eBiz News: AuctionAds, a New Way to Search and Marketing Tools

This week's e-commerce news brings a new affiliate program linked to eBay, upgrades to Constant Contact's e-mail marketing software, studies showing that online spending is still growing while customer satisfaction makes gains, and a partnership between the Chamber of E-Commerce and Web2Corp that helps retailers set up storefronts. Finally, social commerce proponents weigh in on trends for 2007.

Money Makers: AuctionAds and E-Mail Marketing
If you're looking for a way to earn extra cash from your Web site, AuctionAds just launched an affiliate program. You create an account, add descriptive tags relevant to the content and paste the supplied code on your site. The AuctionAds widget will then show eBay auctions relevant to the tags. When your site's visitors click on an Auction Ad listing and take an action on eBay, you earn cash. See their demo page for more information.

In e-mail marketing developments, Constant Contact revamped its interface to reduce the time it takes to create an e-mail and offers a new e-mail wizard that's designed to help small businesses send more personalized messages.

According to the company, upgrades will help e-tailers in the following areas:

Create, edit, and preview e-mails on one screen. The new WYSIWYG HTML interface lets you instantly edit and add text, multiple images, links and sections all on one screen.
Personalize any section or image. With their contact list integrated within the e-mail creation tool, you can now insert personalized contact data (company name, state and so on) in any section with one click.
Move, edit and restore sections with one click. Flexible one-screen editing features new "drag and drop" functionality, helping you to move articles wherever you want. In addition, new one-click "undo" and "redo" makes it easy to edit, delete, or restore sections.
Access and update HTML code. Advanced users can now simultaneously view a campaign while updating the HTML code with "code view."

Studies Show Spikes in Sales and Satisfaction
Meanwhile, both the Commerce Department and comScore Networks issued reports showing that U.S. consumers spent more than $33 billion online last quarter, not counting airline tickets and other travel-related spending. The Commerce Department estimates fourth-quarter online spending at $33.9 billion, while comScore pegged expenditures for fourth-quarter nontravel e-commerce at $33.1 billion. And, apparently shoppers are happier doing so.

Customer satisfaction with the e-commerce industry has improved for the second year in a row, nearing an all-time high, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, in a study released by the University of Michigan with e-commerce partner ForeSee Results.

The e-commerce industry overall rises to a score of 80 on ACSI's 100-point scale, closing in on its record score of 80.8 in 2003. E-commerce continues to outpace most other sectors of the economy in terms of satisfying customers and exceeds the national ACSI aggregate score of 74.9 by 7 percent.

Every fourth quarter, the "ACSI E-Commerce Report" measures customer satisfaction with the following sub-industries: online retail, online auction, online brokerage and online travel companies.

The aggregate customer satisfaction score for online auction remains at 78 for a second year, with eBay maintaining its leadership position despite a 1 percent drop to 80.

But eBay should not take its success for granted. Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, offered this analysis in a statement: "eBay is winning the auction category handily, but should be worried that they are still considerably behind Amazon.com, since the two companies increasingly compete. Amazon is selling more used goods, and eBay now sells many items brand new and direct from the retailer. The lines between auction sites and retail sites get more blurred every year, and eBay will need to bring more innovation to satisfy customers like more traditional retailers do."

Chamber Made: Commerce Group Offers Storefront Deal
In other news, the International Chamber of E-Commerce is offering members, who must pay $39.95 a month in dues, a turn-key storefront set-up through a partnership with Web2Corp.com. If you'd rather skip the building part altogether, Web2Corp will do it for you for a one-time $299 fee, and then you pay the monthly member dues. (Additionally, Web2Corp is offering to build a Web site for free for any local chamber of commerce that has yet to get online and is offering free hosting to those with existing sites.)

"There's no reason to pay thousands of dollars for a fully functional e-commerce site any more," said Bill Mobley, CEO of Web2Corp. "The code to make shopping carts, payment processing, online stores and even more advanced tools like blogs, and integration with other social media like flickr and YouTube, all of this code is automated in our Web site builder at the Chamber of E-Commerce.

"That means you can make a store with pictures of your products that you've posted on flickr, or show a video of the interior of a house that you're selling, and set the prices, handle the payment and manage the entire business online without any technical knowledge at all."

Press "Record" to Boost Sales
Speaking of video, the "deal of the day" site Yugster.com, which offers one product daily at a bargain price until stock is sold out, announced that its fledgling video campaign on YouTube is reaping returns, proving yet again that social commerce is indeed thriving.

Since launch in late December 2006, VideoYugs have been a significant success for the site, with the dozens posted to date garnering high rankings, and thousands of clicks at YouTube, and attracting thousands of new visitors to the Yugster web site and community, according to the company.

"Through our VideoYugs, we're able to help our customers understand better what they're buying, with useful videos showcasing the product's ease, functionality and cool factor," Yugster founder Arthur Frischman said in a statement. "A VideoYug also serves as a valuable resource after purchase, as a demonstration of product use and installation — perfect for those who might be hesitant about purchasing high-tech gadgets or peripherals."

Get Listed on New Search Engine
In other trend developments, reader response to our story yesterday on market movers for 2007 brought our attention to a new "discovery" search engine, or one that helps shoppers get more personalized results.

Launched in October 2006 and still in beta, TheFind.com bills itself as a discovery shopping search engine that "delivers a comprehensive, relevant and visually compelling shopping experience optimized for lifestyle products."

According to the company, TheFind.com crawls the entire Web, using its "Product Ranking Engine" technology to rank more than 150 million products from more 500,000 stores, based on market supply and demand indicators. The result is that any search will return a custom-catalog that consumers can browse.

Just last week TheFind.com unveiled a "Find Similar Items" feature that helps refine searches. For example, the search term "women's pumps" returns over 77,000 shoes. Using the new feature, a shopper in the market for "platform peep-toe pumps" simply clicks on the "Find Similar Items" button next to a favored search result, and TheFind.com returns just over 6,000 similarly-styled shoes. The corresponding lists of top brands and top styles also adjust accordingly.

For Web shop owners, getting listed couldn't be easier. Just click on the "Add a Merchant" link at the bottom of the home page and fill in the information.

Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

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