Good article at the American Express Open Forum on the benefits of Groupon for small businesses. Here is how Groupon works – (paraphrased from their webpage) Each day we feature something cool to do at an unbeatable price. You only get it if enough people join that day……
Wall Street Journal discusses different ways to deal with excess holiday merchandise. Sell via consignment stores – What are consignment stores? These are stores that will hold your inventory for you and sell it at a lower price. They take a percentage of the sales revenue. You still…
This is a no-brainer for every ecommerce merchant. Upload your product information into Google Product Search. It’s free, and will improve the chances of your product showing up during Google search. Google Product Search lets online shoppers compare products and their prices across multiple online retailers. Some of…
Wall Street Journal reports on a survey conducted by Synovate on the shopping habits of the wealthy across the world; conducted across 8,000 people in 11 markets around the world—the U.S., Brazil, Canada, France, Netherlands, Spain, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and the U.K. The findings are…
An annual survey conducted by Sterling Commerce highlights the increasing demand for an integrated shopping experience across multiple retail channels. According to the survey results from January 2009 – 57% of ecommerce customers wanted the ability to return items to a store after purchasing them online. (The number…
The original article is behind the pay wall. You can access the Comscore press release mentioned in the article here. Below are my findings from the two articles – Online sales for the 2009 holiday season (November 1 – December 24) was $27 billion. This is a 5%…
How do you stand apart if you are selling just soap? How do you differentiate yourselves from the dozens of other soap sellers? The key to selling anything is to first identify a small group of customers, and to then offer them something that is better than what…
Here is a slide show that explains search engine optimization in very simple terms. Well written and comprehensive. If you are a newbie to SEO, this is a good place to start.
Here is a 2 minute video mashup, from Inc magazine, of a collection of interviews about marketing. My favorite is the quote from Tony Hsieh of Zappos. Zappos – the hot e-commerce company with 11 million customers – was acquired by Amazon recently for a valuation of $928…