eCommerce and

EBay merchants prepare! Several changes to EBay's marketplace will be going live late September and will affect sellers of varying sizes alike. These updates will be taking place during the weeks of September 22, 2009 and October 1, 2009. A full list of these changes can be found right on EBay's July 2009 update at this link: www.EBay.com/July2009Update.

Of all the changes, two are of great interest to me, the new way in which eBay is deciding to look at detailed seller ratings (DSRs) and the new eBay Top-rated seller status.


DSR Focus Adjustment

EBay has announced that their research shows the buyer experience is more accurately portrayed through lower seller ratings. They have also decided that volume isn’t what sets apart the good sellers from the bad sellers, it’s the consumer experience (that’s a pat on the shoulder for the little guy/gal aka small retailers). This statement simply means that EBay has changed the focus on how ratings are measured within their marketplace.  Merchants will need to be under a certain threshold to be eligible for benefits, such as Top-rated seller status or monthly discounts. Metaphorically speaking EBay has put out a wanted poster for the head of all sellers that don't improve on their reviews that come back with ones and twos. Here is a link to how the DSRs will be calculated based on how many transactions you have in a certain period vs. the amount of bad reviews.

Example Calculations of Low DSRs

New Method to Obtain Top-rated Seller Status

How does the new look into calculating DSR's effect the Top-rated seller status?  Well, this means the status is no longer simply obtained by having a large amount of inventory and selling a bunch of stuff.  It’s based upon competition in category or vertical and the merchant’s ability to provide a quality consumer experience. The buyer experience is directly correlated to the DSR calculations. So larger merchants with high sales volume and robust product offerings will find it more difficult to manage the consumer experience at a more detailed level than the smaller merchants.  This levels the playing field for merchants looking to grow through eBay and obtain a PowerSeller Status, smaller merchants will be able to compete on experience rather than size.  Larger merchants will have to adapt to these changes much like they have had to do over the past two years as eBay have made multiple adjustments in their marketplace transformation.

In Summation, merchants need to start matching their focus with EBay's or they may see sales drop if they keep their current sales strategy past September. Get to Work!

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Recently, our web server was brought down because it was hit a great deal from Yahoo's Ad crawler all at once.  It seems that the crawler hit close to 200 landing pages, simultaneously, several hundred times, in response to a very large upload of new keywords and ad groups to our Yahoo SEM account.  For obvious reasons, the crawler was hitting the landing pages to acquire data about the keyword landing pages and to assign a quality score for those keywords.  What’s unclear is why the heck the crawler hit us all once!?  

I have never seen this happen with Google and I have done far larger uploads with Google AdWords than what was done in this particular instance with Yahoo.  Yahoo's crawler seemed to be acting strange so I sent in a support ticket about this issue.  The response I got back was that the Ad crawler was working as normal and that we should limit how much we should upload at a time.  When questioning Yahoo support as to what would be a recommended or a suggested number of keywords to upload? Yahoo replied "there is not an estimate that we can safely suggest, as it largely depends on each servers bandwidth and capacity" Really...thanks for your help.

Well first let’s look at what I have learned so far?  Not to upload thousands of keywords at one time with Yahoo. Yahoo's Ad crawler will take down our websites.  When the crawler does take down our website or websites Yahoo is of little or no help in troubleshooting the problem. One more thing that I was able to discover, with Yahoo's assistance (kudos to them), was how to block the crawler from hitting our website.  This is definitely a solution but definitely not a recommended one.  I am positive that my quality scores for my keywords would be fairly high. I would like the minimum bids for those keywords to reflect that by having a low minimum bid.  So blocking the crawler keeps my web server up, but will impact "Yahoo's ability to evaluate the relevance of your landing pages to your keywords and ads," this was taken straight out of yahoo's help page.

I am not really fond of taking the crawler out of the issue. Yahoo's crawler may have its problems, but it does seem to act faster in determining a decent quality score for the keywords.  From my experience, Google's quality score is based by an overtime matrix.  Yahoo seems to take it a step further and tries to get an immediate deserving quality score by using their crawler.  

For now I have to find the balance between optimizing the number of keywords uploaded to Yahoo search marketing and keeping our server from being owned by the crawler.  There are pros to having an instant quality score but the consistency seen in Google’s method is also commendable, if only these two companies were working together…

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Recently, I have come across several obstacles in my attempts to streamline a process in converting, already created, Google AdWords campaigns to both MSN and Yahoo SEM platforms.  The support I have received thus far from both MSN and Yahoo usually ends up being a call to their own respective support centers who don't offer much help other than the famous saying "we have escalated your case and will email you in due time." Sometimes within a few hours, sometimes within a few days I will receive some information asking me to search the help or FAQ on their website to find the answers that I have been waiting for. Seeing as searching the help and FAQ is a no brainer I typically email them back asking them to refer to my first e-mail and help me with my question or issue.  What’s funny is how they tout the ease of converting AdWords campaigns over to their platforms.

I don't think they understand that using their documentation is usually what gets me in trouble in the first place.  On several occasions the information in the help and FAQ has led to an increase in the number of errors, leading me to believe there was a problem with the file or the tool on the website.

Typically it takes a re-explanation before I am told that several of their other accounts are having the same issue and the technical team is working on it. Oh well, I hold no grudges toward their support staff as I am a bit of an optimist and will give people the benefit of the doubt.  What is strange though, is that throughout this whole scenario, both converting tools for MSN and Yahoo continue to be useless in actually converting Google campaigns.  Furthermore if both search engines advertise the tool as a benefit it seems that there should be more support and better upkeep of the tool so that search engine marketers aren’t forced to recreate ads over again.

Take this graph from The Rimm-Kaufman Group (it’s from last year but the numbers haven’t changed all that much, if at all):

Given the information above I would think that MSN and Yahoo could only increase their share of the paid search market if they made it easier on marketers to not only create ads, but to transfer ads.  The focus of ad creation is going to lie in AdWords, because Google also dominates the number of searches in general.

That’s obvious by this graph courtesy of Search Engine Land:

Yahoo and MSN aren’t completely clueless.  I have used the new Microsoft Adcenter Desktop tool, Microsoft’s version of Google's Adwords Editor. The tool is great and although a bit buggy, its way better than their web interface.  I have not seen anything from Yahoo in terms of an off line or desktop interface, but their online interface is better than MSN's at the very least.  I mean it’s nice that both have the "converting third-party campaigns" functionalities, if they actually worked it would be even better.

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For businesses that target customers over the age of 26 and/or women over 55, you might consider Facebook.com a worthy website for your advertising campaigns.  Facebook has seen tremendous growth over the past few years, over 175 million active users, and this may just be one more hot channel to market in.

According to Media Post, 70 percent of Facebook users are above the age of 26.  Women above the age of 55 are the fastest growing user-group.  Who knew?  Here are a couple more Facebook statistics Media Post provides:

• Women make up 56.2% of all FaceBook users
• Women users in FaceBook over 55 nearly tripled to around 717,000 users since September 08
• Teenagers on Facebook only make up about 12% of Facebook Users

In today's economy, utilizing as many marketing channels as you can to promote your products/services may not be a bad idea if the numbers make sense.  If you find that the ads are diminishing your brand or the return on investment does not meet your standards a simple click can end the campaign.

Remember, when using Facebook's advertising interface you will be able to target particular ages, sexes, relationship status, etc. with specific Ads.  Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t offer a CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) model for ad spend, they only use CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand). This is not necessarily a bad thing though. If your campaign is specific to your target audience and you know your demographic then your ads will be displayed to customers that have the highest percentage of conversions.

This however, is not an easy task.  Take the Proctor & Gamble attempt at marketing to their customers via Facebook as an example.  Both the “Crest Whitestrips Fans” and “America’s Favorite Stains” campaigns saw little to no social reactions because they failed to actually engage consumers.  While I believe Facebook could be a viable channel we also have to remember the media in which we are presenting.  Traditional ads that would be seen in magazines may not work in a social setting. If you are running a campaign via a social network the campaign has to be social in nature, even if you are looking at 175 million potential consumers.