Interesting article regarding Facebook’s entrant into the world of email provider. New release called Facebook Messages

The gist of the article:

Facebook (FB)  is combining text messaging, instant messaging (IM) and email into one product. FB has already rolled out limited @facebook.com email account to a few selected FB users. Some experts are chiming in that this will change the entire email marketing landscape because retailers will not be able to bombard @facebook users.  The only emails getting through will be the ones that are connected to FB user.

According to the article these are the unique characteristic of the @Facebook is offering:

1. @facebook – limit access to friends and family into one email account bucket while non-friends will be siphoned into another bucket (folder)
2. All chats, emails and post will be documented and strung together – so that users will have the history of all conversations readily available.
3. The bcc and cc  will not be part of their features and no more subject lines either.

Furthermore, the article points out that the “Like” button will not only be important for getting your brand notice, but it  will be crucial to get as much “like votes”. This may be the only way for marketers to find their marketing message into the user primary  folder, in other words into their friends and family folder.

Finally, the last bit is about the importance of marketing messages usability for smart phones to ensure that users will actually or be entice to read marketing emails using their phones.

My take:

It definitely will be interesting to see how this feature will be used by the FB user base. I can see the appeal of having one platform to manage all your personal conversation. I use IM alot, I won’t have to log into my IM or Messager account any longer, I won’t have to text on my phone then email separately and then go back to my text to see the history of the conversation, so definitely this feature is very appealing, why haven’t the other guys think of that?

On the other hand, as a marketer, I am going have to get a lot more creative. I wonder if Brands that have FB presence will be able to access their fan base easily without being bucketed or is this the main point that fans are bucketed into another folder. If that is the case, engaging conversation is all the more crucial because there are so much distraction out there it will be difficult to hold people attention for too long unless its interesting.

Have you read this article?  If so, please share with us your opinion on this new Facebook release? Are you loving it because you can stop using your @gmail and @yahoo and  other the @email accounts? OR are you hating it because your job just got harder?

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What if you could still make money by sending your traffic to your brick & mortar competition, would you do it?

I came across this article and I thought, wow, that is actually a cool idea. Lots of consumers do their research online but really want to buy it locally so they can see and touch the goods before buying. Instead of having your website’s visitor running all over town, why not set up a “coopetition” with local brick & mortar competitors in different parts of the country, using a zip code finder.  Should they choose to buy it locally, you’re steering your visitor to these stores and becoming a resource/directory for local stores. This would be like a reverse affiliate program, where your website serves as a catalog resource, pushing traffic to the local suppliers. You could use your website’s traffic to garner a piece of the business that you are NOT partaking in because you have no local physical presence.

Now, where it would get complex is to attempt to track your role in the local sale, but that’s another subject matter, and certainly something to think about. Does anyone have any experience with this program? Would you know how the online merchant can keep tabs on his share of the revenue?

To read the article I’m referring to, click here

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I wanted to share this story that I read about the UK being the King of Ecommerce. The most interesting part of the article for me is the snippet below:

“Everyone thinks the global Silicon Valley-based companies are driving growth, but this report makes clear that in the U.K. it is coming from the ‘Mom’ and ‘Pop’ businesses. They now have global footprints, they are selling to the long tail, and they are making their businesses more efficient.”

What does this mean?  It means that the opportunity for American Mom & Pop stores to capture a piece of the ecommerce pie is still HUGE. The USA can be Queen of Ecommerce (for now)  I am inspired to help as many ecommerce entrepreneurs take this challenge on.

Read the full article  here and share your thoughts with us.

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I bet you do! Heck, I just want 2 pieces, hmmm 2% of  $51 billion  (my Casio calculator doesn’t have that many zeros so even if my math is bad, it works out to be roughly $1 billion). Okay, perhaps that’s a little too ambitious a goal for this year, since it’s already November, but it’s completely doable to get a tiny sliver of this pie – if you act now.

You can  read the full article

Here is a snippet from the BizReport article:

Experts predict that online shopping will increase by 13% for Q4 to reach about $51 billion. If that happens, consumers would spend over $10 billion more in the online space than in 2009. It could also push yearly ecommerce totals to more than $162 billion, a 12% increase over 2009. Holiday sales figures are expected to account for about 23% of the total yearly online spending, according to eMarketer’s report.

Why the strong increases for Q4? Jeffrey Grau, Principal Analyst with eMarketer notes that shoppers are spending more online in an effort to avoid crowds in physical stores. Also, finding bargains is simpler online and making purchases of unique or popular items online can be simplified in an online environment.

Conclusion:

It’s all about the “OFFER”. Consumers are looking for bargains and the ease of shopping online.  Online shopping would not be this popular if these two things were not true. So, make sure your company is doing everything you can NOW to deliver the desires that consumers want — deals and ease of use.

Ensure that your OFFER is relevant and that the email campaign you send out is strategic (you’re not sending email campaigns just to check it off your to do list). Remember, consumers want “easy” so ensure that your website is user friendly. Once you get your visitor to click onto your site, don’t disappoint them. You customer is getting offers from every direction this holiday season. Assume that people are short on time and attention so be “explicit” and clear about your offer and what you want them to to do on your ecommerce site.

Don’t assume they will scroll down your long product description to eventually find your add to cart button.  Clear your cookies and shop your own site, better yet, ask a novice to shop your site while you sit there (restrain yourself from “pointing out the obvious”) quietly observing how he/she interacts with your site. You may learn a thing or two.

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I’d just read this interesting article about Walmart and ConAgra Brands working on Groupon style apps. I have personally purchased 4 things/offers on Groupon and initially when I first signed up I would check my email everyday just to see what the interesting offer would be. (market research – yeah right – Go broke saving money)

IMHO, it’s both good and bad. If your business service oriented and you have suite of offerings like a spa or restaurant it’s great, you can discount one of your higher margin service and still at least come close to breaking even and hopefully your new client will come back and try other services and be willing to pay the full price.   However, if you sell physical products, that might not work so well for you if you take a loss on a single item or break even in hopes of capturing a customer and getting the customer on your mailing list. It all depends.

I think its may work as a temporary lead capture if you have high margin items and there is high potential to extend the life time value of your customer.  (I’m all about extending the life time value – always)

If you  try Groupon or something like it, be sure that you’re not inadvertently training your customers and your new customers to only purchase from you because you have a coupon or its on sale. Its like Macy’s achilles heel, most shoppers will not buy from Macy’s at full retail and worst, most will only buy when they send out the extra 15 – 25% discount on top of the sale priced merchandise.

Have you tried Groupon as a consumer or as a merchant? What was your experience as a consumer?  As a merchant, what worked what didn’t work and would you try it again?

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The holiday season starts early for us marketers. We should be busy finalizing our holiday season email promotions, sprucing up landing page creative, coordinating upcoming promotions with affiliates and customer service department, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday specials.

One of the nagging question ecommerce businesses struggle with is whether shipping should be considered a profit center or a marketing tool. With the highly competitive retail holidays fast approaching, I thought I jump in and add my two cents to this conversation.

Retailers that give free shipping away use it as a conversion tool and competitive advantage over the competition. Retailers who haven’t given free shipping often wonder if they should. Some give free shipping over a certain dollar purchase threshold and others charge a low flat fee, as low as $2.95, from what I’ve seen.

Two years ago, I viewed shipping charges as a profit center. It definitely added to our bottom line and helped us recover the ever-increasing costs of shipping we pay to UPS, FedEx and U.S. Post Office. But the competitive nature of my industry changed my view about this. We tried different formulas like a flat rate charge of $9.95 when the order under $100.00 and free shipping on purchases over $100.00.

Eventually, we figured out that we broke even around $150.00 because some of our products are pretty heavy when purchased in bulk.  I was fine with breaking even on shipping and even subsidizing it a little bit so we could grow our sales. The tricky part can be figuring out your top line sales growth if you’re giving away free shipping.

As I said above, this is a good time to test this theory. It’s different for every retailers and it’s based largely on profit margin, conversion rate, AOV (average dollar purchased), amongst other metrics. With the holidays fast approaching, your site will experience increased traffic, and this is the best time to check (test) where your break even point is or if your profit level will increase if you give away or subsidize free shipping.

Below is a link to a free shipping calculator, compliments of Mike Ober, Senior Manager, Merchant Developer.  Check it out and give us some feedback on what your findings are. Would you share your opinion or experience with regards to Free Shipping.

Mike Ober’s free shipping calculator http://bit.ly/b2QupJ it opens as an Excel spreadsheet. You can also follow him on Twitter by clicking this link:   http://twitter.com/MikeOber

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I had the pleasure of meeting Audrey at a conference some years back and have always admire how she had grown several of her e-commerce stores on different platform. She was kind enough to let me interview her for my blog. Below she shares the different entreprenuerial hats that she wears on a daily basis.

Q: You’re have several Online Stores, can you tell me a little more about them? Like when you started them.
A: I started my first store, A2 Armory in 2002. I started that store on the Yahoo Store platform, it is still a Yahoo Store today. I started my second store, The Tapestry Standard, about 6 months later. That store runs on the X-Cart platform. I have three other stores that all run on ShopSite, they were started over the past five years. The most recent was just started this past summer.

Each is a niche store targeted to a specific market. That is one of the key points store owners should focus on when creating their stores. You want to go after a market that is specific and position yourself as the expert (whether it be you or your store) in that niche.

Q: Do you stock inventory in your warehouse?
A: I do not stock any inventory. Each of my stores is based on the drop ship model of online business. Basically I form a relationship with a vendor (they are sometimes manufacturers, sometimes wholesalers) and I sell their products at whatever price point I decide. When I get an order, I collect the money from my customer, then place the order with my drop shipper and they ship the product directly to my customer with my company information on the package. This way my customer has no idea that I’m not shipping the product myself. I pay a little bit more per order for this luxury, but to me it is worth it because I don’t have to tie money up in inventory, warehouse space, and extra employees to handle the shipping.

Q: Why do you prefer drop shipping over wholesaling for your stores?
A: For me it is about convenience and being able to keep my company very small. Those two things make drop shipping the perfect model for what I want to get out of my business.

I don’t want the responsibility of running and maintaining a warehouse full of goods. I want as hands-free a business as possible. I think of my vendors as outsourced labor. The drop shipping model removed a lot of stress from running a physical goods based business.

Q: I’ve heard you mention in the past that you have a method for Advanced Market Research that actually makes you money while giving you important data. Can you explain that idea?
A: Yes, when I find a market I’m interested in, I often create an affiliate site for the niche. That way I’m able to check out the market and decide if I want to build a store around it based on more than just supply and demand numbers.

I design these affiliate sites so that they look very much like a typical eCommerce site and I put my contact information on them so I get feedback from customers. This gives me a much clearer picture of what selling in that market will be like so I can decide if it’s something I want to dive into with my own store.

And while I’m getting all this great data, I’m also making money from the affiliate products I’m promoting on the site. If I decide to build a store, I use the URL I have the affiliate site on so my store starts off with traffic and rankings. If I decide I’m not going to move forward with a store, I leave the site up and continue to make money from it.

Q: I really enjoyed your webinar. I was particularly impressed with your Action Plan 2010 Calendar, can you share how you came to create this guide? Is this something that you use on your eCommerce business?
A: Yes, the calendar is my schedule for holiday promotion. You can actually follow along with it and my stores and see me doing everything I laid out in the calendar. I came up with that schedule after going through 8 holiday seasons. It works for my stores year after year.

Q: Is it too late to make money this Christmas if I don’t yet have a store built?
A: No, you can still make money this holiday season, even if you haven’t started building your site yet. Get a bunch of products in your store right away and start promoting. The fastest way to get traffic is to use PPC advertising. If you don’t have the budget for that, get some guest blog posts on industry blogs, put out some press releases, and start marketing your store via social networks and you’ll start seeing traffic.

Q: If a store owner just doesn’t have the time to implement your suggestion action plan, what are the 5 key campaigns that you strongly recommend that they must execute to maximize their Holiday 2010 revenue?
A: 1. Target the big money days.
2. Use your social networks.
3. Use your existing base – email marketing is a major money-making strategy.
4. Put out some press releases for sales you’re running.
5. Use PPC advertising to drive traffic to your biggest money-making products.

Q: When you’re not busy growing your eCommerce stores, what else are you working on?
A: I’m generally looking into new markets and helping other entrepreneurs build their eCommerce businesses with my on-going training program.

Q: What is eCom Incubator and eCom Catalyst?
A: eCom Incubator is a 12 module eCommerce course I created for those just starting out or struggling with their current online store. It covers every aspect of building an eCommerce store from market research all way through automation and outsourcing. The steps in the course are the exact steps I use when creating a new store.

eCom Catalyst is monthly on-going training. Each member has access to a 24/7 forum to ask questions and get answers and advice from me and other members. There are also 3 monthly calls where members can directly ask me questions about anything related to their eCommerce business. The first call is a training call followed by open Q & A, the second call is with a guest expert (past experts have included Leslie Rohde, Vin Montello, Chris Malta, Ray Edwards, and other high caliber online marketers) these are also followed by live Q & A with the experts, and the third call is open Q & A wit me. The calls last as long as the questions do and benefit every member even if they only listen.

Q: What is the benefit of becoming a member?
A: The benefits are direct access to me for all your eCommerce needs. Whether you need a simple question answered or you want a full on site review, I’m here for you. Members also benefit from the specialized knowledge of the guest experts, some of these people charge hundreds of dollars for calls, members get to access them for the monthly cost of only $67. Members also get bonus material created by me (action calendars, graphics packages, special reports, etc) and special deals from people I partner with (deeply discounted store templates, special pricing for traffic software, etc).

Q: Any final thoughts on eCommerce in general?
A: I love eCommerce. I was recently asked by a student, “If you had to start all over again, would you open an online store?” My answer was, “Absolutely”. I love selling physical products. There is something about selling something tangible that makes a big difference in how satisfied I am with my business.

I have nothing against Internet Marketers and Info Product Sellers, but I don’t get the same level of happiness selling that kind of stuff as I do actually putting a real product into a customers hands. To me happiness in business is key, otherwise it’s just another job and that’s not what I want. I want a business that I run myself that makes me money and brings me happiness; my online stores have always done that for me and I’m confident they will continue to for as long as I continue to run them.

Below is an image of the Prediction for the Holiday Season for 2010 – This calendar was created by Mike Ober, Senior Manager, Merchant Development with Yahoo.  Based on last years Yahoo Merchant data and Comscore Data, Mike shared his prediction for the busiest holiday days for 2010. I took a snap shot of the presentation slide with my camera. Please forgive the unsophisticated photo. You can  also follow Mike on Twitter by clicking this link: http://twitter.com/MikeOber

Click image to see enlarge version.

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Here is the summary of the vendors that were at the Yahoo summit 2010 in Santa Clara.

It was really nice to see many friendly familiar faces on the merchant store owner side, the Yahoo account managers and product team, as well as the Yahoo web developers.

In case you’re curious which vendors were present, here are the ones that I got a chance to speak to about what they’re working on for Yahoo Stores.

This what they had to share:

My Store Solutions – Ian Torrey said that his team  has been working on a feature that delivers a intuitive toolset to customers based on how they browse your store. The new product comparison pulls data directly from your item pages via AJAX to the sections, allowing users to compare any similar products on the fly without leaving the page. Other solutions utilize both external application hosting subject to services fees and a reliance of uptime as well as in most cases, a less intuitive presentation in context of your store.

Nextopia – Sanjay Arora, Founder and CEO.  I’ve known Sanjay for several years because  Nextopia’s Ecomm/Search application powered  6 of my sites for  several years for their search functionality. Nextopia, a Summit co-sponsor, has really grown since we started with them, and now has more than 300 Yahoo! Stores among its 1,000+ customer base.

Kingwebmaster – known for making the impossible possible, George Chiyat, Co-Founder of  Kingwebmaster was very excited to speak to me about his Promo Manager (which I help named)  Promo Manage is simple to use. The Promo Manager is a powerful marketing tool designed to allow you to create offers, market them and easy modify them until you reach your sales goals. By using a set of conditions to give your customers specific rewards, you can create a virtually unlimited amount of promotions customized to your preferences. He said that store owners who have signed up are seeing increases in  conversion rates and higher order totals.

Top Right – Ron Pereira, Founder. Ron a new dad was excited to share with me about his single coupon feature.  Top right has makes it easy for your to create and assign codes to specific customers based on the rules you create in the Top Right backend. This can be automatically integrated  to your email message and send to the customer.  It’s ideal for rewards program.

Exclusive Concepts – is helping store owners focus on their sale conversion to get ready for the holiday season. Dan Theirl tells me that its not too last to check out their “Conversion on Demand” package that can easily to rolled out in the next few weeks. Tools like Daily Deal Bar, Cart closer, Peel away ads are some of the easy and effective way to maximize the traffic that turns your visitors into customers.

EY Studios – Eric Yonge, CEO was so excited about supporting my blog that he said that the first 10 people to comment on the my blog with ‘EY Rocks’ gets a free site review with them. Please include your email where you can be reached. Sign up and comment below.

YourStoreWizards – They’re encouraging store owners to work on their product feeds to get ready for the holiday season. I asked them if all stores do feeds by now. And they said, you’ll be surprised about the missing opportunity that store owners are not taking advantage of by providing feeds to places like Google Base, Bing Shopping, the find and shopping comparison engines.

Practical Data – Joel Jimenez, Co-Founder shared with me the successes that his clients are experiencing with “My Rewards” program. This feature encourages customer loyalty by offering points for purchases. Rewards can be redeemed via use of gift certificates or in products.

Fastpivot – Matthew Ledford, CEO is focusing on social media for Yahoo Stores. With their new social tools, their goal is to ensure that your social media campaigns are consistent through out the different medium in promoting your brand.  Features like the Facebook “like” button as well as a professional Facebook Branded pages, help keep your customers engage with your company and with their social connections.

StoneEdge Technologies – Barney Stone, Founder  has been helping Yahoo stores manage their order and inventory needs since the late  90’s.  Their tool helps manage orders, customers, payment processing, inventory, purchasing, receiving, picking/packing, shipping, returns, exchanges and much much more. As I can personally attest, you will not be able to take your business to the next level without a backend system like StoneEdge order manager.

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I realized that I still haven’t explained what eCommerceFastStart.com based on my post a few days ago. So here goes.

eCommerceFastStart is a collaboration between Dan Theis and myself on the subject of helping ecommerce entrepreneur grow their business. I’ve have known Dan since 2004. I had signed up for several of his training program on SEO, PPC and Link Building.

Along the way, Dan also coached me in the best practices for ecommerce businesses. I have to say I learned a lot from Dan and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that he was a huge factor in my success at AmericanBridal.com

We’ve been talking about partnering up for years, but I’ve always been too busy growing AmericanBridal and he with his training programs.

Ecommerce Fast Start is about focusing on ecommerce entrepreneurs. Its about training and teaching best practices for ecommerce operation, seo, ppc, marketing, and everything in between. It’  about growing your businesses to achieve the entrepreneur dream while minimizing the growing pain that is part of growth.

Some of the things that we’re working on now are:

• Ebook
• Content videos
• Training Webinars (structure)

Although we have a strong ideas on what our training webinars will be focusing on, we want to wait to see what kind of feedback we get from you our readers. We don’t want to design a training webinar and then expect that you’ll just sign up. We want our training to be geared to your needs and points of concerns.

So talk to us, leave comments here to let us know which aspects of eCommerce bring you the most headaches.  what keeps you up at night and gives you the most frustration? Whether it be email marketing, SEO, running your warehouse fulfillment or managing employees, we’re happy to hear what you have to say.

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