eCommerce and

“They're (Microsoft) not racists at heart - they're just being racist as it makes good business sense. They're business racists.” – Joe McCann 2009

We’ve all submitted projects that weren’t exactly our best effort.  Yes, even you.  Once your initial response of  “not me, that's not something I would ever do", wears off, go ahead and raise your hand.  Join the rest of us that have, at times, continued the time honored tradition of cramming the night before a deadline.  This tradition I’m referencing inevitably leads to mistakes, errors or at least the quality one could have delivered.   Seems someone(s) at Microsoft may have been practicing this tradition prior to releasing a recent ad campaign.  I’m not saying this is what happened here, but at least it would be some sort of excuse. The specifics are detailed by Bobbie Johnson in his article, Microsoft apologises over race-swap gaffe.

I've noted what I believe to be the painfully obvious, but somewhere along the lines Microsoft didn't seem to pick up on the following:

• The evident; don’t swap one head for another regardless of race. That’s akin to the adult entertainment industry.


• If you’re going to “touch up” skin color, make sure you address the face to hand skin tones.


• When you work for a company as recognizable as Microsoft, try not to use an image that includes your top competitors’ more recognizable laptop.

In an effort to tie this to some kind of applicable business observation, I find myself circling back to much of Gordian Project’s current internal dialogue. Long story short, no matter where you find yourself in the company, what you do every day impacts not only the opportunity you have with the company, but the company’s ability to provide you opportunity. 

I’m interested in what you find most baffling about this Photoshop disaster… 

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• Multiple sites including Twitter and Facebook were hit by denial-of-service attacks this week.


• Google Base eliminated the single upload option, merchants using this option will need to switch to a data feed in order to continue inserting their products on Google Shopping.


• Will automatic, high-tech products that are popular in other countries have the ability to take America by storm?  One manufacturer, TOTO, seems to think so.


• Even Rand is talking about Twitter this week.  This week’s Whiteboard Friday, brought to you by SEOmoz is all about how to get Re-Tweeted.


• Google Webmaster Tools is soliciting your videos for their YouTube channel.

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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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• 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.

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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• 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.
  

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You too can be just like me with my 12 week program!

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.

• 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.

Don’t forget Mother’s Day on Sunday!  For now let's review the week in eCommerce:

• Speaking of Mom… Search Engine Guide recommends using the “Mom Test” if usability is a concern.


• Copyblogger is strategically helping others fight the blogging war for attention, and I do mean “strategically”.


• SEOBook challenges “What do your non customers have in common?”


• Andy is scratching his head over Google’s Chrome commercial that is scheduled to run this weekend.


• I actually haven’t read the Bruce Clay's blog in a while but this post by Virginia caught my eye.   She makes a few really good points about how annoying it can be when someone blatantly steals your content, but she also points out that you don’t have to stoop to their level.  I guess it hit close to home this week, considering when I checked out one of our competitors websites I found that they were using nearly our exact ad copy on one of their banners:

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.