On Wednesday, June 6 from 10:45 – 12:00 pm at SMX Advanced Seattle David Weichel will be speaking on a panel about schema markup and how the new microdata has influenced search results for more than a year now. The session looks at how companies can get the most out of this new semantic markup for data on the web.

Here’s David, you can’t miss him:

We’re also sending Chief Technology Officer and resident joke teller Tien Nguyen to document David’s journey and provide some coverage on the event for you. We’re excited for David to talk about schema markup especially because of it’s increasing importance for ecommerce retailers to leverage on the web.

Get more info on David’s session here.

As we’ve mentioned in the past collecting and distributing merchant ratings is a great way of increasing clickthrough rates and revenue for sellers who actively promote products both on Adwords and Google Shopping.

According to BazaarVoice the combined “company will count nearly half of the Internet Retailer 500 retailers as clients, which will enhance [their] ability to deliver value to brands of all sizes and across all geographies and allow [them] to meaningfully increase [their] consumer reach to more than 1.8 billion visitors each month across our combined Internet Retailer 500 clients alone.”

While the exit is certainly great for the investors and employees of Power Reviews we’ll have to wait and see how the merger impacts customers of both review platforms. If your eCommerce store is on either review platform feel free to let us know if and how the merger impacts you and your bottom line.

Sell dot What?

Sell.com may be one of the oldest shopping engines that you’ve probably never heard of. Whereas other CSE’s try to dazzle you with the latest in social media and snazzy banners, Sell.com sticks to its roots and has stayed minimal over the past 13 years of its existence, making it similar to Craigslist but for the online world.

I Think I Can, I Think I Can…List?

It’s quick and easy to get a single listing up via an online form, and it’s even free in some cases–so if you’re moving and want to say, get rid of a TV, some clothes or a small child you can easily do so.

However if you’re a medium or large retailer, Sell.com also has a package for you and in our experience has been a great source of high converting traffic for nearly every retailer we’ve put on there.

It works like any other shopping engine like Pricegrabber or Shopzilla in that merchants can submit their data feeds to get their products live. Perhaps the best part about their service is that they operate on a low, flat monthly fee, rather than on a cost per click basis.

This means that a merchant can throw their full inventory of 100 or 100,000 products and not worry about costs spiraling out of control.

We were skeptical at first since we get solicited by tons of shopping engines all the time who rarely deliver, but in the few months that we’ve been working with them they’ve certainly more than delivered.

Numbers Please

After seeing most of our clients satisfied with the results they’ve gotten so far, we’ve put together some data on exactly how well they’ve performed, relative to their site as a whole.

The main metric we used is conversion rates, which basically measures how qualified a lead is when they come to your site. Since all else is equal, e.g. landing page quality, site load time, etc., the only variable here is the source of the traffic.

In this quick study we took a sample of merchants we have on Sell.com and compared the conversion rates received on traffic received from there, and compared it to sitewide traffic, as well as other CSE’s.

(anyone who’s seen our Top Ten CSE Rankingsknows how much we love bar graphs)

First let’s look at how Sell.com traffic convert vs sitewide traffic during the same time frames:

Conversion Rates

Sell.com vs Sitewide Traffic

How to read: Each set of bars represents one merchant and compares their conversion rate from Sell.com traffic vs their sitewide traffic.

For example: in the first set, Merchant 1 converted at close to 14% vs just over 4% sitewide, Merchant 2 converted at 9% on Sell.com vs 2% overall, etc.

As you can see, with the exception of one merchant, traffic from Sell.com not only outperformed traffic sitewide, in a majority of cases it absolutely spanked them.

Now let’s take a look at how traffic from Sell.com converts compared to traffic from other comparison shopping engines:

Sell.com vs Other CSE’s

Similar to the first chart, all but one merchant converted better with traffic from Sell.com compared to all the other CSE’s, and again in most cases it was a landslide.

Overall, taking the median points of all the data, the conversion rates are as follows:

Sell.com – 4.49% Sitewide – 1.91% CSE’s – 2.22%

So in essence, Sell.com has converted at over twice  as well as the other CSE’s, and at 2.5 percentage points higher than they do sitewide.

If we look at each shopping engine individually from our top ten CSE rankings, Sell.com would easily be at the top, beating out the leader  Google Shopping which posted a conversion rate of “just” 2.7%.

Average Order Value

Sell.com vs Sitewide Traffic

In this section we take a look at average order values (basically total revenue / number of orders). Like the previous two charts there is a clear trend across the board here, except this time traffic Sell.com was lower than the sidewide average order values.

One theory is that a customer who’s visiting Sell.com is more likely to be bargain hunters and not as eager to spend a lot of money and instead will look for lower priced items to purchase.

Anyone who’s ever posted an item on Craigslist is familiar with the countless emails they’ll get asking to sell their $500 TV for $45.

Sell.com vs Other CSE’s

Again the trend is similar to the above, with most sites seeing a lower average order value from Sell.com as compared to the other CSE’s.

Combining all the data together, here are the average order values by each of the three sources we measured:

Sell.com - $95.53 Sitewide - $116.61 CSE’s - $114.96

Wow cool…but?

The trade off between being low cost and easy to list on is that you have tons of competition on here, so the slice of the traffic pie is divided into many smaller slices. Thus, the amount of volume and traffic that one can expect from listing Sell.com won’t be as high as say a Shopping.com or Nextag, and will be along the lines of a lower-tier shopping engine.

There aren’t any bidding options either on top of their flat monthly fee, so in a sense it’s like Google Shopping, where merchants just have to throw their products up and hope for the best.

Still, as a low cost solution the risks are indeed low and the rewards can be quite high. It may not be the swankest CSE in town but it’s there and does its job: provide merchants with an easy path to list their products, and consumers with a way to find the products they’re looking for.

As one of our own account managers puts it:

I have been pleasantly surprised with Sell.com for most of my clients and I mention it as an expansion to many clients who want to test out something new. With the low monthly cost it makes sense to at least try it with all your clients who are seeking expansion or have space in their ROI to experiment.

Check them out at: www.sell.com

Enter Sweet Tooth Rewards, a white-labeled loyalty and rewards programs for online retailers. Since its launch in 2009 the platform has seen over 1,500 eCommerce owners integrate the technology with their storefronts.

While the platform is currently only available to merchants on the Magento platform, they’ve recently closed a round of seed funding meaning that we should see Sweet Tooth on more platforms in short order. I had a chance to catch up with Jay El-Kaake, Founder and CEO of Sweet Tooth Rewards, earlier in the week.  Here’s the interview-

Nii: Describe the Sweet Tooth Platform in 140 characters or less?

Jay: Sweet Tooth is plug & play loyalty software that allows eCommerce merchants to reward customers for purchasing & engaging with their store.

Nii: What led you and your team to building the platform?

Jay: Sweet Tooth started as an eCommerce web development agency. Many of our clients had the same problem; they were spending a significant portion of their budget on acquiring customers and weren’t able to retain and remarket to them. The eCommerce industry in general showed the same problem. We developed Sweet Tooth for a client and it has done so well that we now focus solely on eCommerce loyalty.

Jay El-Kaake of Sweet Tooth

Nii: What’s the biggest mistake eCommerce merchants make when it comes to incentivizing return purchases from their customer base?

Jay: Brand differentiation: eCommerce merchants often don’t give customers a compelling reason to come back to them rather than their competition. eCommerce sites have huge issues surrounding product-price commoditization, shopper experience, and customer loyalty. Unless they have programs in place to mitigate these issues, their customer base will only be loyal to the first result on a search engine. The first mistake is believing that focusing solely on acquisition strategies such as SEO and SEM are a sustainable long term business strategy, rather than brand differentiation.

Nii: What kind of revenue lift have retailers seen by using Sweet Tooth’s platform to power their loyalty program, any examples you care to share?

Jay: Our merchants have reported an average sales lift of 15%. Revenue lift isn’t the only measurable improvements. We’ve just completed a 6 month comparative case study with one of our customers, Maggie’s Direct ( www.maggiesdirect.com )that showed some other great metrics: 52% increase in conversion rate, 372% increase in Facebook Likes, customer account creation rate increased 35%, and search engine results page increased 15% using a unique points-based blogger referral system.

Nii: What’s next for the Sweet Tooth Development Team?

Our next step is expansion. We want Sweet Tooth to be on as many eCommerce platforms as possible. Long term, we want Sweet Tooth to expand beyond eCommerce loyalty and into brick & mortar, mobile, point of sale, employee motivation and more.

Nii: How can a merchant get started with working with Sweet Tooth?

Jay: Simply visit our website (www.sweettoothrewards.com) and sign up for a monthly plan! We will even have a forever free edition that is perfect for smaller merchants or those that want to run a pilot program before they subscribe to a plan. Sweet Tooth uses a success-based pricing model, so you don’t have to pay until you see results from our software.

The Emerging eCommerce Technology Spotlight Series is a series of blog posts where we sit down and interview the founders and executives of exciting, emerging, and compelling technology and platform companies about how their technology can help propel ecommerce organizations to the next level.

Four members of the CPC Strategy team will be taking a long trek from San Diego to Chicago to attend this year’s Internet Retail Conference and Exhibition at McCormick Place West.

Those attending (from left to right) include Rick Backus, CEO, Nii Ahene, COO, Andrew Davis, Director of Marketing and Katen Raj, Business Development.

We’ll be at booth 1011. If you’d like to meet up with us please email contact@cpcstrategy.com or fill out the short form here to get a free on-site audit of your comparison shopping campaigns at the event.

Three must-view sessions at IRCE:

Turning shipping into a profit center – even when you’re offering free shipping – Mike Connors, CEO of Bulbs.com

“The pressure is on to offer free shipping and there are many ways to meet consumers’ demand for free shipping without going bust. The first step is to determine your right threshold for free shipping. This session will examine how to know what your customers will respond to, how to balance the cost of free shipping against the cost of acquiring customers, how to negotiate with carriers, ways to minimize warehouse costs and how to make sure your offer is attracting the right kind of customers.”

June 5, 2012 : 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Good-bye, stores: How going web-only saved a business – Mel Ronick, CEO, Stack and Stacks

“In 2008, 24-year-old home furnishings retailer Stacks and Stacks embraced e-retailing by closing its last store. Four years later, CEO Mel Ronick does not regret the decision to become a web-only merchant. The company has weathered a recession and the onslaught of big box stores into his market while continuing to hold onto its spot in the Internet Retailer Top 500. Ronick will discuss his decision to close six stores, how the company has benefited from being web-only what he would do differently if he were making the transition today.”

June 6, 2012 : 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

Not last year’s SEO: New rules to raise rankings – Ben Kirshner, CEO, Elite SEM

“Google and Bing are constantly—and secretly—modifying their algorithms and adding and subtracting criteria that rank pages high in search results. Marketers keep a close eye on what works and what doesn’t and can deduce requirements and when changes have taken place. This session will examine recent changes at Google and Bing, discuss the role that social media plays in search engine rankings, report how recent changes affect search engine optimization practices and help attendees understand what they need to do to continue to rank high at the two major search engines.”

June 5, 2012 : 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM

Meet up with CPC Strategy at IRCE. Email Contact@CPCStrategy.com

Meet up with CPC Strategy at IRCE AND get a free Comparison Shopping Campaign Audit – Click Here

While the Panda ferreted out the spammy websites – for which we are all thankful – it also affected many others whose SEO strategies are also similar to, if not exactly, the black hat methods Google detests. Many were forced to adjust their approach on website optimization and companies offering SEO services also had to adjust their game play.

Google Panda 3.5 is no funny cartoon! It means business… serious business.

On April 19, 2012 Google updated the Panda with the 3.5 edition. Then on April 27 it unleashed an even bigger challenge for the online community: a second web spam algorithm called the Google Penguin.

This time it is set to do so much more than get rid of website spam from search engine inquiry results. In an effort to ensure that only the best and most honest websites make it to the top SERPs, the Penguin update targets websites that are overly optimized or whose optimization does not match the value of its content.

Let’s take a closer look at how this new search engine filter works.

No to Over-Optimization!

SEO is necessary for a website to rank. In layman’s terms, it helps websites become visible by earning one of the top spots in the earliest search engine results pages. Google has established rules and an algorithm that is supposed to evaluate the quality of the websites related to a keyword search. Those that earn the highest “grades” or page rank will land on the first pages of the SERPs.

That was what Google wanted it to be: that the highest-ranking websites are expected to be the most valuable to the queries of the Google search engine users. However, many SEOs have learned how to get around the algorithm by technical means. People learned to do a little tweak here, a little over there, to make sure that their websites earn a high Page Rank even if they don’t bother with producing quality content. Many were abusing that and Google wants to change this odd, undesirable mix of technical manipulation and mediocrity as far as quality of website content is concerned.

This is why Panda was created in 2011. During the Q&A for the Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better! panel, Matt Cutts, the overall head of Google’s Webspam Team, revealed that they had been working on a new update to “level the playing field.” To ensure that websites with excellent content get ahead of the websites that are merely optimized to the extreme, a smarter GoogleBot will filter out websites that rank because of “over optimization or overly SEO”.

So now we have the Google Penguin update to deal with.

Google Penguin: A bit bloodthirsty, is it not?

While we can understand Google’s desire to provide the best for its users and reward website owners who have been staying by the book and stuck to white hat strategies all this time, what sets many people off is that there are also casualties that aren’t supposed to be hit by the Penguin’s axe.

There’s a logical explanation for this though. The Google Penguin will penalize sites that do black hat SEO practices like:

- hiding links
- sending automated queries to Google
- loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- duplicating content
- phishing
- linking affiliates that are in no way related to the original website, etc…

Unfortunately, over-optimization is very similar to these black hat strategies, and that’s another reason why white hat SEOs still end up as collateral damage.

Negative Response from the Global Online Community

Cutts assured the online community that this second level of action will only affect 3% of Google websites. The outcry on the immediate results of the Penguin suggests otherwise though, as thousands of website developers and owners trooped to forums and Google Webmaster Help to air their frustrations and complaints. Some are downright heartbreaking. This article at Search Engine Round Table reveals the devastating effect of Google Penguin on many people’s very livelihood.

Besides the heartless axing of white hat websites, the inconsistency of Google’s advocacy of “quality first” to the actual outcome of Penguin–and Panda as well–is also a cause for outrage. Some are complaining that that the Penguin has pushed brand sites up the SERPs and axed niche sites. While brand sites are indeed relevant to most queries, they are hardly what you’d call unbiased sources of information. Niche sites that publish truly excellent content are more reliable and can provide more information for keyword searchers.

Can you hear the cries of “Unfair!” ringing out now?

The Answer to the Ultimate Question: How to Keep Up with Penguin?

Despite the general outcry over the Penguin update, there are also SEOs who are calmly facing this new challenge and are simply taking the new algorithm by face value. Since Google is intent on putting much emphasis on excellent web content, then this should be the direction SEOs should take for 2012 and beyond.

SEOs can cope with Panda 3.5 and Penguin by concentrating on people and improving user experience instead of focusing too much on evading the bots. This means paying more attention on content quality instead of keyword density; keeping it real when writing anchor texts instead of forcing in keywords; and making sure that backlinks come from valuable websites instead of just article directories and link networks.

These are just a few that SEO and webmasters should focus in 2012, but most likely Google will come with another 1 or 2 major updates this year. Who know what we will have to change at that time.

Enjoy and feel free to share using the buttons on the side or the embed code at the bottom of the post and help your friends figure out where sell products online too!

Feel free to share this infographic with your friends or repost on your on blog:
<a href=”http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2012/05/sell-products-online/”><img src=”http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/sell-products-online-infographic.jpg” alt=”Where to Sell Products Online” width=”613″ border=”0″ /></a>Source:<a href=”http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog”>CPC Strategy Blog</a>

So, where’s the best place for you to market and sell products online?

Think Priceline for eCommerce.

It’s an interesting concept and with Amazon training shoppers to expect lower prices, Netotiate could be a great option for retailers to discover the price points that will motivate their customers.

Check out the webinar below hosted by CEO Amir Farhi to learn more about Netotiate:

Amir Farhi

Co-Founder & CEO

Netotiate

Here are a few mock ups of Netotiate that Amir discusses during the webinar:

Landing page optimization is one of the most under-appreciated ways to increase online sales dramatically. Even an uptick in conversions by .1% can add tens of thousands to your store’s total online sales each year. To help get the word out, we sat down with Oli Gardner, Director of Marketing & Founder of Unbounce.com, a company that provides web-based landing page optimization and analytics software.

1. Why is landing page optimization so important for online retailers to do?

Oli: Online retailers typically have hundreds or thousands of products (consider Amazon for example). Each of these pages contains a product for sale, but is essentially the same page in terms of it’s templated layout, design and messaging. Every page that lives inside a website (as opposed to a standalone targeted landing page) can have 10s to 100s of leaks in it – links or ads that can draw peoples attention away from your goal of selling a particular product.

If you imagine this happening to one product – then multiply that by the number of products you’re selling, that’s a lot of missed opportunities. Therefore every extra % conversion point you can squeeze out of your pages can have a big multiplicative effect on your bottom line.

You can think of an un-optimized page like a 5-lane bridge. 2 lanes have cars driving happily across the bridge to the other side (ConversionLand) while the other 3 lanes end abruptly causing the cars to plunge into the water – in other words, leaving your page/site. By fixing one lane (removing distractions like ads, extra links etc.) you are optimizing your page.

2. What’s the main reason why so many online retailers don’t invest resources into landing page optimization, and how does Unbounce help solve that problem?

Oli: There are a couple of factors that prevent retailers from investing in optimization:

• I.T. bottlenecks: marketing is often impulsive, and getting pages created or changed to reflect a special offer can be a big challenge when dealing with busy I.T. and software development teams, taking weeks instead of what should often take minutes.

• Fear of cost: Many retail owners don’t want the risk of spending money on something they don’t really understand. For these people, I’d recommend they read this post which explains the economics of conversion optimization.

• Lack of expertise: Conversion is a lot harder than people think, and it pays to invest in getting some expert advice from a trained optimization specialist (either consultant or company). Some companies will try to do it themselves and after getting lackluster results, they give up and move onto something else, which is a shame for any business.

Unbounce solves these problems in a number of ways:

1. By being a completely hosted solution, we place the responsibility of creating, publishing and A/B testing pages directly in the hands of marketers – removing the need for I.T. or development.

2. Targeted at the small to mid-sized market, Unbounce provides a monthly cost-effective way to operate an optimization program.

3. We have a network of talented optimization specialists that we recommend to our customers to help them get the advice and help they need.

3. What are a few best practices online retailers can use now to start optimizing their landing pages?

Oli: One of the best practices you can learn to adopt is to listen to your customers. There are numerous feedback tools available that can be added to your important pages to learn what barriers your potential customers are facing – which can be fed back into an A/B test to optimize your page.

• If you’re running promotions (seasonal for example) – then you shouldn’t be sending your traffic to your leaky, distracting product pages directly. By using a standalone landing page that has only one message, one purpose and one call to action can focus attention on the task at hand, effectively warming the prospect up, and building interest in your product and any offer you are promoting. This is the point that you should send them on to your product page.

• Take advantage of the post-conversion experience. This is the most overlooked part of most retail sites. Once someone has made a purchase from you, you have confirmed their interest, so take the opportunity to ask for a little extra from them. This could be to follow you on one or more of your social networks (to keep them in your sphere of influence), or to present them with a time-limited discount offer to bring them back to your site again.

• For further reading I’d start with these 2 blog posts: The 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program & 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips.

Get Started with a Free Trial of Unbounce

If you’d like to start improving your conversions and creating landing pages for your retail marketing campaigns, you can get a 30-day free trial of any Unbounce account. You will also get 50% off any plan if you enter the coupon code “cpcstrategy503″ on the second page of the signup process.

Full disclosure: This is not a sponsored post. We just know the impact landing page optimization can make to our client’s online sales and wanted to share that with you.

Do you have any experiences with landing page optimization? Share your thoughts below.

I recently had a chance to speak with Korey Lee, co-founder and VP of Operations of SumAll. He and his team have created a real-time dashboard to help provide ecommerce owners with best practice financial insights that improves sales and make their businesses more successful.

Nii: Describe the SumAll Platform in 140 characters?

Korey: SumAll is a value priced business intelligence tool to help businesses better understand, manage and execute data driven decisions.

Korey Lee of SumAll

Our design-centered app is easy to use and simple to integrate, aimed at the CEO or business manager of stores with electronic data. The initial focus pertains to revenue, time comparisons, trend analysis, product and customer metrics. We will go on to aggregate data across verticals and industries to create indices and benchmarks so businesses can measure their performance and efficiency against others. SumAll will help businesses make more money from commerce data without spending hours pouring over excel!

Nii: What led you and your team to building the application?

Korey: Our broader vision is to democratize data and put data back in the hands of the people it belongs to, the hardworking folks generating it. The bulk of data today, if even accessible is hidden behind APIs, archived in monstrous databases and tucked away in servers. We want to make that data available and useful to the individual. We’re starting with SMBs but want to make this a consumer product as well.

In the e-commerce world we can answer questions like

• How do my shipping fees stack up to my peers?
• What does my revenue look like compared to last month, last week, yesterday?
• Are my SEM campaigns and SEO efforts working and converting into revenue?
• Is traffic helping generate more revenue or is it just noise?
• With what frequency should I send direct emails? Is my open rate actually converting into purchases?

As we expand into the broader consumer market, we want to solve other problems.

• Ever wonder what Facebook does with all that information about your friends
• How does Twitter use all of you and your friends Tweets to learn more about you?
• How many emails do I actually reply to on a daily basis? Who are my most frequently contacted people? How can I filter my emails to be more efficient with my time?
• How much time am I spending online and what am I doing with that time? Is my social (Twitter, FB, Google+) and professional (LinkedIn) footprint increasing or shrinking

Nii: How can an online retailer benefit from incorporating this technology on their website?

New V. Returning Customer Analysis

Korey: Most small e-retailers don’t have the ability to see how their stores are performing on a real time basis today. Being able to see your revenue, shipping, tax, discounts, units sold, among other data points and filters and then compare it over time is a powerful tool to understanding your companies revenue history so you can use that information to affect the future.

Our insight engine generates a daily updated news feed containing a variety information from helpful tips about running an e-commerce store to metrics and forecasts about your store to broader e-commerce metrics across all of our users. For instance, one of our insights last week was as follows:

“In April, our customers earned an average of $87.12 USD per order. How does your store stack up?”

Armed with a simple and easy to use analytics tool as well as actionable insights, we hope that online retailers will be more able to make informed data driven decisions to increase revenue and minimize operational costs.

Nii: How easy it to install to implement the platform and start monitoring their businesses in real time?

Korey: Getting SumAll up and running takes less than 5 minutes. Since we’re on the cloud, there’s no software to install or download. After you verify your credentials to authorize us to pull down your data, the import takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes (1 time import only). We’ll send you an email when the import is done and your data will update in real time from there on. It’s kind of like watching a stock ticker except better because it’s your business!

Nii:  What’s next for the SumAll development team?

Reviewing Overall Performance

Korey: In the near term we have integrations with Google Analytics and PayPal coming soon. We’re excited about this release because it will allow our current customers to compare the relationship between their transaction and traffic data. It will also open up our tools to a much broader audience (PayPal) and allow millions of stores to leverage their data to optimize revenue and decrease costs.

Nii: How can a merchant get started with implementing the SumAll for their business?

Korey: If you store is on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento, you can sign up right now! We’re in the process of integrating PayPal and Google Analytics which should be launched within the next few months if you’re using those platforms. In the case where you’re using a different platform, please fill out our platform request form and we’ll add it to our integrations list.

While we’re in Beta, SumAll is free. Sign up today and start making your data work for you at www.sumall.com