eCommerce and

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.

Enjoy!

• Firefox held a 20% browser market share in November of 2008 for the first time.
• They call him Dr. Doom, the economist who five years ago, predicted the economic recession that we now face.  His thoughts may help your company plan ahead for 2009.
• If Google Checkout is an option on your website you will probably be interested in the following two stories:
  • Google Claims That Google Checkout Increases Conversion By 40% & Clicks By 10%
  • Checkout Icon Makes Ads 10% More Clickable, Google Says
• TechCrunch is fighting back against unscrupulous PR firms.  Their plan is simple “Today we are taking a radical step towards fighting the chaos. From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to.”
• Curious about what other retailers are doing to stay afloat in a down economy?  MarketingProfs.com interviewed Best Buy and Wipro CMO’s to get their ideas.

Happy New Year all!  I am out for the rest of the week so the variety is early.  There are some new posts that I wanted to share, but in addition to that let’s take a look at some of our favorite posts, top stories, and some of the biggest developments in the industry from 2008.

• Google Product Search up 786% in the category of shopping search.
• The Silicon Alley Insider reports on Digg’s revenue losses and why ad targeting, or the lack there of, could be a major factor in these losses.
• Have your 2009 wish list ready for Google?  I know Zach does and Matt Cutts’ parents do, but submissions are coming in fast so add yours soon.
• Jennifer Laycock released her second installment of “Six Lessons from a Wooden Boy”, but I recommend starting from her first post on the subject.
• A legend about the inventor of chess may provide insight into internet retail growth.

2008 In Review

• Election news spreads and bloggers highlighted Super Tuesday.
• eBay jolts sellers by changing fees.
• eCommerce celebrates its 25th birthday.
• OutdoorPros.com launches!
• Mercado rebrands one month and then sells to Omniture a few months later.
• April Fools jokes get better and better every year so it would seem.
• eBay adds a merchant dashboard so sellers can track best match search placement.
• Amazon goes down!
• PCI updates Data Security Standards, again.
  
• The iPhone is released.
• Google adds shopping list to Product Search.
  
• The Top 100 Web Celebrities is announced.
• Yahoo and Google team up.
• Brian gives a lesson on forecasting.
  
• Amazon is finally able to ship Kindle.
• Big companies continue to try and squash the little guy.
• Vanessa, yeah that’s me talking in the 3rd person, goes on a rant about employee responsibility.
• The Olympics!
• Google News causes a 75% drop in United Airlines stock.
• Bill Gates retires from daily role at Microsoft.  Little did we know the extra free time would be spent with Jerry Seinfeld.
• Spore, the most copyright protected game, also becomes the most pirated game.
• Barack Obama becomes the first “Internet President”.
• Macy’s requires online shoppers to “wait in line”.
• Reputation management becomes increasingly important as social networking becomes more popular.
• Internet retailers have to respond to declining economic conditions.

• The Internet star rises in a down economy
• E-commerce on the move
• How the Supreme Court Fractured Online Pricing
• Retail Explorer
• We-commerce
• The Power of Customer Reviews
• Advantage: Amazon
• Merchandise sold on eBay falls 1%, the first decline in company history
• Exit Strategy
• Target.com supports site design for blind people under legal settlement

I know this couldn't possibly be everything, which events in 2008 were most memorable to you?

If you’re in retail I doubt you’ve had time to catch up on this week’s blog highlights.  I found these particularly interesting this week:

• Search Engine Marketers, I suggest reading Search Engine Land’s post on 9 Myths of Landing Page Quality Score.
• It’s the giving season, and bloggers are doing their part.  Brian Smith of Comparison Shopping Engines is growing a mustache to raise money for DonorsChoose, an organization that lets teachers submit projects they need funding for, if you are interested you can go to his giving page at ComparisonEngines.com.  Joe Hall proposes linking to charities to improve their web presence.  Finally, if you Twitter give Squidoo a tweet and they will donate to charity as well.
• Rand from SEOmoz covers the fundamentals of an SEO campaign in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.
• As social networking becomes increasingly more popular the need for reputation management grows.  According to the London School of Economics via Denise Shiffman’s Engagement blog “Every 1% reduction in negative word of mouth correlated to .41% growth, while a 1% increase in positive word of mouth correlated to just .14% growth. In other words, reducing negative comments could grow revenue by 300% over increasing positive comments.”
• Search Engine Guide’s, Stoney deGeyter, takes a look back at what he wanted for Christmas from the search engines in 2002.  To see if he got what he asked for click here.
  

Bonus Articles

• Everyone working in the marketing department of your company, you may want to read this. The internet has made it much it easier to measure just how valuable you really are...sorry. 
• Want a job where you work from home making videos about whatever you want while raking in thousands of dollars a month? Well look no further than Youtube. Sounds too good to be true? Well it isn't exactly as easy as it sounds. Building up a fan base on the internet big enough for companies to want to advertise through you will take a while. But here is an article about some of the success stories of Youtube.
• Do you need to reach more people with your advertising? Well, Google has extended its AdWords products to any mobile device that has HTML browsing, such as the iPhone  or T-Mobile's G1. "This new option will now allow you to display your ads specifically on these devices, create exclusive campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting."
• Customer service is a big part of a computer company, and many people will purchase a certain brand over another just because of their customer service. Well, it seems that Dell did not get the memo. Dell is now "charging customers a monthly fee to have access to its United States-based customer service representatives." You can read more about it here.

We were lucky enough to catch up with Linda Bustos of Elastic Path Software and ask her a few questions that are likely on many retailers minds.  Both multi-channel and web only retailers face difficult challenges ahead, the holidays that are right around the corner, and the global economic downturn that has brought spending to a drastic halt.  The insight she provides may help many overcome this uphill battle.

Tell us a little about your blog, company, and your role at Get Elastic:

My official title is Ecommerce Analyst at Elastic Path Software, a role that involves keeping on top of all the trends in Internet marketing and retail, and translating them into actionable tips for online retailers on the Get Elastic blog in addition to ecommerce consulting for Elastic Path customers.  Get Elastic’s primary purpose is thought leadership rather than talking about our ecommerce software.  Get Elastic exists to communicate with retailers, ecommerce vendors, consultants, analysts and anyone interested in Internet marketing.

What is your approach to evaluating and prioritizing opportunities and aligning resources with these opportunities?

I’d divide “opportunities” into site features/functionality, marketing activities and customer service.  (Fulfillment is impacted by marketing and customer service initiatives).

For site features, first you must determine whether what you want to do is feasible with your current ecommerce platform.  Your hands may be tied until the next upgrade on certain bells and whistles.

Then you need to make sure you’re already doing the basics well.  I consider the basics to be product information, product images, intuitive navigation and good search functionality.  You have no business asking for a virtual fitting room when a customer can’t enlarge images and see multiple views.  Personalization takes a backseat to usability.

After all that, if you’re in a position to add functionality, a good idea is to find out what customers prefer on ecommerce sites.  If you can’t collect enough info surveying your own customers, subscribing to Shop.org’s Smart Brief newsletter and Internet Retailer will alert you to the latest consumer studies.  Bookmark them as you go, so when it comes time to make decisions, you can refer to them.  You may discover customers consistenly cite ratings and reviews as valuable, but they don’t care about wish lists or reading retail blogs.  Use this data to invest in what will delight your customers.

As we head into a holiday season that is projected to be the slowest in our near history what advice would you give online retailers and multi-channel retailers?  Which do you think will be impacted by the economy more (Online only or Multi-Channel retailers), why?

Rather than increasing spending on PPC or shopping engines (buying traffic), work on optimizing landing pages to squeeze more profit out of the traffic you’re already getting (including “free” customers like repeat, type-in visitors and organic search referrals).  Not to mention your email campaigns would also be more profitable, which is a nice segue into…

Market to your existing customers (provided they have granted you permission) and those who have subscribed to your email list and segment, segment, segment.  It’s still true that it costs much more to attract new customers than keep existing ones, and segmentation is key to effectively delivering relevant offers.  If you throw random offers at your entire list, you’ll likely lose subscribers.

Jeanne Jennings’ Really Simple Segmentation Framework is a great resource for segmenting by behavior, but you should also allow customers to self-segment by indicating their preferences.  Disney Shopping and GAP are examples of retailers who do this really well. 

So change your email signup form to allow self-selection of what kind of offers or products the customer wants to receive, and how often they want to hear from you and ask existing subscribers to update their preferences.

It’s also important to have a strong value proposition that is clearly communicated on your site.  Not a slogan, not a tagline, but a clear statement that answers the question: “why should I buy from you and not your competitor.”  If you don’t have a clear value proposition (most retailers don’t) make sure you read up on value propositions at Marketing Experiments’ blog.

To answer the second part of your question, I don’t think one or the other will be better or worse off.  Because we know many people will use the Internet only to research purchases they prefer to make offline, the online retailer with a local store can offer free ship-to-store, inventory lookup and free returns to store – multi-channel retailers have an advantage -- while the pure-play has a small chance of converting that customer, and may even be paying high CPCs to provide the research service to a non-buyer.

But retail stores carry overhead that pure plays don’t have.  Also, multi-channel retailers may treat ecommerce as a separate operation, and the online channel may have to fight to prove itself and win human and financial resources.  Pure plays give their all to their online business and may be more advanced in efficiency and effectiveness.

What are some of your best and worst marketing channels?  What are the best ways you have found to increase performance for a given channel?

In terms of ecommerce marketing channels, it really depends on your market, your strategy, your investment and your execution which channel is going to perform the best for you.  Email might be the top channel for a retailer, but is that because they are sloppy with PPC and have an ecommerce platform that prevents them from maximizing their SEO?  Do they have an outsourced affiliate manager that’s doing a poor job? 

Also, there may be channels that perform better for one category vs another.  If there is much competition in PPC and shopping engines, click costs inflate and it’s harder to remain visible. 

You can even get more granular and say that some products will do better through PPC and others through email.  Again, when you focus on improving landing pages, your performance goes up across all channels.

If retailers are cutting back on spend where do you think costs can be cut or dollars can be saved? Is there any “must have” that retailers should only cut back on if it’s a last resort?

The first area I’d look at is your fulfillment – shipping costs, damage in transit, returns management, where can you improve?  Have a read through every blog post on ecommerce fulfillment, by expert Maxim Mironov on his blog Optimalogica.  Then I would suggest landing page optimization rather than “buying traffic.” 

An interesting thing that may happen is, as advertising spend is expected to go down, it will result in lower prices and less competition.  Since consumers are not flocking away from the internet, you may find PPC and shopping engine marketing is less expensive than it was in healthy economic times.

As we enter into 2009 what do you think will be the next big change in eCommerce (similar to the affects of “web 2.0”, social networking…)

I think video will be important from here on out.  It’s not cheap, so you might not want to offer it on every product you sell, but video can really ease a customer’s fears, uncertainties and doubts about a product when they can see a 360 degree view or see it in use.  Retailers that embrace it early will have an advantage over those who don’t.

Again, first things first.  Product copy and images are more important, get those right, then explore video.

What are some of your favorite online stores, and why?

This is the number one question I get asked  I can’t say one store does everything perfectly.  I like bits and pieces of stores like AE.com’s navigation and product pages, Endless.com’s filtering options and Crutchfield’s product finders and informative content.  But if I had to pick an overall favorite online retailer – I’d choose Threadless because of its unique business model, it’s fresh design and it’s active, passionate community.  It’s just all-around fun.

Special thanks Linda!

For the best prices, on the largest selection of faucets, from your favorite brands like Kohler, Danze, and, American Standard shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Happy Halloween!

• Andy Beal reports on the Google AdWords changes that we should be seeing soon.  Interesting changes to say the least, and I love the fact that he referenced Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update.
• Facebook is top choice for socially engaged retailers according to recent studies.
• A Harvard Professor is suing Google for typo-squatting, the practice of registering web sites addresses that are spelled similarly to the legitimate site but with small variances like an extra letter or a letter out of place.  Benjamin Edelman, the professor, alleges that Google is costing advertisers between $30-$50 million dollars per year.
• The economy is affecting all of us and hopefully we are all working for companies that are preparing for it.  If for some reason you’re not quite sure if the company you work for is heading in the right direction, you may want to look over this checklist.
• This story wasn’t from this week, but I just caught wind of it so I thought I would share.  Take a look at the decision set forth below and decide which of the two options you would choose to invest in:
  
  Innovation A enjoyed blockbuster first-year revenues of $200 million thanks to "a clear value proposition, clever positioning, and a strong distribution network."
  
  Innovation B, meanwhile, had on a muddled business model and generated only $220,000 during its first year.
  
  Most people would probably choose option A without considering the numerous other factors that should be taken into consideration.  This is the point that Scott Anthony is trying to get across in this article, because as it turns out option A was Vanilla Coke which was discontinued three years later, and option B was Google.  Google’s “muddled business model” was enormously successful once they settled on an ad-based business model.
  

Today is a sad day, Ryan, our online marketing team leader, blogger, and friend is moving to Northern California to broaden his career in the world of eCommerce.  We are sad to see him go, especially those of us that have worked alongside him for so long, but we are also happy for him and wishing him the best of luck.  I asked him what he was going to miss most about working here at Gordian Project and am happy to report that this was his response “If I had to boil it down to just one thing that I will miss it would be working with my friends. Yes, my friends. It really is hard to leave a place where the people you work with are your friends, not just some geeky, weird folks you work with and share the same cramped 'Nerdery' with but would never ever want to see outside of the office. I have had the privilege of spending time with many of my coworkers in a classroom prior to us all joining PlumberSurplus. Sharing the experience of walking off the graduation stage and into the doors at Gordian Project together was priceless.

I will miss:

• Watching the company grow and need to find more office space again
• Seeing new faces come through the door, eager to join the team
• All the snacks in the kitchen
• Basketball and BBQ Fridays
• My kitchen table (enjoy execs!)
• Going with everyone to get BOGO ham sandwiches on Tuesdays
• Themed office dress up days and Flying Saucer Pizzas (can you tell I like food?)
• Nights out for TGIF

Thank you for the support and encouragement as I start a new chapter in life."

I am sure that Ryan will post on this blog in the near future, but for now please wish him well.

The week in eCommerce:

• You may not be able to get the WebAward Judges to review your website, but you can take the criticisms given the current presidential candidates and see if you are making the same mistakes.  After the review the judges announced that Barack Obama’s website was the better of the two in their opinion.  You can judge for yourself but their commentary is actually interesting.
• Google AdWords now has the ability to break out search traffic from Google as well as its partners, as opposed to the previous solution which only allowed search engine marketers to separate search from content.
• Matt Cutts reports on another new feature from Google, and he is surprised it isn’t getting more attention.  I think he is surprised for a few reasons as this tool can assist in creating better 404 pages, and “converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free.”  For the Google post on this tool click here. 
• YoungEntrepreneur details the results of their Entrepreneur Poll “The Best Way For a Startup To Earn Revenue”.
• I love it when blogs publish tips and tricks for popular products, and this is no exception, check out “The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection”.
• A lot of blogs reported on Google’s quarter three earnings, but I like the fact that Bruce Clay took the results and analyzed what they could mean for the search industry as a whole.

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...

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.

Welcome to our fourth installment of intern week, where we present blog posts written by our remarkable interns.  The following blog post may sound contradictory to what an eCommerce intern would believe, and trust me, we gave Jeff a hard time about it after we read it.  However, he brings up some good points and reminds us that not everyone is as internet savvy as those we are used to being around, which I think is a needed reminder.

- Vanessa

Online advertising allows businesses to reach their target markets through the internet and has become one of the core advertising formats for many companies.  However, with new technology always on the rise new forms of advertising may be leading the way and marketers will need to be prepared in order to take advantage of these new advertising formats.  One of the fastest growing advertising platforms is Mobile Ads. Companies that have already succeeded at online advertising are quickly moving in to mobile advertising, companies like Google for instance.  Google has launched Mobile Ads, its mobile complement to AdSense. This concept is not exclusive to Google alone; other companies like Yahoo! and AOL have their versions of mobile advertising as well.  Google however, is attempting to take mobile ads to the next level.  According to Google, their current advertising platform would sense when a user is accessing a website on a mobile device by connecting the user directly to Mobile Ads.

Mobile advertising spend as a whole is expected to reach $1.3 billion in 2008 and is expected to continue to grow.  Mobile Ads are comprised of mobile video, images, banners, text, or a combination. For now text is the main format sent for mobile ads, but video is expected to be the wave of the future.

Mobile Ads may sound good to some, but I feel that our society is too technologically dependent. For example Mobile ads would be more of an annoyance than a perk for people like myself that don’t typically shop online and aren’t constantly texting.  Not to mention these ads could potentially would be dominate text, picture, or video message allowances for individuals who don’t have unlimited text, picture, and video messages within their mobile plan. Also, regulations have not been established for mobile advertising yet.  This could be a problem for parents that already have to regulate the number of advertisements their children see on television and other traditional marketing formats. Another problem could be that with the increase in ads could come an increase in cell phone models, such that the cell phone technology would be able to keep up with ad technology.  I am sure some consumers dispose of their old cell phones properly, but those that don’t could potentially harm the environment every time they upgrade their phone. However, the one good thing that I do see about the concept is that it does allow eBusinesses to reach out to more customers and potentially new customers. Like I said though, when it comes to my personal opinion I prefer buying in store and viewing my advertisements on the good old fashion television, and not my cell phone.

- Intern Jeff