eCommerce and

Early this morning Microsoft and Yahoo made the official announcement of their plans to “join forces” in internet search marketing.  The partnership would effectively give the pair a 30 percent market share of U.S. search advertising, a little less than half of what Google’s current market share is, but a considerable increase for Microsoft’s present 8 percent stance in the market.  According to news sources under the arrangement, Microsoft Bing would "power" Yahoo search, while Yahoo would sell premium search advertising for both companies, using Microsoft's AdCenter system.  This deal will affect staff at Yahoo.  While neither company admitted that layoffs would continue the mention was hinted at in conversations with reporters and advertising for both companies will now be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform.

How do marketers feel about this though?  Zach, fellow blogger and manager of marketing, search and content at the Gordian Project says “This agreement displays the power of online search advertising and the dollars behind it, but what’s interesting is that Yahoo has opted to integrate someone else's search technology instead of their own therefore actually reducing the number of search competitors in the marketplace. Even though there is one big name in search, Google, I don’t know if fewer competitors is actually better? Has Yahoo really given up on search technology? Had search gotten to a place where it can't be improved? Will this alliance be able to take on the almighty Google? We will all be waiting to see, but it seems like they are so fixated on the dollars and the revenue aspect of search technology that they may be forgetting about all of the other aspects that can be incorporated into improving their technologies."

The two companies are still going to have to go through regulatory hearings, but seem to be prepared as they are already making claims that data will not be shared.  Either way marketers need to be prepared.

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• CIT is looking for investors, and the NRF (National Retail Federation) is feeling the pinch.  Without factors like CIT taking on the financial burden between suppliers and retailers, supply chains will struggle to continue to produce at a rate that consumers want to see product on retailer’s shelves.  As the holiday season approaches both suppliers and retailers have begun to panic as they realize that this couldn’t be happening at a worse time.


• Future or hopeful entrepreneurs may want to look to this roadmap to see if they have what it takes to make it.


• Yahoo! rolled out their new homepage and with high-quality reviews, which is good considering it was supposed to debut last year.


• Increase creativity by distancing the group from the problem.


• This is a to be continued blog but I have complete faith that the copywriting tips that are going to come from the follow up are going to be worth linking to the initial post.  It helps that he references one of my favorite childhood movies throughout the post as well so the post in general is thoroughly enjoyable.


• Amazon bought Zappos this week and the price keeps updating.


• This quote was brought to my attention courtesy of Contrast Blog
  “Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”
  -Joel Spolsky
  -From his book User Interface Design for Programmers
  

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• Shop.org released their 2009 State of Retailing Merchandising Report this week: 
  • “Specifically, retailers this year are setting the following as priorities for their Web sites:
    Checkout process redesign – 79%
    Improved content on product detail pages – 73%
    Site search and browse results – 71%
    Home page – 60%
    Redesigned help section / FAQ”

• Clickthrough rates can change when language and experience are factored into the equation; if you don’t believe me take a look at this experiment.


• Optaros is offering a complimentary eBook on social eCommerce.  The book "5 Winning Strategies in Social Ecommerce" can be found here.


• Social media is only effective if it’s based on trust, transparency and ethical business practices, luckily I work for a company where this isn’t a problem.  Unfortunately there are still, as I suppose there may always be, companies out there that don’t operate in this fashion.  The New York Attorney General isn’t standing for it, in fact he has fined a company $300,000 for encouraging fake reviews.


• Entrepreneurs are powerfully positive.


• Google announces second quarter 2009 financial results.
  

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

Microsoft and Google seem to be dominating business and web announcements over the last few weeks and the trend doesn’t look like it is going to end any time soon.  Google’s big announcement last week was the Chrome operating system, which came right off the heels of the seemingly overwhelming Bing craze.  Microsoft has started out this week notifying us of an up-and-coming release of a free version of Office software that will be available over the web.  The programs will be similar to the MS Office suite and work in the same fashion as Google Docs.  Microsoft stands to lose by offering the product for free as they currently report an operating profit of $9.3 billion after the first three quarters of this fiscal year.  The company plans to push traffic for the online version of Office through Bing. 

As Google Docs continue to improve and consumers continue to adopt, it's likely put additional pressure on Microsoft to offer a complimentary service as well.  What’s important about what these two companies are doing is how it is going to affect business for eCommerce and entrepreneurs alike.  Marketers may have to consider Bing as a larger player than they would have (or at least, the spoiled child of very wealthy parents) and adjust ads and spend accordingly.  It will be important to pay attention to where each company spends their time, resources and focus; each announcement could mean big changes this year.

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• Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, wrote this blog recently and I think as far as eCommerce blogs go, this title is the best so far this year “Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian & Telling Stories With Data”.


• Search Engine Journal shared a tool this week that shows you how your page listing might look within Google SERPs, and it’s really sweet.


• Are your landing pages in need of a makeover?  Copyblogger released an insightful case study on how they could assist Cars Helping America.


• The big story this week was the announcement that Google is working on the Google Chrome Operating System!


• Reviews are one of my favorite website features, but only when they are true.  One suspicious lawyer investigated and found that Amazon’s system is still dealing with frauds.
   

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.

• By now most of us have heard the news of Michael Jackson’s death, what really surprised me was the way in which many of us found out about it…. Twitter.  Twitter may be having a far greater impact than we may even know.


• This title speaks for itself: Amazon: “A Search Engine With A Warehouse”.


• We know that load times affect user behavior, but would you say that fractions of a second could have a billion dollar price tag?


• Are you ignoring important landing pages?


• Apparently there is controversy over personalized ads, but are we really surprised that people don’t want to share their social security numbers?

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.

I finally get to say it, “The Lakers are NBA Champions!”  I did so much smack talking last year that I ended up losing my bet and the Lakers lost in the finals, so this year I decided to not say anything until it was all over.  So, Father’s Day is this weekend, and other than that it’s time to move on to the week in eCommerce.

• Google changes public stance on PageRank Sculpting with nofollow, Matt Cutts gives a detailed analysis here and Marketing Pilgrim gives a synopsis here.  Changes to be aware of: Distribution of link juice is either passed on or it vanishes, SEO’s no longer have the ability to allocate PageRank value using nofollow.


• Has Bing raised public interest?  Yes.  Does Google fear Bing, like the New York Post reports?  I doubt it.  I tend to lean more towards Clint Boulton’s opinion that Google’s respect for Bing was revealed when they launched “Explore Search”, a page that features many of Google’s functions in an easy to read format.



• Online shoppers plan to spend more on dear old Dad this Father’s Day than offline shoppers.


• Social media can be used by marketers to engage and acquire focus groups. 


• Writing headlines sounds so simple, but getting started can be the difficult part for the writer; Copyblogger offers nine proven formulas for these troublesome times.
  

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

• Tim Berry and his wife Vange collaborated on what they have learned over the last 22 years as small business owners and came up with a list of ten lessons they learned.  They point out that these lessons may not work for every business but in my opinion Tim and Vange may be too humble about their list.  Businesses are still failing today because they either don’t know about the topics discussed in this article or they choose to ignore them.  I chose three points to reiterate for our audience:
  • 2. We built it around ourselves
    Our business was and is a reflection of us, what we like to do, what we do well. It didn’t come off of a list of hot businesses.
  • 5. We spent our own money. We never spent money we didn’t have.
    We hate debt. We never got into debt on purpose, and we didn’t go looking for other people’s money until we didn’t need it (in 2000 we took in a minority investment from Silicon Valley venture capitalists; we bought them out again in 2002). We never purposely spent money we didn’t have to make money. (And in this one I have to admit: that was the theory, at least, but not always the practice. We did have three mortgages at one point, and $65,000 in credit card debt at another. Do as we say, not as we did.)
  • 7. We minded cash flow first, before growth.
    This was critical, and we always understood it, and we were always on the same page. See lesson number 5, above. We rejected ways we might have spurred growth by spending first to generate sales later.
    
    

• The Palm Pre comes out this weekend, and I am quite excited about it!  Search Engine Land reports on Google’s excitement for the release of this smartphone that has Google Search, Maps and YouTube already built into the device.  What’s important about this article is the trend toward mobile apps and how advertisers will choose to plan for future PPC campaigns.


• Bing seems to be the word of the week and (#badabing) the tweet of the week.  Bing even managed to become the number two search engine for a day, which isn’t all that surprising considering the dollars that Microsoft is tossing at their ad campaign, but will it last?  Some think not, and I tend to agree.  I tried to use Bing for a day, but I couldn’t even make it that long.


• Adobe BrowserLab is making it easier for developers to test cross browser compatibility.
  


• We pride ourselves on being problem solvers, in fact that is how Gordian Project came to be our name.  We go about discovering problems and implementing solutions in various ways, but I enjoyed this simple outline for those in their infancy of tackling issues.
  

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.

• Dear Jane is working on an experiment that deals with brand perception.  She put together a visual representation of the brands she uses on a typical day and her findings were quite interesting.  She is also asking the community to participate.


• The search engines are improving search capabilities but are we the users capitalizing on them?


• Decency as a sales tool…. What a concept!


• Friendly fraud, online retails equivalent of shoplifting or consumers just gaming the system?


• Social networking is taking off, so don’t walk into the process blindly, let those who have learned their lessons along the way provide some assistance.
  

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• Jeremy Schoemaker seems to be getting somewhere with his trademark infringement case against a Google employee.  Search Engine Land has embedded the documents which show the Judge has ordered Schoemaker be given access to the AdWords account in question.


• Understanding shopper motivations can help retailers customize promotions to fit their target audience according to recent studies.


• When Google goes down it takes others with it.


• New data shows that 2009 is seeing a large decrease in paid search traffic from search engine visits.


• 10 Reasons Craigslist Is in Legal Jeopardy. 

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.