eCommerce and

• The Boston Globe reports that retailers need to be prepared for a somewhat new and increasingly more frequent trend, customer haggling.  It’s understandable that with the economic decline those who are shopping are shopping for the best deal, but not many retailers are working with the margins that they used to.  If you haven’t done so yet this is a good time to train your representatives the proper way to interact with price negotiations.
• Whether you have an SEO campaign, are thinking about starting one, or questioning if you should keep it in house or outsource, Stoney deGeyter of Search Engine Guide has put together a list of “61 Pre-SEO Campaign Questions You Need to Answer to”.  What’s great is that he has included questions that relate to both in-house campaigns as well as outsourcing.
• Sage Lewis of Search Engine Watch experimented with promotions.  He based the experiment on two different types of promotions: one included user feedback on the best ideas for the future of his column, and the other was based on getting users to link to the column.  He provides his thoughts on the outcomes of the two here.
• Branding can be difficult, especially for the little guy.  Entrepreneur magazine points out five common mistakes that brand marketers may be engaging in.
• Seth Godin is great at pointing out the obvious.  This statement is not meant to belittle his writings but to point out the fact that a lot of the things he writes about are issues that have been on many marketers’ minds, he just finds an eloquent way of relaying the information.  In a post written early this morning he puts into perspective the reasons that good intentioned marketers are finding it harder and harder to get the word out to potential consumers.

Welcome to my third installment of Affiliate Watch. I've had some great help reviewing applications from the intern department over the last month while I worked on a large SEM project, but was able to pick out some affiliate websites that I thought we could learn from. Let's see what kind of sites applied...

Site 1: Surfin For Style - If your target audience is female and the products you sell are Coach Handbags at discount prices then this affiliate is for you; provided that you also sell on eBay. SurfinForStyle uses an aesthetically pleasing flash widget to show hundreds of eBay auctions for Coach Products. While eBay offers store referral credits for the seller when a sale is driven by this type of affiliate there are many reasons why I would steer clear from these types of affiliates.   The opportunity for branding is significantly decreased in this situation as the consumer will see the eBay brands and remember purchasing from eBay rather than one of our websites.  We prefer to have publishers driving traffic to our websites directly so that we have the opportunity to expose our brand.  It helps that eBay offsets part of the FVF (Final Value Fee) with the referral credit. I think it's a great idea that eBay and eBay to Go (in beta) has developed a tool that makes it easy for publishers to promote products listed on eBay.  I am pretty sure that the tool was aimed at having shoppers promote products and create their own "unique" content, but how unique is the content if the widget users just repost someone else’s listing?

Site 4: The Schlott Company - "Resource articles to get your business off the ground" is their tag line. I wonder if any businesses found this blog useful, as they stopped posting back in May. In all fairness I actually visited the company's real home page (which has no link or mention of their blog) and found their portfolio quite decent. They ought to update their publisher profile to the company home page not the blog. Once I saw this, I offered them a spot in our program.

Actionable take-aways for affiliates:

1. Publisher Profile Information - always keep this up to date, in the example of The Schlott Company, they would have been declined had I not taken the steps to view their real website. Put your best foot forward, you only get one chance for a first impression (or your only impression).
2. Don't use animated gif images - I may have mentioned this at least once or twice before.
3. Don't get mad and irate at us when we decline your website - Unfounded, harassing phone calls and emails won't help your case.
4. Get a real webhost - We can all tell when you are using a free webhosting service and it shows. There are many services available that cost less than a Big Mac value meal per month. I don't want to see long, hyphenated, multiple directory, unrelated domain names.

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.