• €63billion will be spent online by UK shoppers
• 860 million parcels will be shipped to the UK's 26 million internet shoppers, 33 each on average
• Online shoppers will each spend €2400 on average
• 10% of all retail now online, rising to 20% in three years time

Online retail will grow in quality too, becoming an integral part of mainstream consumer's habits

1. Inclusivity people of all abilities will use online shopping
2. Normalisation online shopping will become integral to normal everyday life
3. Diversification online shopping will extend to a wider range of products and services
4. Shophistication online shopping services to become easier, quicker, safer and more valuable
5. Exclusivity a rise in specialist boutiques, offering more niche and exclusive products

Cross-border Shopping

Cross border retail is gaining traction, as shoppers look for and find better deals across borders. Shoppers in Europe have forever shopped across borders, specially when located in towns near frontiers. With online shopping and international postal delivery, cross border shopping for better deals is about to take off.

Already, Spanish book purchasing relies heavily on Amazon UK deliveries, as no strong contender exists in Spain. Amazon UK has in the passed purchased advertising from hispavista.com, our parent company. Bargain hunting is about to extend across borders; and the bargains are considerable, even in spite of delivery cost across Europe.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 6:57 AM | Permalink: Online Shopping set to Reach 20% of All Retail | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Great event for affiliate marketers organized yesterday by affiliates4u events team. Four hundred attendees, merchants, affiliates and affiliate networks.

Merchants are clearly courting affiliates and their ability to attract targeted user traffic. From Kevin Cornils buy.at presentation; affiliates sold in excess £ 2000m goods online for a fee of £140m. A year-on-year rise of 60%, taking an alleged 10% of total online advertising spend.

Clearly merchants are discovering the pay-on-acquisition model. My opinion is that CPA commissions will inevitably rise though, as merchant demand for the model exceeds the volume available through affiliate networks. In the end, buy through ad impressions (CPM), clickthroughs (CPC), and on-purchase-results (CPA) will balance out to give the same value-for-money (ROI).

Yes, what a soup of acronyms.

The word branding came up in conversations increasingly. Paid-search and affiliate marketing have a secondary benefit in addition to the immediate sale; repeat sales. In fact, the repeat sales experts extraordinares, the email marketers, were very evident at the event. It is not just about the sale on clickthrough, it is about the repeat visit. The brand and the loyalty. In fact, one expert from UK Media Ltd, who arbitrages £ 12m in volume, says branding is the next natural step for affiliate web sites.

Technorati Tags: affiliate+marketing

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:06 AM | Permalink: Affiliate Marketing on the Rise | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

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)

In spite of the recent controversy on the poor accuracy of online statistics, Hitwise still produces interesting insights on overall internet clickthrough.

Moneysupermarket.com, leading loans and insurance comparator, received 13.55% of total traffic from organic search, and 20% from paid search (PPC) campaigns. While 4.2% of traffic to retail sites are now being sent by comparison shopping engines, a 17% increase relative to last year. For certain products, 90% of online shoppers use comparison shopping engines to research a purchase.

One of the keys to successful use of comparison shopping engines is being able to submit your entire catalogue through a data feed. Enclick runs data feed service for merchants wishing to outsource data feed submission and maintenance to the top dozen comparison shopping engines.

[ Via Shopping sites critical to retailers: Hitwise?s Tancer]

Technorati Tags: comparison+shopping+engine , retail+clickstream

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 6:43 PM | Permalink: Comparison Shopping Engines now Essential for Ecommerce Marketing | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has issued its first proposal for a data feeds standards. The standard is aimed squarely at Comparison Shopping Engines, like shopping.com, kelkoo.com and enclick.com. The goal of the standard is to allow ecommerce merchants to generate a single data feed valid for all affiliate networks and shopping sites, instead of the dozen odd data feeds which are necessary at present.

Jay Heavilon of MARS, who chairs the committee for the standard states

"The current situation is a digital tower-of-Babel, where different online shopping search and shopping engines take SKU data in different formats. These specs allow advertisers, engines, and agencies to exchange product data more efficiently,”

[National Retail Federation Press Release]

Google, W3C and ARTs have competing standards for ecommece data feeds. Google has published the GData API which is a simple focused standard, concentrating exclusively on getting merchant's products into Google Base. With Google Checkout interface adding the transaction backend interface.

The ARTS standards is a more comprehensive definition of vocabulary which ties into ART's other standards for the communication along entire retail value chain. The W3C's RDF schema is also comprehensive, but the retail category XML schema is still not complete.

There Can be Only One

The three data feed standards clearly overlap in scope. Which ones attains critical mass first is still very much an open question. Each standard has pros and cons.

ARTS has buy-in from Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, and other major players in the online retail sector.

Google Data is now the way for merchants to get their products into Google Search Results. Since Google dominates the retail clickthrough market; its search is typically the origin of 25% of all ecommerce related clickthrough. If Google keeps this lock on retail related traffic, Google Data will be an obligatory data feed for all online shops.

The W3C's XML standards have the advantage of having public domain licences. W3C waives the right to demand fees for the use of its schemas. ARTS and Google reserve all rights on the use of their standard; either organization has a right to demand fees and royalties on the use of their standard in the future. All W3C's standards use forms of creative commons licences, and are therefore truely for the benefit of the retail community.

Public Licence Standards

The public licence issue over the standard is central here. Viral marketing tenets for mass adoption recommend zero fees and minimum friction on use of the schemas. But Already Google has attracted strong criticism from internet leaders over their commercial lock-in tactics of the Google Data standard. Similarly, ARTS already levies fees for use of some of their standard; a disaster in viral marketing terms.

Meanwhile retail merchants observe in hope, as they are forced to produce half a dozen feeds for submitting their product list to price comparison engines.

Technorati Tags: data+standards , retail+association , shopping+standards

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 4:40 PM | Permalink: Shopping Feeds Standards Fight is On | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The announcement comes just in time, as Google hurtles forward in the development of its competing GData standard for Google Base and Google Checkout. Google Base is to power comparison shopping on Google's main search, with Google Checkout providing clients and merchants with bank clearing of transactions.

[Google Data API have opened a blog here]

Technorati Tags: comparison+shopping , gdata , google+base , online+retail , shopping+data+feed+standard

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 9:11 AM | Permalink: Developments on the Standard Universal Data Feeds Front | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The number one online supermarket has announced 28.7% growth for the first half of 2006. Having topped £1000m in turnover in 2005, growth is down slightly from 32% for the year ending 2005, but profits are up to 43.1% in 2006 as economies of scale rise further. Likely sales for 2006 are £1300m (topping €2000m), only behind Amazon for the UK.

Online sales are only 6% of total sales though, compared with Littlewoods 30% revenue from its ecommerce group.

Tesco has piloted specialized order fulfillment centers, which use state of the art Operational Research Software to optimize a order filler's pick up route along specialized pallets and shelfs. In addition to advanced automation to manage shelf stock. Order filler staff follow instructions on a wrist worn PDA, to fill several orders at the same time, with a minimum of movement along ailes.

Tesco is rivalling shops like Argos and Ikea by offering home delivery in two-hour slots, instead of half-day ones, and also the option to collect directly from stores.

Tesco has increased the number of CDs and DVDs it offers online to 280,000. With an additional 8,000 products in the lucrative electronics and household appliances sectors. In fact, Tesco is the highest selling household appliances retailer on the Enclick price comparator site. With close to 300,000 products, Tesco has one of the most comprehensive product data feeds on offer among online merchants.

[Via Guardian Online]

Technorati Tags: tesco

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:44 PM | Permalink: Tesco.com Sales Increase by 30% | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Froogle is being elbowed out of the online price comparison sector. Like or not, the essence of a good price comparator is the quality and depth of its database, and the quality of its search. In my opinion, the google search and google base combination will inevitably see froogle out of the the door.

Meanwhile Google is circumspect about Froogle's future, stating

G: Froogle is alive and well. We are continuing to integrate shopping and product search features into Google.com to make it as easy as possible for users to find product information through Google. We don't have any more specifics to share publicly on how this will look down the line but we will make sure to let you know about any developments. [Via John Battelle's Searchblog: News:

Google is no stranger to failed projects. In fact it thrives on them, using the darwinian approach of beta testing a huge number of potentials and only picking the best and fittest projects.

Technorati Tags: froogle , google+base

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 9:51 AM | Permalink: Froogle is Bound for Obscurity | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Littlewoods has announced results of over €3000m in turnover, with internet accounting for 30 per cent, or €570, of Littlewoods’ turnover, making it the fourth-largest online retailer in the UK.

Littlewoods redoubled its online efforts a year ago, in order to beat decreasing high-street sales. Improving its distribution through price comparator sites like, enclick shopping, and affiliate networks.

Littlewood's data feed is one of the more complete on the market, with an emphasis on clothing and footwear. Littlewoods goes to some lengths to provide product descriptions and details in its data feed. Results on our price comparator show that, prices being equal, the greater the detail and depth of inventory in a merchant's data feed, the greater the the sales through vertical portals and affiliate networks. Enclick shopping has a range of 10,000 Littlewood products on sale, leading the clothing and footwear categories on Enclick shopping.

As shown in the figure, Littlewood lags behind argos.co.uk and tesco.com, with Amazon the clear number one in UK sales. Littlewoods is conspicously absent from online sales of DVD and music, where amazon, tesco and woolworths battle it out.

[Via: Guardian Unlimited Business | | Makeover for Littlewoods to boost web sales]

Technorati Tags: data+feeds , littlewoods , online+shops

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:37 PM | Permalink: Littlewoods €570 in Online Sales with a 10,000 product Data Feed | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

But, in a move aimed no doubt at catching up with the video content explosion on the web, as witnessed by the rise of youtube.com video service, the Froogle link has been replaced by a Google Video link.

The result on Froogle's traffic has been pretty dramatic, as shown in the latest Hitiwise statistics of Google Video

Technorati Tags: froogle , google+homepage

Posted by Paul Salber at 12:33 PM | Permalink: Froogle Demoted from Google Home Page in the US | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The incident ocurred at the annual conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) where Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, got tough questions from Google's Director of Research after his keynote speech. The disagreement was on the Semantic Web, or the future of information on the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee's proposal of the Semantic Web is, put simply, that each website provide structured information, i.e. a data feed, of its contents. Same as blogs provide RSS files of their information.

Data feeds are becoming increasingly important ways to transferring information. Witness the rise of RSS as a means of transferring news and blog information. Similarly, online ecommerce is reliant on structured product data feeds to transfer information to and from merchants, shopping portals, suppliers and customers.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of “world wide web” originally conceived Semantic web vision, a architecture design for the web where data feeds follow a universal standard, and W3C is working currently on this under his direction.

The aim of Dr Berner-Lees vision is that all the information on the web be universally machine readable and understandable. Such that generation and processing of ecommerce data feeds, and Gooblebot spidering of the internet, will be disappear and be an automatic part of the internet infrastructure.

Unfortunately, commercial interests are about to intrude on Dr Berner-Lees and the W3C consoritum's work. Already, online retailers are attempting to agree on standards for the product data feeds used to transfer product and price information between suppliers, ecommerce merchants and online shopping portals.

Enter Google and its already heavy investment in data feed standards, namespace and its own Google Semantic Web - Google Base has an intricate semantic definition for its bulk upload feeds.

Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google challenged Dr Berners-Lee over problems with his Semantic Web . Dr Norvig's problem is over cheating and incompetent webmasters:

What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first," Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user.

"We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step. The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results and then try to sell someone Viagra when that's not what they are looking for. With less human oversight with the Semantic Web, we are worried about it being easier to be deceptive," Norvig said.

"While you own the data that's fine, but when somebody breaks and says, 'If you use our enterprise system, we will have all your data in RDF. We care because we've got the best database.' That is much more powerful," Berners-Lee said. To illustrate his stance, he used the example of bookstores initially withholding information on stock levels and purchase price but then breaking them as others did.

Dr. Berners-Lee agreed with Norvig that deception on the Internet is a problem, but he argued that his design for the Semantic Web was complete and also solves the problems of identify the originator of information, and trusted and secure feeds. Dr. Berners-Lee concluded that

"Google is in a situation to do wonderful things, as it did with the Web in general, and add a whole other facet to the graphs--the rules that are testing which data source. It will be a much richer environment

Like it or not, the World Wide Web consortium, will have to keep Google happy with its Internet Information Architecture, as Google is currently the biggest single consumer and provider of information on the Web.

[Related Enclick Service: Enclick data feed service for ecommerce merchants

Technorati Tags: Google , metadata , Norvig , semantic+web , Tim+berners+lee , w3c

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 10:07 PM | Permalink: Google Skirmishes With Founder of the Internet Over Internet Data Standards | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Shopping engines are gaining market share in the ecommerce sector, with users increasingly looking for an independent comparison of prices and products. Online merchants are increasingly turning to these shopping price comparators for qualified high-conversion traffic.

The problem is that merchants looking to be included in these engines need to handcraft a data feed of product information, model number, SKU and price for each one. The IT work adds a considerable overhead since each of the shopping portals has a widely different template for the data feeds.

In addition to the problem of standardised input, shopping engines statistics is also patchy and varies widely. The usability data on clicks and costs varies widely between shopping portals. The variation makes central management of multiple shopping campaigns hard to coordinate and compare.

Merchants often rely on shopping data feed services like ours to generate, submit and manage data feeds of their ecommerce site. They effectively outsource their data feed marketing function.

The National Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has embarked on the Unified Data Feed Standard Project. The standard aims to unify the templates used by all the shopping comparator sites in a comprehensive way. Covering not just the naming of the fields used in the data feeds, but to drill down into the values used, like a unified standard colour values. The three areas in most need of a unified standard for data feeds are:

• Choice and name of Data Fields currently vary widely
• Product Categories: A unified taxonomy of products would reduce the overhead in preparing multiple feeds by half, according to the Enclick team.
• Product Identifiers: Price comparators rely on manufacturers product number in their search of different merchants and prices for that one product

Google's Base Namespace is used in the bulk upload’s data feed is currently one of the most complete definition of compalsory and optional field standard for different types merchants. Naturally, the namespace is totally different from Amazon's Information Tag Standards.

Making these two giants, plus Shopping.com and Yahoo Shopping, to agree over a common standard will take many man-years of effort, but the stakes are high for comparison engines and merchants alike.

In the meantime merchants must generate and optimise their data feeds as best they can. And the stakes are high. In Google's own words

You are strongly encouraged to use as many of the attributes specific to your information type in your bulk upload.

Supplying additional information about your items using attributes defined in the Google Base module will greatly increase your item’s chances of showing up in search results.

Enclick client's pursue the first positions in Froogle's and Yahoo search results seriously, outsourcing their data feed to a dedicated team at Enclick. Appearing in the first positions on price comparators often means a windfall of free high-conversion traffic.

Technorati Tags: data+feed , froogle , yahoo+shopping

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 12:38 AM | Permalink: Universal Data Feed Standard from the Association of Retail Technology Standards | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Technorati Tags: chocolate , ecommerce , online+supermarkets

Posted by Paul Salber at 1:01 PM | Permalink: Chocolate & Wine Top in Online Supermarket Sales | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Comparison Shopping Market Leaders

Rank Name Domain Market Share

1 www.shopping.com 18.38%
2 www.bizrate.com 17.35%
3 shopping.yahoo.com 14.39%
4 www.shopzilla.com 13.60%
5 www.froogle.com 8.49%
6 www.nextag.com 7.83%
7 www.pricegrabber.com 5.81%
8 www.epinions.com 5.75%
9 www.calibex.com 4.63%
10 eshop.msn.com 3.76%

From Search Engine Watch

Kelkoo dominates the U.K market, with more than double the traffic of #2 player Shopping.com UK

These are the players that most affect the shopping feed standards body. The shopping feed standards they require from merchants are quite different both in language, format and parameters.

Technorati Tags: comparison+shopping , ecommerce , vertical+search

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:01 AM | Permalink: Shopping Feed Standards: Governing Body | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Industry bodies are trying to push through a standard for shopping feed files A recent meeting of the Arts trade association feed standards committe had a low turnout from shopping engines.

One of the big problems with shopping feeds is the wide range of different taxonomies, categories that merchants and shopping engines use to categorize merchandise in their offering. The forms that merchants must fill out to send their product data to the engines also differ widely, increasing the chance of error and the work that marketers must perform to get items listed. For example, Yahoo! Shopping has two mandatory fields, 13 optional ones and 40 possible setting combinations for each SKU; Shopping.com has one mandatory field of 21 characters with three options; and Shop.com has four fields of 255 characters each. Other metadata can also be handled differently from engine to engine—things like global shipping and payment settings, feed file requirements, and submission data.

Standards would reduce the overheads in generating shopping feeds for the ecommerce merchants, improve the return on investment for marketing on shopping engines.

One issue that came up in a recent shopping portal representative was whether to require merchants to offer their data feeds in extensible markup language (XML), a text format originally developed for large-scale electronic publishing. Many merchants now send their feeds in the form of highlighted spread sheets and data streams delimited by commas—an old holdover that’s relatively easy to program, but also likely to contain undetected errors that can get their product data left out of a shopping engine index. The concensus is that XML is the future, but uptake is slow among some older shopping portals.

The advantage of better shoping feed standards is the ability to use richer data. The ecommerce retailers want to provide it and the shopping engines want to use to on their portal. Standadized XML shopping feeds will arrive in the future.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , shopping , xml

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:00 AM | Permalink: Standardisation of shopping engine feeds meets with problems | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

As of today, the feed submission formerly in the Google Merchant Center has been replaced with Google Base submissions. Google Base was quietly launched 3 months ago, and currently offers free online classifieds service that allows anyone to list a product for sale.

Google Base is also arming itself with a reputation system like eBays, where merchants will accumulate vetting votes from its buyers.

Google Base replaces Froogle Merchant Center by ZDNet's Froogle Merchant Center is no longer -- it has been replaced by Google Base in what seems to be an attempt to merge the two data sources.

The grand plan is for Google Base to be a central hub of information. In some distant future, you will submit information for Google Co-op, Google Sitemaps, Google Book Search and Google Scholar through Google Base. Sounds like a Google will be aiming for a standard for feeds.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , froogle , google , googlebase , shopping

Posted by Paul Salber at 12:09 AM | Permalink: Froogle to merge with Google Base | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The European head of Google, the giant internet company, has warned that Europe still lags behind the US in exploiting the commercial power of the internet. Nikesh Arora, the vice president of Google's operations in Europe, said British and European businesses needed to focus more on building their online operations to meet consumer demand.

Speaking on the eve of Google's "Zeitgeist Europe" conference in Hertfordshire, which will be attended by 250 top European executives, he said: "The internet will change the shape of commerce, advertising, newspapers, entertainment. . . of most industries it touches.

"Europe has not embraced the internet as a commerce platform as much as the US."

Europe is failing to exploit internet, says Google chief

Surprising statement in view of the UK's ferocious uptake of the internet and the recent online economy results. But justified, when comparing the percent of retail sales transacted online in Europe and US.

Nikesh Arora was likely addressing the retailers in Europe, where the figure is still 10 times lower than in the UK. Nikesh's communication drive seems to be impacting German, Italian and French media and blogs most, while the UK and US media is focusing on Google's assumed role in the market.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , google

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:33 PM | Permalink: Google Chief says Europe failing to exploit the commercial power of the internet | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From statistics by hitwise, IMRG has just published the top 50 online retailes in the UK. These retailers are reputed to be grossing £50b in sales through the online channels

IMRG - IMRG Index Special report

MAY 2006
1. Amazon UK www.amazon.co.uk
2. Dell EMEA www.euro.dell.com
3. Argos www.argos.co.uk
4. Tesco.com www.tesco.com
5. Play.com play.com
6. Amazon.com www.amazon.com
7. Expedia.co.uk www.expedia.co.uk
8. easyJet www.easyjet.co.uk
9. RyanAir.com www.ryanair.com
10. Apple Computer www.apple.com
11. British Airways www.britishairways.com
12. lastminute.com www.lastminute.com
13. Thomson Holidays www.thomson.co.uk
14. Next www.next.co.uk
15. Ticketmaster United Kingdom www.ticketmaster.co.uk
16. Tesco Register www.tesco.com/register
17. MyTravel UK www.uk.mytravel.com
18. Thomas Cook www.thomascook.com
19. Tesco Superstore www.tesco.com/superstore
20. John Lewis Stores www.johnlewis.com
21. Thomsonfly.com www.thomsonfly.com
22. Comet UK www.comet.co.uk
23. Marks & Spencer www.marksandspencer.com
24. B&Q www.diy.com
25. bmibaby www.bmibaby.com
26. First Choice www.firstchoice.co.uk
27. Currys www.currys.co.uk
28. O2 Shop shop.o2.co.uk
29. QVCUK.com www.qvcuk.com
30. PC World E-Commerce www.pcworld.co.uk
31. Carphone Warehouse www.carphonewarehouse.com
32. HMV.co.uk www.hmv.co.uk
33. XL.com www.xl.com
34. Tesco Electrical Warehouse www.tesco.com/electrical
35. Flybe.com www.flybe.com
36. Debenhams www.debenhams.com
37. Travelodge UK www.travelodge.co.uk
38. Packard Bell United Kingdom www.packardbell.co.uk
39. Jet2 www.jet2.com
40. Littlewoods Online www.littlewoods-online.com
41. Woolworths UK www.woolworths.co.uk
42. InterContinental Hotels Group www.ichotelsgroup.com
43. The Orange Shop shop.orange.co.uk
44. Seetickets.com www.seetickets.com
45. Monarch Airlines www.flymonarch.com
46. Screwfix Direct www.screwfix.com
47. HP www.hp.com
48. Opodo UK www.opodo.co.uk
49. ASDA www.asda.co.uk
50. ASOS www.asos.com

Many of these retailers make heavy use of affiliate networks and use our shopping feed solution or are members of our merchant partner scheme for our online shop.

IMRG Index Classification: Beer / wine / spirits, Books, CDs / tapes / records, Clothing / footwear / accessories, Computer hardware / peripherals /
consumables, Consumer electronics, Digital downloads (e.g. music, software), Flowers, Food, beverages and household supplies, Furniture, Garden /
DIY, Health and beauty, Home appliances (e.g. washing machines), Household goods (e.g. kitchenware, bedding), Jewellery / watches, Software,
Sporting goods, Tickets (e.g. cinema, theatre, events), Toys, Travel (e.g. flights, holidays, hotels, car hire), Video games, Videos / DVDs

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , onlineretail , onlineshop

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 12:02 PM | Permalink: Top Online Retailers in the UK | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)