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http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3645026
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By Valle Dwight
November 21, 2006
E-tailers don't have to wait until CyberMonday for the official onslaught of holiday shopping, according to the latest survey on gift-buying habits, because it's starting this weekend.
Shopzilla.com's study reports that online stores will join their offline counterparts in getting a huge amount of business this weekend, bucking the trend that says so-called "Black Friday" is for bricks-and-mortar stores and the following CyberMonday is when present-seekers start perusing wares at Web shops. Almost six out of 10 online shoppers report that they'll do some holiday online shopping during Thanksgiving weekend, the study says, with 42 percent of those saying the day they plan to do the most e-tail therapy is Friday. Another 29 percent will shop the most on Saturday.
But that doesn't mean some people won't be hunting for the perfect present right after they awake from their food coma. Helen Malani, chief shopping expert at Shopzilla, says, "Online retailers tend to go all out over Thanksgiving Day, when most brick-and-mortar shops are closed and this helps kick-start the weekend shopping spree. E-tailers are ready for you to shop as soon as you finish your last bite of turkey."
So, with all the money to be made, it's prudent to have a sound strategy for attracting those eager gift buyers. Through a combination of direct e-mail promotions, paid search words, and third-party channels, you have a variety of powerful tools to help gift-givers find the perfect present — at your site.
A growing avenue to purchases is the third-party marketing channels — comparison shopping sites, gift portals, affiliated programs and search engines. According to a study by Mercent Corporation, a provider of online marketing technology for retailers, half of all online purchases originate in one of those channels.
The third-party channels include Amazon, Froogle, Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, Yahoo Shopping, Google AdWords, Become.com, Epinions, and ShopLocal. For retailers specializing in gifts items, there are several gift portals to consider including FindGift.com, Gift.com, Present Picker, The Ultimate.com, and Surprise.com.
And the challenge for retailers is how to get the most out of all these channels, how to manage their products, and how to find out if their listings are actually leading to sales.
"None of this stuff runs itself," said Diane Rinaldo, Yahoo Search Marketing's Senior Director of Retail Category. "You need a dedicated marketer, even if it's just one person. That will be the best money you spend."
Shopping-comparison sites can be complicated to monitor and access for the average merchant, Rinaldo says. Each channel has unique ways to categorize products, so merchants need to adjust their entries for each.
Rinaldo suggests that retailers test several channels (six or so) to see which ones give them the best sales. Once you've determined the best performers, focus on those, she recommends.
Scott Buck, owner of Garden Hardware company, knows first-hand how difficult it can be to get a multi-channel marketing strategy down, and the many hours it can take to manage.
"The challenges are extraordinary for small merchants," says Buck. "And painful."
Buck, who set up his specialty hardware site three years ago, decided fairly quickly to get his products into the shopping comparison sites (he started by bidding on key words with Google but dropped it when he realized he had no idea if it was working).
He started in the spring, the busy season for garden shops, with four sites, loaded up his entire catalog into each channel, and quickly learned that it was not an easy process.
But it seemed to be working. "Things were flying off the shelf," he says. But as the months passed and the garden-buying season waned, so did his sales.
"I started to look as the numbers more closely, and it was apparent I wasn't making money," he said. The problem was, he couldn't tell which products were making money and which weren't.
The sites didn't provide reporting on the item level, and even if they did, Buck figures it would be a full time job to manage all the comparison sites. "I'm a one-man shop here," he says. "I have enormous demands on my time." And even if he found that a product was floundering he couldn't make a line-item fix (change the product name or description, for example).
Let Analytics Show the Way
Buck has found a partial solution with Mercent, which has software to manage the various channels, while also maintaining analytics software to help retailers see which strategies are turning the best profit.
Mercent's Web-based software supports more than 30 channels and merchants only have to deal with one data feed. The software also handles the categorization for each channel, has robust content management tools that merchants can tailor to meet their needs, and sophisticated analytic software that lets them assess their sales on a SKU basis.
"Regardless of the level of sophistication" of the ecommerce site, channel management software like Mercent "will have a tangible benefit," says Eric Best, Mercent founder and Chief Executive Officer.
Buck is using the Mercent software to put his inventory on Amazon, and so far he is thrilled with the results. He thinks the software is really designed for the big players, such as Guess and Crabtree and Evelyn, but it has been working for him.
Mercent lets him manage his inventory on a per-product basis, checking the performance of each item, changing descriptions, photos, or even pulling non-performers off the site. It also is integrated with his inventory so that if a product is unavailable it will not show up on Amazon, minimizing his headaches and customer service problems.
"I can go to sleep at night now," says Buck, "and not worry about it."
Valle Dwight is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com.
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