The presentation is derived from my whitepaper Are you Making The Most of Shopping Portals ? (PDF file). The message is

The "search tail" is often under-exploited by merchants. Most merchants own product data that can be turned into a "quick-win" in search marketing terms. My advice is get (1) "your data out" and (2) filter and push your data to the head of the search. Often the most popular and profitable keyword emerges from the tail; all a question of finding it and promoting it to the main page.

A large database of product information is worth its weight in gold in search marketing terms. Learn to exploit it and you will improve both search head and search tail. I have analytics for a shopping site (shopping.enclick.com) that started using dynamic top 10 list of products and categories based on measuring search traffic to the site.

Send me an email, (paul dot elosegui at enclick dot com) if you want to meet up.

Technorati Tags: data+feed+marketing

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 8:32 AM | Permalink:London Search Engine Strategies Conference: Meet Up | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wikipedia is the online public domain encyclopedia, which has recently surpassed all commercial Encyclopedia services, like Encyclopedia Brittanica. In an effort to combat spammers who edit encyclopedia entries with external links in order to gain Google´s PageRank favour, has implemented the "nofollow" tag on all external links.

Wikipedia has succumbed to this controversial measure, just like all blog services, the blog search engine technorati, and the social filtering site del.icio.us. The measure was originally proposed by Google to remove the incentive for spammers to add bogus comments to blogs in an effort to increase banklinks to their spam site.

The "nofollow" tag disables the link in question from Google's algorithm, basically announcing to search engines that "this-is-not-a-good-link"; the tag removes any PageRank assignment for that link. Google first proposed the "nofollow" for fighting spam on blog comments and trackbacks. Spammers cannot leach pagerank from high PR blogs with automated comment generators.

The measure is a double edged sword for Google though. Google relies on counting links to a website to judge its importance. If webmasters use "nofollow" links which do not count for pagerank, Google will have no links to count. The concept behind their algorithm looses power.

The "nofollow" tag also goes against the central principle of attribution, which plays a critical role, that of currency, for the creative commons and open source ecology. GIven that wikipedia is lives because of the open data and creative commons ecology, this could affect it critically.

Linking out of wikipedia provides attribution to other sources and providers of information; short changing on attribution could reduce the number of wikipedia content volunteers and inbound linking to it.

Technorati Tags: nofollow+wikipedia

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:32 AM | Permalink:Wikipedia Renages on Attribution by Using the "nofollow" Tag in Outbound Links | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Merchants with competitive prices benefit especially from supplying their product data feeds to price comparison engines. The quality of the data feed plays an important role in the share of traffic merchants get. Manufacturer´s product reference and model number information in the data feed gets the products inserted fully in the price comparison algorithms, and competing for qualified users which are at the price comparison stage of their buying cycle.

The resulting customer orders exceeded expectations and as a consequence multichannel sales grew over the 6 weeks by 204%. Releases. Woolworths online drive offsets middling high-street sales; overall results are down, like-for-like sales dropped by 4.6% in the six weeks to January 13. In Tesco's case, underlying sales (excluding fuel) grew by 5.9% in the six weeks to January 6, helped by its online store Tesco Direct, which lifted internet sales by 30% on 2005 figures, to a total of £150 million (€225 million). Online sales are estimated to have added as much as 1% to the like for like sales figures. After the successful Christmas period, Tesco is planning to increase its current 11,000 DVD, CDs with its full non-food online by April.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , online+shopping

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:00 PM | Permalink:Woolworths Big Christmas Push in Online Sales | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Domino is also preparing its mobile ecommerce platform. It expects text message orders will also drive sales growth in the future, as the coming teenage demographic use always-on broadband and text rather than voice phones.

Domino pizza media center.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , online+shopping

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 8:09 AM | Permalink:Online Pizza Orders Drive Growth at Domino Pizzas | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hundreds of millions of shoppers using their paypal account to ensure security on their ebay purchases can now use their paypal accounts for all purchases. With the new debit card number associated ot their paypal accounts, shoppers can use this new "paypal credit card" to shop safely on all retailers accepting credit cards.

Paypal accounts are designed with online fraud protection, since they can only be used online. Paypal guarantees fraud protection and polices its account transaction proactively. Online security is heightened by technical encryption and authentication technologies, over and above the standard secure transaction page.

Paypal's new innitiative to improve consumer confidence online should have higher impact in countries where confidence is still low. The value is limited in the UK and US where credit card companies and major banks have dedicated online fraud units, and confidence is high.

PayPal Virtual Debit Card FAQs - PayPal

Technorati Tags: online+fraud , paypal

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:00 AM | Permalink:Security Risk Reduced to Zero with PayPal Virtual Debit Card | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A quarter of all electrical goods sold over Christmas were bought online, according to Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG). IMRG also said that online now accounts for 10% of total retail sales in the UK, compared to just 0.5% in 2000. In 2006 as a whole, online sales were up 40% from the previous year.

On commodity products that have little differentiation, shoppers search for best prices using price comparison engines like Enclick best price search.

"From talking to our members, my guess is consumers will have spent £3.7bn (€5.55bn) online just in December", James Roper, chief executive for IMRG

"This has definitely been an online Christmas. We think 25 million people are now shopping online and the spike that we see at Christmas is huge. Everything combines to push people to internet shopping over the period - bad weather, bulk buying, the inconvenience of transport ..."

Wrapped gifts was another category of massive growth this year, up 150 percent year-on-year. Statistics released by online shoppers are impressive:

1. John Lewis saw its online sales soar 60% in December
2. Online sales at Tesco soared by more than 30%
3. 1.3 million shoppers ordered groceries and Christmas gifts through Tesco.com
4. Tesco Wine Club delivered 80,000 orders in time for Christmas, up 50% since last year
5. Amazon, the number one etailer in the UK, sold 4 million orders on its busiest day, December 11.
6. Next Directory's sales (50% of which are estimated to be online) rose by 9.3

Offline, high-street sales are loosing market share. HMV and Woolworths both issued profit warnings at the beginning of December, and Mr Ratner of the Retail Consortium, said their Christmas trading updates were likely to be bad. Next's retail division, saw underlying sales in the 308 stores slump by 6.9 per cent from 31 July to 24 December.

Marks & Spencers is making a concerted effort to increase its online sales. Stuart Rose, M&S's chief executive, wants to increase internet sales from £100m to £500m by overhauling its website. Marks & Spencers datafeed has improved in quantity and quality recently, as it distributes its products among shopping portals.

All retailers are embracing internet shopping portals as distribution partners. For the high-street retailers, our Enclick shopping compares prices on the following number of products:

• Woolworths: 273,000 products
• John Lewis: 19,000 products
• Marks & Spencers 9300 products
• Littlewoods: 10,500 products

The enclick data feed marketing team is in high demand, helping retailers market their inventories online.

Many bricks and mortars high-street retailers are all turning to Online Sales to save their businesses. Who would have said ?

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , shopping+online

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 4:59 PM | Permalink:Online Shopping Rises to Record Levels over Christmas | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)