June 12th, 2008 by Richard Lee
Internet Retailer 2008 – Managing 3rd Party Vendors
Internet Retailer 2008
Managing 3rd Party Vendors
Yahoo Store Customer Example:
American Bridal
American Bridal, started on Intershop Shopping Cart then switched to YahooStores.
American Bridal, did the $70K catalog expense and that didn’t work. From design to mailing, and did not reap the return on investment. Using online methods help you adjust quicker versus print catalog costs are fixed and non-adjustable once you send them out.
When working a shopping cart designer/developer to customize your online store, be respectful of their time. Many top designers and developers will want your business to succeed and will give you the time of day and their advice, however, when you there are limitations to anyone’s skills as well as limitations to any technology. If you force your will on the development process you may ruin that working relationship or make your project overly complicate and never launch.
1. Plan for Success!
2. Create an operational bible
3. Videotape or write down your processes which helps to create your operational bible
Express Design Group:
They Own 20 businesses, such as GreekGear.com
They use Yahoo Store and created an E-Commerce store for each apparel niche that are closely related to their business.
GunDogSupply:
They were one of the first Hunting Supply Store to be optimized online. They were content experts on all the Hunting Dog Accessories, and ranked in the top rankings for keywords like “Astro Garmin 200 for tracking your dog”
They used ViaWeb which then was bought by Yahoo in 1998.
SEO Tip: Rewrite product descriptions from vendors (because with duplicate content, google will rank those pages by pagerank, so you need to change the way it’s written/phrased or you will be on the bottom of the list for that article). SEO tip, duplicate content is not penalized under certain circumstances, however, you will be ranked the lowest by pagerank (and others also say by freshness or age, i.e. the first one to write that content).
Take your own pictures of the products to be unique and to provide better stickiness for your website.
Create your own Editorial Content / Product reviews to add SEO keyword score, but also to add value to your customers.
Multiple Stores:
B2B Website:
Duplicate your Yahoo Store, password protect public page, no follow SE tags. This works great for B2B or wholesale businesses that have both Retail and Wholesale customers.
Back End, Good Software to Start with:
StoneEdge, OrderMotion (multiple stores with 1 order back end)
Focus on 1 store first, with PR 6, tons of links, then do multiple stores
eBay Store Statistics:
Ebay $60 Billon
1.3M sellers all or part of their living on eBay (not include hobbiest)
Every 1 Min a baby gear item is sold, a car is sold every min, mustang is sold every 26 minutes.
1 Billion pages views per day
100M concurrent listings (updated more than 500 times per second)
Double the transaction volume of NYSE
Millions of Buyers transact with millions of sellers
2008 Focus on our customers:
1. Trust
2. Selection
3. Loyalty
Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) (was eBay feedback)
The 4 DSR’s: (up to 5 stars each):
Item as described
communication
shipping cost
shippng time
DSR within the last 30 days:
4.8 = 15% discount
4.7 promotion in search
4.6 5% discount
4.5 powerseller status
4.4 risk of demotion, seller, non-performance, payment holds
eBay Store Case Studies:
Stacie & Jon Sefton
ebay id: bhexpress, B&HFactory outlet
eBay feedback 316,612
2003 with husband
Sell Designer Clothing and Merchandise (100% of their sales in eBay, in process of building new store, Iowa)
*** eBay brings them customers
$12M Sales in eBay sales
Bill Frischling
eBay id dyscern, 72,946
Started in 1999 with wife
Sells Electronics
12,000 emails
40% of sales from eBay
Helps cashflow and keep inventory churning
Seller onramp
ebay.com/onramp
Other eBay Information:
Strategy is Counter Intuitive:
More people bidding on an item in at a lower cost will end up higher final bid price than an item that starts off high. This is because in the fact that more people are bidding on it, then it must be good.
One tip: Products for $65 with free shipping sold more than the same products priced at $50 and no free shipping.
ChannelAdvisor = Using eBay
Mainly:
Overstock, close out, liquidation merchandise, used
One other area I wasn’t aware of is broken merchandise (but they are labeled as non working and only for parts i.e. people looking for spare parts to fix their digital camera, computer or other product)
CNet Channel, PriceGrabber, etc.
Sometimes call customers instead of email
have a great customer service rep, that people love to talk to
Autoloader = Channel Advisor
ShipWorks = Shipping Tool
Suppliers = after 3 years to establish a relationship
Clothing:
6 full time photographers, 24 data entry people
B&H Express
Benefits:
Greater protection (confirm every address)
Lower fees for better feedback
Power Sellers in More than 1 year (can’t leave them a negative rating within 7 days)
Increase seller services in the future
Increased International Sellers (with the weaker dollar)
Some sellers have over 50% of their sales are overseas
SEO:
Chose store name and store descriptions are pushed to SE
Within Stores, put in custom categories, with at least 5 items (then eBay pushed to SEs)
Items that are up for a long time, i.e. Fixed priced items, and less of the auctions that are temporary
Misc:
.40 to $4 for auction insertion fee
.05 &.10, Insertion free for (30 day listing format, with relisting), for items that don’t sell for a while
eBay owns a presence in over 60 countries (eBay.de, eBay.it, etc.), and also has part ownership in different brand Int’l websites.
Canadians ship postal service vs. UPS
i.e. $5 versus $50 to $70
Lower dollar amount (under $100) no trariffs i.e. $50 in addition to shipping fee
Amazon Store Statistics and Information:
30% sold by 3rd party sellers
Millions worldwide active seller accts
Over 20 categories
Fullfillment services
Expand into Int’l
MISC SHOPPING NETWORKS:
Use Larger Images
MSN Shopping
Optimization 1 Sheet (15 recommendations for data feed)
Frequent Shopper Program
Shophelp@microsoft.com
AOL Shopping
Female 45 Avg Age
Success:
- Deliver the right product, to the right customer, at the right time
- Establish relationships and maintain relationships to get customers to come back
- Boost sales with promotional events (annual, seasonal, etc.)
- Increase sell through (conversion, upsell, etc.)
- Meeting objectives and within budget
AOL Seller Advantages:
Deals, inSeller emails
Gift Centers
Gift cards
A-Z Store Directory
Wish Lists
Vertical Search
Ratings
My Shopping
Mobile Shopping
On and off network distribution
Yahoo Shopping:
Greg Hintz, General Manager
Yahoo Product Submit (merchant program to submit listings)
10 years, new website redesign 3 months ago
Coupons, Discounts,
30M monthly vists
100M products
250M monthly page views
Your Products May Be Featured in these areas:
Yahoo! TECH
Yahoo! MOVIES
Yahoo! TV
Yahoo! SEARCH
How to Get Started:
Open a Yahoo Store which can easily integrate with Yahoo! Product Submit
Product Feed into Yahoo! Product Submit
How to optimize your Feed and gain more:
Relevance: Accurate product description to Improve relevance
Merchant Rating: Improve your merchant rating
- no bait and switch
- don’t up-sell after the sale
- review your merchant review and attend to conerns
- encourage your own customer to do merchant reviews
Soon to increase from 64 to 1200 categories
Category and Sub category level bidding
Pricegrabber listings also get into AOL shopping