Variable Markup

I’ve been playing around with the data visualization tools at IBM’s Many Eye’s project and came up with a visualization in a treeview that shows the top 500+ ecommerce sites split by category of retailer with google page rank.  It’s an interesting way to look at the data as you quickly see that apparel & accessories dominates number of retailers in the top 500.  Following the apparel category is Specialty/Non-Apparel, Housewares, and Computers/Electronics. 

 An alternative interesting view can be see by dragging the retail vertical to the position between google page range and site.  This will group everything by page rank showing that there’s only 4 retailers with a GPR of 9. 

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage. (continue reading…)

Google just release Google Checkout Trends.   Similar in nature to Google Trends where you can compare the popularity of search terms, here Google is allowing you to compare sales of products or brands that were paid for through Google Checkout. 

After playing with it a bit, I started to think about how it might be used by retailers for useful information.  One of the clear ways may be to look at two brands like I’ve done in the screenshot below.  Comparing shoes from the brands Sebago and Rockport, show they are fairly even in their success overall, but show very different peaks and valleys.   I think it would be interesting to compare Google’s results to your own sales metrics and see how they differ.

When checking it out, be sure to zoom in on specific time frames and price points.  You can start to see patterns of how the products do at various points.   

Merchandisers will have to keep in mind that this sales data is only for online transactions and those that went through Google Checkout, which is an extremely small portion of online sales at the moment.  Never the less, it can still show interesting trends. 

One of the disappointing things that makes this less useful is that Google only shows top tier items so trying to compare products

While surfing I came across Beyond Alt Text:  Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilitiesfrom the Nielsen Norman Group.   It’s normally $124, but they are giving it away for free for the holidays.   Accessibility design has become increasingly important over the last few years with ecommerce websites due to rulings in the courts that sites such as Target.com must be accessible.   

 It’s a good time in the year to look at your site and determine if you are compliant. 

I’m giving Bestbuy.com a C+ for their holiday widget strategy this holiday season.  They provided two widgets, one in the form of Yahoo Widgets for your desktop and the second for igoogle.  Both are identical in look and functionality.  The visual design was well done, although the functionality came up short IMO.  Details below.

This is the first view of the widget which allows you to add holidays that you are planning for.  I added Christmas and Valentines day.  It then also allows you to take notes for each of the holidays you have added to your list.
(continue reading…)

Strong words from the CEO of Ikea.  Furniture Today has an article today that says that a memo is making the rounds in Sweden from Anders Dahlvig, CEO and President.

“According to the memo, which came from Anders Dahlvig, Ikea’s CEO and president, the Swedish company will focus on the in-store experience as “the only sales channel,” putting a halt on “further investments to develop the Home Shopping or Online sales channel(s).”"

An Ikea spokesman followed up later stating that there are no plans to discontinue ecommerce in the US.

This is a surprising move for Ikea, given the fact that their supply chain and merchandise is specifically designed to be small and transportable before reaching the consumer.  Out of all of the furniture retailers, these guys are set up perfectly to excel in the ecommerce market. 

I’m a firm believer in focusing on a few things you can do really well, but abandoning the ecommerce market is a bit too narrow for me.   Either way, it’ll be interesting to watch.

I haven’t been writing much over the past couple weeks because I’ve been focused on developing a new mashup app that will track the top 500+ ecommerce sites on the web.    Trying to keep up with what the top companies are doing is always a difficult and time consuming task so I decided to pull information together in one place.   I’ve written a few spiders as well as some mashup code with Compete, ZoomInfo, and Google API’s to build a dossier on each of the best sites. 

Please check out The Top Ecommerce Sites and let me know what you think. 

Currently I’m tracking on each site:

• Snapshots of the home page
• Google Page Rank
• Backlinks from major search engines
• Traffic via Compete
• Company data from ZoomInfo
• Types of technology used and sizes (i.e. html, images, flash, javascript)
• User submitted comments and reviews
• 1-5 Star ratings submitted by users
• References in the Blogosphere
• Google News

(continue reading…)

Brandon over at “The life and times” wrote up a great article on Optimizing for Google Product Search (Formerly Froogle).   Definitely worth checking out. 

Along with Walmart putting their secret sales online early this year, other retailers are deciding to release their ads earlier than Thanksgiving.  According to an article on ToledoBlade.com, Best Buy will release their ad on Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Meijer has already released their ad including a 37 inch LCD TV for $500.   After a quick look at the Meijer site, I couldn’t find the ads.  A few links found on black friday sites resulted in a page not found.  It looks like they changed their mind after publishing the ad. 

I think getting the ads out earlier is an interesting way for smaller retailers to compete with the big box stores.  If the retailer isn’t going to be able to get the ad coverage, they might as well get their ads out now, build community mindshare and traffic to their site.   They can always leave some exclusives for later in the week.

A Secret Black Friday Walmart site was found showing some products at steeper than normal discount with “Secret In-Store Specials”.  It appears they are trying to start the holiday savings early with this site.  It will be interesting to see if this applies pressure to others to follow suit.

The site makes extensive use of Flash.

Update from NY Times

After writing the last post about Rooms to Go’s success with Local PPC (Pay Per Click) Search, I decided to research the topic a bit and write up these tips to improving your Local PPC and SEO efforts.  

1. Make sure your PPC links list the city you are advertising for.  When your ad is seen, you want to make sure the person surfing notices that your ad is specifically for the area you are advertising for which will increase the quality of your click throughs.

2. Take your store locator and turn each store details page into a landing page just for that location.  

• Follow standard SEO best practices and include the store city location in the page title, URL, and text.  
• Add specific local information to the landing page like events – tent sales, book signings, or other local information such as store hours and manager contacts.
• Personalize the content on that location’s page to be as specific as possible about that location.   Avoid duplicating content that’s provided on your national pages here. 
• Consider having a photo taken of the local store that can be shown on the landing page giving the reader an immediate connection to the location.
• Make sure you have a site map linking to all of the locations so the search engines will index those store location pages.
• Consider a sub-domain approach for each location – city.yourdomain.com as that will help with the local SEO for that location and provide a memorable url for your repeat customers.
• If you are going to make any of your pages mobile accessible, these have to be at the top of your list to get done. 
• Put GPS Coordinates and POI(points of interest) file with your locations that can be downloaded  and used in a customer GPS device to find your stores when on the road.

3.  Avoid sending the reader to the home page on the first click.  If there’s nothing Local about the landing page, the user may abandon the page and move on.

4.  If you have stores in cities with high concentrations of a specific ethnic origin, consider local city targeting in the native language specified through that search engine. 

5. Optimize your SEO keywords for your local landing pages.  An easy way to generate keywords for local search is to use a tool like http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php.   This site will take your keywords and add the cities to them for targeting that specific area. 

6.  Don’t overlook the search engines/directories that specialize in local search – i.e. Citysearch.com, superpages, and yellowpages.

That’s all I have for tonight, anyone have any other ideas?  I’ll enter the ideas submitted in the comments into a drawing for a shirt from the swag bag.