for affiliates, today our recap is dedicated to merchants:

• Auto-Approvals give the affiliate the opportunity to work on marketing for the merchant right away.
• Reviewing affiliate websites at the point of conversion is far easier and less time consuming then reviewing every single application.
• Program approval emails can further the opportunity for immediate results when banners and promotions are included.
• Develop your bio in a way that is attractive for affiliates as they are likely the ones reviewing it.
• Review commissions paid out for cancelled orders; if you as the merchant are not getting the sale then the affiliate should not be getting the commission.
• Merchants that are on more than one network need to set up parameters for tracking sales, and attributing the commission to the affiliate that received the last click.
• Review the terms of your network as you may not be allowed to selectively show tracking.
• If you find that one of the networks you use doesn’t allow selective tracking then be sure to check for multiple commission payouts for a single sale.
  

Special thanks to the publishers that provided such great feedback:

Bob from RainmakerInteractive

Bill from Beaches and Towns

Kellie from AffiliateFairPlay

Angela from PowerReviews

Scott from MechMedia

Adam from CouponSurfer

Vinny from NYFalcon

Arlene from GettingAdamBack

Ratna from RedTagDeals

See you all next month!

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We recently made the decision to switch SEM bid management partners. It's not that something went awry with our previous partner, we just outgrew their product and it didn't make sense for us to make the switch to their product that would have fit our size. Fortunately an existing partner in another channel had a solution that leveraged bid technology that we were already familiar with. As we reviewed what worked, what didn't work, and what was missing, I put together the following list of items that were important to us in the decision making process.

1. Budget - This is probably the largest factor to consider when looking for new solutions, or when reevaluating your current solution. If you aren't looking for a different tool and are content with current performance, perhaps you can negotiate a lower rate or fee if you've been with a particular partner for a certain period of time. As we researched alternative solutions, we had to clearly define what our budget was. With a set budget, we could quickly eliminate the solutions we could not afford. No one can tell you that your organization can afford to spend more (this can also be a good bargaining point). Surely, there are some amazing partners in the SEM bid management arena, but with better tools typically comes higher prices. Our past partner had a flat monthly fee which was favorable, as we prefer fixed costs over variable costs and other pricing models. We could not afford to step up to our old partner's top product mainly due to price, and the new solution that we ultimately chose has a pricing model that is based on a revenue share instead of percent of ad spend.
2. Optimization Settings - If you are a sophisticated organization you will need the ability to optimize SEM campaigns against multiple objectives. Maximizing or optimizing just one variable won't scale or be as sufficient as your organization grows and matures. Also, look for a solution that will let you set targets at account, campaign and ad group levels. We previously used a portfolio based approach to target one goal for our account.  This was great at the beginning, but may not work well for some merchants, and eventually did not scale with our growth. Different product groups in our campaigns (with different margins and sales velocities) need different targets and our SEM tool needed to support this. 
3. Automation & Integration - If you add our growing product offering, multiple websites (and more planned), continuously changing product stock levels, and my lack of time (which is always diminishing) you find yourself with the need to have automated solutions to do the grunt work.  Not only do these solutions need to be automated, but they need to be easy to implement. The new solution offers automated URL tagging which is great because I shouldn't spend my time tagging tens of thousands of keyword URLs. This solution also offers tools to generate new keywords which aren't in your current inventory. How sweet is that! While I'm sleeping in on Saturday morning the system is finding new keywords for me that users are actually using. Another helpful feature we found to be extremely helpful was the ability to pause and resume keywords automatically based on actual inventory levels. Before, with the old system, I had to login and pause keywords and ad groups manually when we ran out of stock.  Often times the system wouldn’t update until a day or two after we actually ran out of the product. This meant we were potentially still spending dollars on products we couldn't sell because we didn't have them in stock. When the product came back in stock, I had to resume the paused keywords, and again there was often a delay until this update could be processed.
4. Monitoring Conversion Assists - With separate tools for CSEs and SEM, we had no visibility of conversions that came from multiple touch points. We would pause a keyword because it wasn’t profitable.  We would target different objectives for our CSE efforts but could not tie these efforts together for the best outcome. It's not that we were naive to this idea in the past; we just didn't have the resources to track this effectively. Now with CSE and SEM under the same roof, we can identify when users interact with our ads across multiple channels and sites. We won't kill a keyword because it doesn't convert by its lonesome, because we've observed this keyword as being an integral part of the conversion funnel. If you pull out a keyword in that funnel, the whole conversion path could fall apart.
5. Agility & Growth - The world of eCommere changes daily. Our business continually faces new and unique challenges. We need a partner who can grow with us and who can develop solutions to overcome newly discovered obstacles. As our business moves toward the next level in both sales and sophistication it was imperative that our partners can grow with us. Ask the SEM tool provider what their development and product release approach is?  Do they roll out releases every few weeks, or wait months before new features are released and bugs are corrected? Will this partnership grow stale before the length of your contract is up, or will it be a lasting relationship that goes for many years?

As we bid adieu to one partner, we welcome the other and look forward to success together. This is just our experience, limited as it may be, but I'd still like to hear what other aspects are important to you so comments are welcome...

I’m back!  Thanks Ryan so much for keeping our readers updated in the world of eCommerce, and reminding me and everyone else that I lost the Lakers bet.  I hope you all missed me as much as I missed you.

Let’s talk some eCommerce (said in the voice of Joel McHale from the Soup on E!): 

• J.C. Penney is blaming their ad agency for an ad that surfaced on YouTube featuring the sellers logo and slogan. The problem is that the ad called “Speed Dressing” promotes teen sex.  The retailer is still investigating the issue. Pennies may have a better chance of combating this problem in the future if the powers that be take a lesson from this week’s Whiteboard Friday on SEOmoz.  In this episode Will Critchlow demonstrates how those in powerful positions can manage their brand reputations on the down low. 
• Yesterday we talked a little bit about the DSW suit against Zappos.com.  Apparently the tactic is catching on as Hearts on Fire sues Blue Nile for a similar issue.  Seriously marketers, is this what we are resorting to for linkbait?  If we don’t nip this trend now people will start referring to us as ambulance chasing attorneys! 
• What is your MySpace or Facebook “FriendRank”?  Companies like SocialMedia Networks and 33Across are revamping advertising via social networks.  In the words of the founder of SocialMedia Networks “We're trying to make ads suck less in social networks”. 
• Want to save 90% on Microsoft Office 2007?  Well, a religious goods internet retailer in Korea has come up with the Microsoft Church Package and according to the ad it is a 90% savings. 
• Does it make anyone else sad that the human population seems to love seeing the mighty fall?  Well it brings me down, but I guess I am in the minority since blogs are already discussing the demise of companies like Apple and Google. 
• In case you aren’t getting your fix of eCommerce and Entrepreneurship here, I thought I would share the Entrepreneur blogs that have been chosen as the 15 worth reading.  Plus we wanted to give kudos to our friends over at Get Elastic for making the list.

Zappos.com has been all over the blogging world lately, mostly due to DSW's lawsuit.  Considering a lot of people in the eCommerce community are speculating that this is a linkbait ploy on DSW's part, Zappos may be benefiting from the links as well.  Zappos.com is also trying some traditional marketing campaigns that may surprise you.

A few weeks ago I had the "pleasure" of passing through security at Ontario International Airport. On this trip, I took a drastic tack from my classic approach. I packed light. Really light.  I'm talking one bag that satisfies as a carry on for a trip almost a week long. Although this is old school to many, this is a monumental feat for me. In the past, my philosophy was to toss it all in, and be quite certain I packed any options I'd want, than to spend any time at all figuring out what I actually needed. However, now that getting in and out of an airport, plowing through TSA security, and flying in general, has become the second most inefficient process on earth (second only to the continental plates shifting to create new land masses) I've had to evolve.

Quest Through Security

So I checked in, showed ID, showed luggage, got our boarding passes, showed ID again, and headed to the Field-O-Metal-Detectors.

The family goes through the metal detectors first, without any hiccups, then I send the stuff through the machines for them to retrieve on the other side.  Now, it's my turn.

I take my laptop out of it's bag and stick it in the bucket.  I empty my pockets.  Out goes the iPhone, the keys, the wallet, all into the bucket.  Let's see if I can make it through the metal detector...

Beeeeep.  Nope.

The TSA lady points at my face, but she's really trying to point behind me.  "Go back through the metal detector!", she admonishes.

While trying to figure out what I should ditch next, she yells, "Take off your belt!"  Belt ditched; in the bucket.  Back through the metal detector...

Beeeeep.  Nope.

"Back through!", she scolds.

"Take off your watch!"  Watch ditched; in the bucket.  Back through...

Beeeeep.  Nope.

The line behind me is gaining in length, and losing in patience.

"What else do you have?", she chides.  "Nothing", I retort, while slapping my pockets.

No ones happy.  Not me, her, the crowd behind me.  Actually, everyone's getting frustrated.

She has an epiphany and looks down.  I follow her eyes.  Crap, my sandals are still on.  I'm not sure why I didn't ditch them yet.  Maybe I forgot.  Maybe I thought since they were small, light, and open toe, they wouldn't matter.

"TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES!!!!", she cries.  Like I'm an idiot.  Like I want to go through the freakin' metal detector four freaking times.  Like I want my family to have to wait for me with all our stuff on the other side.  Like I want the whole damn airport hung up.

Frustratingly, very frustratingly, shoes ditched; in the bucket.  Right now, I pretty much hate the airport, hate TSA, hate metal detectors, and hate, well, shoes...

But, this time, before I go back through, I notice a familiar face in the bottom of the bucket.  It's Zappos.com.  Here is what I saw.

The Zappos X-Ray Bucket Advertisement

The ad says...

IT'S MAGIC!
KIND OF LIKE THE X-RAY MACHINE.
Zappos.com
POWERED by SERVICE
PUT A LITTLE ZAPPOS IN YOUR DAY
MILLIONS OF SHOES, CLOTHES and BAGS.

How ironic.  Zappos.com reminds me they sell shoes, just when I hate shoes. (As an aside, they also reminded me of those advertisements on grocery store carts in that section of the cart where a baby rides.  Those ads always have pictures of people that look really shady.)

What is Zappos trying to do?

Recently, Zappos dumped their free overnight shipping and their 110% Price Match Guarantee.  Since then, I've noticed a decent amount of Zappos marketing directed at branding and other marketing campaigns that has difficult to measure ROI, such as these x-ray buckets. So with this campaign, is there more than meets the eye?  Are they trying to do more than create brand awareness?

Maybe Zappos is hoping that I'll be thinking about Shoes and Zappos simultaneously so that the next time I think about shoes, I'll think of Zappos?  Now, that would be great, as long as I also don't think about how absolutely freaking ticked I was and attribute that attitude to Zappos.

Maybe they are targeting the customer that is thinking about how they wish they would have worn an easier pair of shoes to slip on and off?  In the moment people might think like that, but in the morning, on the way to the airport, do people decide what shoes they'll wear and take with them on a trip, based on which pair will be most easily removed at security?

Maybe Zappos is thinking that people are getting to the airport earlier and earlier due to airport security, delays, etc., and that they can influence them to pass the time doing some online shopping?  I spent all my time going back and forth through the metal detector so that didn't work for me.
Maybe the idea is to get people to start thinking about shopping at online stores even when they aren’t online.  This is especially important since shoes are traditionally something that people like to try on before they buy.  Hence, Zappos' absent restock fee and free returns shipping.

Good Idea?

So is it a good idea for Zappos.com to remind me that they sell shoes, just when I hate shoes.  Good question.  I don't know the answer.  I know they convinced me to write a blog post about them.  AHA!  THAT'S IT!  It's a viral marketing campaign secretly targeting eCommerce bloggers who Zappos knows will question the value of their campaign.  Genius.  Just Genius.

By the way, once I ditched the shoes, it was smooth sailing through the metal detector.  Dang steel toe sandals... 

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!
  

At the end of my senior year of high school I was awarded "Scholar Athlete", which came with a certificate published on an ink jet printer and something like $500 bucks.  Now, even though this was pre-steroid scandal, the award is pretty deceiving.  I'm way more scholar than I am athlete.  All the real jocks were, how do I put this lightly, academically challenged.  I think the athletics department just picked the student with the highest GPA, as long as he or she played any sport.  I played on the golf and tennis teams.  Well, actually, I "used" the golf team.  If you joined the golf team, you got to play at all the great local courses, for free, as often as you liked and use the driving range, for free, until they shut off the lights.  I didn't care as much about our team, which wasn't that great anyway, as I did about free golf.

Hang with me, eCommerce-ville just ahead.

The scholar athlete award is so deceiving that heading to college, I couldn't have cared less about sports.  However, once I stepped foot on USC's campus and started mainlining the Koolaid, my metamorphosis into a college football feen went full throttle.  Long story short, now I'm a massive USC football fan.  This addiction has led me to become a huge college football fan.  Being a college football fan means I hang out with people who like pro football; which means I end up watching the Super Bowl.  Inevitably, I annually find myself inhaling a carb-infused feast known as pizza.  It's a natural downward spiral.

Hooray, entering eCommerce-ville!  Population: Many hungry sports fans.

Integrating Offline Advertising with Search Engine Marketing

Following the Super Bowl earlier this month, there's been some interesting chit chat in the blogoshphere discussing how well companies integrated their Super Bowl television commercials with their online presence.  With cost estimates for 30 second spots swirling up to $3 million, it seems critical for advertisers to take full advantage of their commercial exposure by intimately assimilating their online arenas.  After the game, Reprise Media published their 4th annual Search Marketing Scorecard (SMS) which ranks companies who buy Super Bowl commercials by their ability to integrate those commercials with their online presence in order to metric how prepared each company is to capitalize on online interest.  A healthy portion of the conversation has been centered around how the Super Bowl advertisers fared from a website visibility perspective.  More specifically, this conversation has analyzed URL visibility in the commercials, mentioning the URL, displaying or calling out the URL prominently, showing website screenshots and the advertiser's ability to drive traffic to their website.  Another notable portion of the conversation has centered around a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective.  The SEO conversation has analyzed whether advertiser's sites appear in search engine results for branded and non branded phrases associated with the campaign.  For anyone that did not catch the Super Bowl advertisements, Fox created a MySpace page housing all of the advertisements.  Although Fox and MySpace are siblings, both parented by News Corp., the general consensus seems to be that a more strategic SEO move would have been for Fox to host the commercial content on their own domain.  MySpace seems to be doing just fine on the traffic front.

Wait, isn't this post supposed to be about Pizza Hut and email advertising?  Why are we still talking about the Super Bowl?  Hold your horses!  eCommerce-ville has needs.  You can't just rush in.  Where's the foreplay?

Order Online: A Call to Action

All this "Which Super Bowl advertisers ruled and which ones sucked?" conversation reminded me why I'm glad that I'm a college football fan.  Not only do I think college football is superior (trigger flood of hate mail), but, in general, many of the sponsors' advertising campaigns are better as well.  Case in point: Papa John's.  Papa John's sponsored the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) game between the Cincinnati Bearcats and the Southern Miss Golden Eagles, aptly titled the 2007 PapaJohns.com Bowl.  Not only did Papa John's plaster their URL (not just their name) on just about every single piece of marketing that made reference to the game, from the BCS' website to the banner across the televised broadcast, but plenty of the marketing included the call-to-action "Order Online" underneath the Bowl's title.  Even the giant Papa John's logos all over the field were stamped with the instruction to "Order Online".

Now, it doesn't take a marketing research guru to figure out that Papa John's may have had a spike in sales during the Papa John's Bowl due to their sponsorship.  However, the higher level long term branding initiatives are a much more interesting discussion.  It's well known that using a strong call-to-action in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns is an optimization strategy that, in general, improves the quality and performance of advertising campaigns, without raising costs.  Not only is Papa John's use of a call-to-action capitalizing on this strategy, their implementation in an offline channel generates online traffic while lowering overhead conversion costs.  The costs associated with executing an online transaction are likely markedly less than transactions performed over the phone.  Moreover, every order placed online provides an opportunity for Papa John's to build their email marketing list, up sell and cross sell in an automated fashion, and generate increased loyalty with those who have a positive customer experience.  As such, the "Order Online" mantra may be less about customer acquisition and more about customer retention and market share growth.

Their SEO efforts seem to be in tune as well.  For the searches order pizza online and pizza order online, Papa John's ranks first.  Along with the bowl game sponsorship,  Papa John's created an entire site, papajohnsbowl.com, dedicated to the game and chock full of content.

Eureka!  Our destination!  A conversation about Pizza Hut!  The title of this post does apply!!!

No Opt-In, No Pizza For You

Don't you hate it when you're creating an account on a website so that you can place an order and right before you check "I Agree" to the Terms of Use, you have to UNCHECK, "I Agree" for you to send me a bunch of crap.  Well, Pizza Hut took that annoyance to a whole new level.

The week before the super bowl, my wife mentioned that we had a couple unused Pizza Hut gift cards that had been magneted to our refrigerator for over a year.  She was under the impression that the card's value begins to depreciate one year after purchase (If true, don't even get me started on this issue!).  Perfect!  We had a super bowl party to attend, so we decided to donate to the cause.  Since Super Bowl Sunday is like the biggest pizza ordering day, I dropped the gift cards off at my friends house the night before the game so we could get our order in before the frenzy.  We grab the mac book, find the codes on the gift cards, and head to pizzahut.com.  After spending time starring at the coupons, figuring out the promotions, figuring out how many bodies we need to feed and filling up our shopping cart, we end up at that account creation page.  After filling out a bunch of data, we get to the bottom of the form and see this:

WHAT?!?!  Are you serious?  Really Pizza Hut?  Really?  You can't be.  This can't be right.  I really can't buy your product online unless I agree to receive your junk mail?  There's no check to opt-in, LET ALONE AN UNCHECK TO OPT-OUT?

Let me get this right.  In order to order pizza online from pizzahut.com I MUST "agree to receive information about Pizza Hut®/WingStreet® coupons, promotions, announcements, events and specials".  Are you freaking kidding me?  Refresh!  This must be a mistake.  No, even better, they must have been hacked by a competitor.  Dominoes... you sneaky, sneaky, guys (KIDDING, no calls from lawyers).  I was absolutely floored.  Now, I have no idea how easy it is to opt-out of the "information", once the "coupons, promotions, announcements, events and specials" start flooding in since my buddy refused to create an account.  I'm imagining the subject of an email right now: "WingStreet Wings: So Damn Good, You'll Never Unsubscribe, So Why Give You the Option?".

In scanning the policies, I couldn't quite figure out how they were going to advertise to me.  Is it email, snail mail, text, pizza delivery boy stopping by, blimp, tattoo?  Also, I don't know why there is a "Pizza Hut Terms of Use and Privacy Policy" and a "WingStreet® Terms of Use and Privacy Policy".  Both of the Terms of Use links land on the same page (http://www.pizzahut.com/TermsOfUse.aspx) and both of the Privacy Policy links land on the same page (http://www.pizzahut.com/PrivacyPolicy.aspx).  Neither of the documents make it clear whether they are the "Pizza Hut" docs or the "WingStreet" docs.  The account creation form requires several pieces of information, including: email address, street address and phone number.  Other types of information are optional, like a cell phone number.  While I was wondering what channels and mediums this "information" would come via, I came across some great content in the Privacy Policy.  My favorite part of the policy is reproduced below:

Hilarious!  I love it.  They say "For those who initially opted-in to receive future offers or promotional materials or to allow the sharing of Personal Information with third parties may subsequently opt-out as follows".  Ummm, by "For those who" do you mean "everyone who bought online" since it's impossible to not "initially" opt-in?  Underneath that, the policy provides instructions on how to opt-out of email and text message communications, which implies they advertise via both of these mediums assuming you cough up your cell phone number.  I'm guessing they advertise to the street address as well.  For perspective, it looks like Papa John's let's you opt-out of both email advertising (by unchecking) and text message advertising (by not checking).

Since we thought this was a terrible policy, didn't want to end up on their advertising lists, didn't want to have to figure out opting out later and didn't want to deal with a bunch of junk mail until we could get off their lists, we closed our browser and called our order in over the phone.  We would have gone to a competitor if we didn't already have the gift cards.


This experience raises at least two serious concerns.  First, it completely eliminated all of the value mentioned above that could have been created by an online order.  Since we called in, conversion costs increased, Pizza Hut will never have the opportunity to add our email address to their marketing lists (via a check or a non-uncheck), they will never have the chance to up sell or cross sell to us in an automated fashion, they have completely obliterated any loyalty we had and they provided an utterly terrible customer experience.  Moreover, their customer retention and market share numbers just dwindled by a body count of two (my friend and I).  Second, the strategy that Pizza Hut is utilizing makes me wonder if most users don't notice what they're getting themselves into and if this is what Pizza Hut is shooting for.  Well known practice in eCommerce is to force a customer to agree to a sites general terms of use in order to transact on that site.  Sometimes, at the same time a user is agreeing to the Terms of Use, a second, optional, opportunity is provided that allows the the customer to opt-in to advertising.  If only one option is given, it is by and large a Terms of Use agreement.  Therefore, if a customer only sees one option, and doesn't read the details, they assume that they are agreeing to a sites Terms of Use, and that no option to opt-in to advertising exists, let alone that they are opting in if they agree to the Terms of Use.

By the way, in the past, I've been a big fan of Pizza Hut's crust.  This time, we went for the Pizza Mia's.  I have to say, I was definitely disappointed.  Icing on the cake...

Well, so long for today eCommerce-ville.  The sun is setting on you once again.  It's been a good visit.  A long one, but a good one.  Next fall during football season (college or pro) when I order pizza online, it's Papa John's all the way.

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.