eCommerce and

The holiday season is a special season for both the consumer and the business. It is a time of shopping, eating and connecting with family through holidays such as Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In business though, this is an important time of year, one where you need to make yourself stand out from the competition, taking the time to create a great promotion is a good way to do this. This time of year always comes with people spending money on themselves and on others so a well-targeted campaign can help connect with your customers as well as provide them a value when they are shopping. Below are four tips that will help you get on your way to running a successful promotion during the upcoming holiday season.

Embrace the Season
You want your promotion to fully impact people in an emotional way. The holidays, after all, are all about emotion. Your promotion should take this into consideration. Do not just have a sale for the sake of it, have a sale with a theme that connects directly to the holiday and the consumer. Adding emotion into your sale allows the user to connect with you and gives your company more personality.

Give People What They Want
You also need to make sure that you are running a promotion on products that people will actually want to purchase during this time of the year. For example, you will sell more sweaters around Thanksgiving and Christmas than you will around the Fourth of July. In many ways, this seems like common sense; however, store owners often make the mistake of trying to push the items that are out of season with a promotion. The result is often a lackluster sale that could have been prevented if seasonality was taken into consideration. A great place to check for this is on Google Trends. You can use this great tool to see when the most search volume is for the term. Below you can see the term sweaters is always searched at the end of the year.

Be Original
You should always strive to make your promotion different than everyone else's. You want people to look at your sale and think it is so good that they shouldn’t even leave your store to look for others. If the customer thinks they can probably find the same deal somewhere else, they will keep shopping, hoping to find even better savings as they go. If the customer leaves the store there is always a chance they will not come back, create a sale or promotion that makes it hard to not purchase from you.

Find your Advantage
Finding your advantage is essential for running a good sale during the holiday season. For some businesses this is price, for others service and for others still it's exclusive products. Regardless of what you decide is your advantage, finding ways to make the most of it is essential to a successful sale. Not everyone will have the lowest price on every item, but every business has some way they stand out that can help them to connect with their customers and provide them with a great shopping experience.

These are just a few of the tips we suggest to make sure this holiday season is a good one. We would love if you would leave a comment with your tips if you have one that I have left out.

For years, Amazon.com has been one of the top selling marketplaces around the world, selling everything from books to automotive products. With such a large customer base, they have been the admiration of many small e-commerce companies, who strive to one day be a fourth of what Amazon has become. Despite their success and fame, Amazon seems to have forgotten an important core characteristic that must continue to be a part of a company regardless of their size - Ethics. Ethics is about making choices that, though they may not always seem economically beneficial or good, are ultimately the right choice.

In recent news Anderson Cooper, a reporter from CNN, did a story on the controversy surrounding Amazon.com and books defending pedophilia. As I watched in complete astonishment, I began to see how the lack of ethics can ultimately hurt a company.

On their website, Amazon has vowed to become “Earth's most customer-centric company.” They have done an amazing job branding themselves around customer service; however, the validity of their vow is being questioned. Amazon failed to not only offer a reply to customer complaints about selling these books, but more importantly they did not even remove the book in question. It wasn’t until after CNN’s story went through that something was done about it.

Instead of apologizing to their consumers or the media, the only response Amazon offered was that they do not believe in censorship. They failed to provide sensitivity to victims of pedophiles, and protection for children from such abuse. Their lack of censorship, which as Anderson Cooper pointed out does exist, only portrayed the little interest Amazon has for their customers.                                                               

With the holiday’s approaching, and Cyber Monday being one of the most important days for online companies, the news of this issue could not come at a worse time. Many consumers have threatened to boycott Amazon, reposting CNN’s video on their Facebook, and encouraging many to do the same.  This, in turn, can ultimately hurt their pocket books, publicity and brand image.

Regardless of the size of a company, ethics must always be a central pillar to the daily business decisions as well as future goals. Let this be an example to all e-commerce companies that every decision and/or product listing reflects the ethics of your company.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?

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.

• Entrepreneur.com reminds us that companies are not democracies. It’s a harsh reality if you are employed by an owner that you don’t care for or don’t believe in, but if that isn’t the case than I think it’s important for us non-owners to remember this quote from the article:
  
  In today's warm, fuzzy, politically correct environment, where conventional wisdom is all about collaboration, fairness and listening to your employees, many small-business owners forget one important thing: They have to execute their battle plans with as few flaws as possible. A company is not a democracy. The only opinion that counts is that of ownership. Have a suggestion box in case someone comes up with a good idea, but don't make it a bible."

• I liked Business Insider’s tip of the day today:
  
  "Having recently concluded four years of interviews for a book on the topic of making ideas happen, I can say one thing for sure: Hard work is the single greatest competitive advantage. Ideas don't happen because they are great. The genius is in the execution, aka the "99% perspiration" that has become this site's namesake.  Perspiration implies sweat, self-discipline, and (yes) occasional exhaustion. I think this is what Malcolm Gladwell teaches us in his book Outliers when he proposes that a true mastery of anything requires 10,000 hours of doing it. There are no shortcuts to lasting success."
  -- Scott Belsky, Founder and CEO, Behance

• Get Elastic posted a great article with some basics for improving your website to increase sales volume.

• Mashable highlights a study done by inside view about how the World Cup has affected our economy and productivity globally.  In fact there is evidence of this in a Business Insider story posted today:
  
  FT reported this morning on Brazilian traders who complained about having to work while Brazil played Netherlands:
  "'Nobody is very happy, but we have to work, don’t we?' Pedro Galdi, a trader at the SLW brokerage house, said only half seriously.
  'Our experience of the previous games tells us that it will be quiet. Clients aren’t making transactions when the matches are on,' said Luiz Roberto Monteiro, a trader with Souza Barros brokerage. 'But still, we have to be here.'
  Sure enough, Banco do Brasil (BBAS3.SA) shares have lost steam from yesterday, down nearly 1%.
  And Brazil is up 1-0."
  

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon Kitchen faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

Here at PlumberSurplus.com – we love customers. No, seriously – we love our customers. Working in Customer Service gives us the opportunity - nay, privilege to interact with literally thousands of personalities each month.

It’s awesome.

From time to time, we get together to discuss the “gems” we’ve accumulated throughout our months of helping customers. We gather in the conference room and swap stories like baseball cards. Here’s a few we’ve collected from our recent “gem-jam.”

1) Customer responded to his account update email with the Taco Bell nutritional value menu.

Our customer was either hungry or set on proselytizing the nutritional values (or lack thereof) of delicious and convenient Mexican fare.

2) On St. Patrick’s day – a wonderful Irish customer bid Hannah adieu by sending her off with a traditional Irish blessing.

 “May those who love us, love us,
  And those who don't love us,
  May God turn their hearts
  And if he can't turn their hearts,
  May he turn their ankles
  So we will know them by their limping!”

3) A valued customer used "A as in abstinence." To better clarify the spelling of his name.

    I think we’ll leave it at that.

4) A customer once asked if we delivered to the moon. We informed him that we shipped primarily with UPS and sadly, the moon was outside of their delivery area.


5) "Thank you for calling PlumberSurplus.com this is Joelle"..."what’s your name?"..."Joelle"...."What?"....'My name is Joelle"...."Your name is Jello?"...."No, Joelle"....."Oh whatever I don’t even care, YOU SENT ME A BROKEN TUB..."

Personally – I think Jello makes every situation better.

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.

Today at Google’s I/O Conference Google announced that they are making Google Wave (which before today was invite only) open to everyone at wave.google.com.
 
Google wave is a tool to increase productivity by turning traditional email into a sort of email chat hybrid that allows much faster and easier communication and collaboration. Watch the video below for more information.

Trevor posted about this software when it was highly buzzed about at its beta launch earlier this year, but the buzz has dropped off since. However, Google has added many new features such as undo and email notification options and is encouraging those that have tried during the beta to give it another go now.
 
So head over to wave.google.com to try it yourself and let us know what you think about it in the comments.

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 haven’t tried but apparently Facebook doesn’t make it very easy to delete your account. Read Write Web just released an article about the recent uptick in searches for deleting Facebook accounts, which seems counter intuitive in relation to Facebook’s current popularity, but many seem to be turning to Google to find out how to do so. Since this story was written, I captured my own screenshot and it appears to be an even greater climbing search since then. You can see this reflected by Google’s search suggestion set below:





• Josh isn’t the only one disappointed with Google’s new search layout according to a recent post by Virginia of Bruce Clay’s blog.  In her post she notes that “thousands of people have downloaded the Hide Google Options plugin for Firefox and Chrome”.


• Mashable releases exclusive information on Twitter’s new Business Center.  According to Mashable and their sources at Twitter the new business features will add a variety of features like the ability to receive direct messages from non-followers and the ability to verify business accounts.


• I thought this TechCrunch article was really interesting - “Digg’s Biggest Problem Is Its Users And Their Constant Opinions On Things”.  TechCrunch points out that Digg’s history of making changes according to user uproars and complaints has actually hurt the company.  They compare this to Facebook’s strategy of “you may go pound sand” and point out that Facebook has reaped the benefits of this approach.  Interesting read.


• I’ve worked in the “Nerdery” (a room full of nerds) and had to adapt to feeling out of place.  One thing I learned about nerds is that they speak in acronyms, and if you don’t catch on quickly you can find yourself really behind in any given conversation.  Linda Bustos decided to help those of you new to this type of situation by publishing “99 Ecommerce Acronyms”.

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.

Understanding the Study

In order to understand how the study is done one first needs to know how the retailers measured are selected.  The study measures the top 100 online retailers as identified by Internet Retailer in accordance with 2009 sales volume.  While this does measure industry leaders not all retailers have chosen to participate in Internet Retailer’s Top 500 because quite a bit of company information is published.  Retailers like us for instance are privately held and therefore do not publish this type of information. We have therefore declined to participate, so there may very well be other retailers out there who are also not included for similar reasons.  Customer satisfaction is then measured by FGI Research’s SmartPanel, “a nationwide group of 1.6 million consumer households that have agreed to participate in opt-in surveys – and analyzed using the methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which was developed at the University of Michigan.”  Of the group, data was collected from 23,400 respondents who visited the online retailers studied within a two week time period regardless if the respondent made a purchase or not.

The study measures four key areas that affect customer satisfaction: price, merchandise, website functionality, and content.  Typically merchandise is the greatest factor affecting customer satisfaction, but this year it tied website functionality at second with price being the highest customer satisfaction priority.  Economic conditions have obviously played a large role in increasing the importance of price as a factor affecting customer satisfaction, and will likely continue to do so throughout this year.

Customer Satisfaction Impacts Revenues

“Researchers at the University of Michigan have conclusively shown a strong connection between customer satisfaction and a company’s financial future, regardless of whether the markets are up or down. Companies that perform well on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) enjoy better revenues, profits, loyalty, word-of-mouth recommendations, and return visits.  They even achieve higher stock prices. The University of Michigan’s findings have been corroborated by other universities, and the findings are consistent: high customer satisfaction, when measured scientifically, predicts success.”

The study also concludes that a point increase in customer satisfaction can mean an average increase of $89 million in year-over-year online sales regardless of outlying economic factors.

Top Performers

While Amazon may be the internet retail giant in overall sales, they came in second to Netflix who leads the study as the top scorer for customer satisfaction for the fourth year in a row now.  Netflix scored 87 out of 100 with Amazon following at a close second with 86 out of 100 points.  Historical changes in scores as well as who made the top nine can be seen in the image below:

The study breaks down retailers by category and also provides other key factors that contribute to retailer success, as they relate to customer satisfaction.  To get your copy of the study visit this link.

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.

The social media scene has been buzzing, no pun intended ;-) about some of the new features recently released by Facebook. Specifically the release of the Open Graph Protocol and the Like Button.

"The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed."

While I think that this is a natural progression of what Facebook has been doing I am also interested in the discussions about the Like feature replacing links on the web. I don't entirely agree that will happen however I think that Facebook is making a major play for some very valuable social content. I think that the importance of this new facebook technology will largely be hinged on how open facebook becomes, because before bydefault everything was closed.  Recently though Facebook has changed their privacy settings to be more open which has come under scrutiny. If search engines and other websites can get access to the data I am not sure it's as big of a deal, they have been able to evolve over time to the changing web; however, it puts the ball for this type of data squarely in Facebook's court. This changes the game by adding a middle man to all of the data search engines and other websites care about. I don't think this is the end of search engines, far from it, I think that this is an evolution of the way people share and curate content socially.

In all honesty I think the new Like feature is great, much better than the old way you could share websites and content.  It creates a more curated web through your social graph. I am almost surprised they have not created a Facebook bar (ala the now defunct Digg bar). Where you are browsing the web through Facebook and then chatting and sharing features at the click of a mouse, maybe someday that will come (I'm not saying I think that's an amazing idea just surprised that they have not created it yet). I know they have an IE and FF tool bar but unlike the Diggbar it takes installing and is far from seamless. In some ways this makes me think they can create a better Digg, curated by your friends, a little Metadata, categorization and a sprinkle of people actually using it and you've got something. It moves more and more content into Facebook, makes it more social and lets people more easily share their likes and interests.

I think this just goes to show how powerful/useful Facebook can be, I think it's an amazing platform and it will be interesting to see how they leverage their power and usefulness.

Predictions

• Seemlessly integrated Facebook Bar (much like the Digg bar) by the end of 2010.


• The new Like button data will become some of the most coveted and important data on the internet.
  

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.

If you haven't heard of Facebook, you're probably not actually on the internet. Facebook is the current champion of social sites, a giant community where people post their latest pictures, dialogue with each other, and play simple online games. It's also the hot new thing in eCommerce: sites hoping to capture the attention of that massive audience pouring onto the site.

There are three ways companies can build a presence with Facebook. First, they can put up a "Fan Page". A member of Facebook can create a page associated with a business, posting pictures, links, and comments just like any other user. Instead of becoming "friends", users can become "fans", but it's otherwise virtually identical. The second way to establish a presence on Facebook is to build an "app", a web service integrated into Facebook to provide more advanced services to users. Games are a particularly popular type of app, but there are also more traditional eCommerce platforms like sortprice.com that provide Facebook integration.

The third way to build a presence on Facebook is to integrate Facebook into your own site using Facebook Connect. With Facebook Connect, your eCommerce site can allow a user to login using Facebook, make posts to his or her wall and pages, and more. This allows your presence on Facebook to be spread out among your customers, rather than confined to one page or application. However, integrating Facebook Connect with your site takes a bit of skill, requiring custom code and Facebook's APIs. Recently I got a chance to do some work with Facebook Connect, and I'd like to share some of the issues and solutions I found.

Integral to Facebook Connect is the concept of permissions. Facebook asks the user's permission for any interactions with the site; that way the user probably won't be surprised or angered by something you do. One common action, for example, is to write a post to a user's wall. Each time you do this, Facebook prompts the user with a popup window with a description of what will be posted, giving them a chance to edit or refuse the post. Most of the time this is good. However, sometimes you may wish to post when the user isn't actually present to approve a post. For this, you need to request extended permissions (using "showPermissionDialog"). The two most relevant are "publish_stream", which allows you to post without explicit prompts, and "offline_access", which allows you to take actions for the user (assuming you have permission) even when the user is not logged in. There is some session information you'll need to store, but I won't go into details: you can read more at the Facebook Developer Wiki.

Another thing you might want to do is publish posts to a user's pages as well as his or her wall. This requires a bit more finesse. First, you need to know what pages a user has access to: unlike the user account, these are not given to you when the user logs in. To get them, you need to use the "query" function and FQL, a special API modeled on SQL. You can query the "page_admin" table to get the page IDs, and the "page" table to get any other information you need. Once you get the page ids, you can get permissions and post to them much like you did for the user's wall. To get permissions, you will need to explicitly list the page and user ID’s, even if you're requesting permissions for all of them; otherwise the dialog will present a dropdown to the user with only the user's wall initially selected (most users will simply click "OK", denying permission to all but their own wall). Once you've gotten permission to post to a page, simply substitute the page ID for the user ID in the "streamPublish" function. If you want to post to the page using the user's account instead of as a page self-post, keep the user ID but set "target_id" to the page ID.

As you can see, it gets pretty complicated even to perform simple activities like making posts for a user. In my own research I saw many questions and much confusion on such things as permissions and IDs. Hopefully I've given a few pointers here to get people on the right track. Although Facebook integration can be difficult, it's often worthwhile in terms of connecting with your customers and publicizing your brand.

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.

By far one of the most interesting innovations that is happening in online video is the invention of clickable video. Many companies are quickly adopting this as the next frontier for engaging with customers and convincing them to make a purchasing decision. Watch the video from videofishbowl.com below to learn more about how it can help your company’s conversions.

• For anyone who is uploading videos to YouTube, Drew Hubbard’s article on the Five Keys For Creating Viral YouTube Titles is a must read. This article dives into the different tactics you can use to optimize your title and description for the best viral results. I personally liked the idea of using the word video in the title. It makes sense to include this as often when people search for videos they are adding video to their search query.


• ReelSEO points out that videos are the fastest growing website feature for small businesses in their article of the same name. In Q4 of 2009 19% of small business websites had video; this is up almost four times from 5% in the previous year. They also touch on some interesting non video related ideas such as expanding paid search to more search engines and increasing conversion rates.


• Flimp posted a case study where they worked with the United Way to create a video email invitation to an upcoming event. The event had record attendance and raised over $400,000.00 for the charitable organization due to the success of the digital invitation.


• This also comes on the back of Google’s announcement that their YouTube preview feature has graduated into a normal feature in Gmail.


• Lastly, Search Engine Watch wrote the first part of a five part series on online video analytics. This post is nothing more than an intro into the series but I am excited to see what direction they take and will be tuning in for future posts in this series.
  

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.