eTail dTail | July 27, 2006


	July 27 , 2006

Free (and almost free) Internet Advertising

by Michael Lambert, CEO MerchantAdvantage.com

Miami, FL (July 27, 2006)— In this edition of eTail dTail we are going to take a break from our "Setting Up My Storefront/Shopping Cart Efficiently and Strategically" series. We found some exciting new trends that we wanted to share with you immediately, which we hope your marketing department will find useful.

It can be said that more often than not, "you get what you pay for", but there are some unique opportunities which sometimes present themselves to those open to new ideas. MerchantAdvantage has found, tried, or been told of a few "free" and "almost free" online marketing concepts. This newsletter is meant to divulge what we think are great ideas. All of these ideas certainly require some research and effort on the part of the merchant to identify which, if any, apply to each merchant's specific advertising scenario and those details must be found, or adjusted, in order to make the concepts work. Now that we have given the obligatory disclaimer, let's get into it. Ideas listed below are displayed in order from the most obvious to the least obvious…

Organic Search Engine Placement
Anyone online (even non-retailers) know that surfers use search engines to find things on the internet. Although it is my personal belief that these channels are way too cluttered to identify the appropriate consumers amongst the millions researching and such, there is undoubtedly a place in online retail for organic search engine marketing. The online merchant stands a better chance at attracting the appropriate consumers by optimizing their site's index page, product pages, and any category pages they may have. I recommend having a professional (employee or not) help with this endeavor and look at every single code which is on, or not on the page. Some examples include the names of your photos, the names of your pages, "alt" attributes in the image tags, meta keywords and descriptions, and ratios of "important" words to "unimportant" words. In the end, even if only one out of 1000 online surfers actually shop, they were a "free" consumer.

Froogle/Googlebase
Although there are clearly costs associated to configuring any feed, or tooling up to send a merchant's product catalog to any shopping comparison site, there are NO pay per click costs associated with marketing through Froogle – Period, THE END.

Catalog Manipulation
By sending a product to most Shopping Comparison Sites, the merchant is accepting the responsibility of paying for consumer clicks to that product, i.e. pay-per-click. But what if the merchant has a product which doesn't have enough margin, or is simply too inexpensive to compensate for the standard click to purchase ratio? Well here are two ways to get "free" internet advertising related to this concept;

Catalog Dipping
Most Shopping Comparison Sites do not allow a 0 bid function. So, do not send any products which do not warrant the marketing click costs. This may be because the product is too inexpensive, or because the margin associated with that product isn't great, or because some of a merchant's products aren't as competitive in the marketplace as their other products. In short, sending all products is "wasted" money. By pulling the appropriate products out of the feed, the online merchant is effectively saving that profitless expenditure – and if we stretch this a little bit we can say that by spending the same amount of money this month as last, but acquiring more sales because of "catalog dipping" the marketing is "sort of free."

Pay-Per-Performance
By spending money on each click generated, whether a sale occurs or not, it could be argued that money is being wasted. This is one of the thoughts behind marketplaces in general. Unlike a shopping comparison site, a marketplace such as Amazon or Underbid is actually responsible for the sales transaction. They do not send the merchant a consumer, they send the merchant an order. So, a marketplace only charges a merchant when a sale occurs. So, the merchant is paying commissions, not paying for advertising. Perhaps I am splitting hairs, but this is, in essence, free advertising. The bad news here is that working with Amazon is not an easy task. Signing up and getting the appropriate information to Amazon is VERY difficult, especially if the merchant falls into certain categories like Jewelry, for example. Their needs are very stringent, so if the merchant's data is not complete as Amazon requires, the account is not likely to be consummated. MerchantAdvantage's Channel Management does "speak" to both Underbid and Amazon, but it is possible that a merchant's data is so incomplete that even a tool as powerful as Channel Management can't fix the discrepancies arising from Amazon's specification needs. Additionally, the commissions are not measured in cents per click, but percentage of the product sold. So, you could possibly be paying more for the sales, even though it's not really an advertising fee. This form of "free" advertising requires that you do the math and make an extremely educated decision on whether using Underbid, Amazon or other marketplaces applies to you or not. But this concept is definitely worth a merchant's time to review. As a side note, there is a new shopping comparison site which functions much as a marketplace, i.e. performance based – JellyFish.com.

INCREASE YOUR PROFITS AND
REDUCE COSTS - RISK FREE!
Because Nobody Knows Your Business Like You Do,
for only $245 a month Channel Management Gives You the Ability to:

Quickly Submit Your Top Selling and High Profit Products Only to the Channels Where They Perform!
NEW! View Up to the Minute Performance of Your Channels, Storefronts, Categories, and Products with Chanalytics!
Quickly Identify and Remove Poor Performing Products!
Free Setup— A $400.00 Value!
FREE Live Support for 30 Days!
No Activation Fee, No Locked in Contract!
Channel Management Supports All Channels! (Shopping Comparison Sites)

CLICK HERE NOW TO SCHEDULE YOUR LIVE DEMO!

or CALL NOW! 1.800.550.9466

www.merchantadvantage.com

New Offerings
As the pay per click industry grows, more and more entities arrive on the scene with a new or special offering. Some examples include "Two Months Free", $50/off first month and this most recent announcement by Pricefish which offers a new level of service by offering a monthly, fixed fee plan where the merchant pays a set monthly fee and receives unlimited traffic or unlimited clicks. The question here is, of course, what's the cost, and how many clicks will occur? That being said, it's certainly worth looking at, as are other offerings which pop up from time to time.

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: SLI Systems

Is your current site search doing a good job of helping your site visitors find the products they're looking for? If you're not sure, or if you think your site search could be improved, SLI Systems, a MerchantAdvantage Partner, has just what you need. SLI Systems provides a hosted site search solution that drives more traffic to your site and delivers more relevant results once they get there - helping you to gain new customers and increase sales. For more information, or to contact SLI Systems for a free, 30-day trial, visit www.sli-systems.com, or email sales@sli-systems.com.

Technology Vendors which also provide marketing aid
The online retail industry has given rise to many third party tools and support. Many of these third parties offer powerful solutions to improving the consumer experience, providing feedback to the merchant, aiding in customer service, and of course there are third party marketing entities from which to choose. The latter certainly wouldn't apply to this newsletter, as you most certainly would pay a marketing company for marketing endeavors. Many of these third party offerings, although powerful and valuable in their own rite, offer marketing advantages as a sort of byproduct.

As one example, SLI Systems provides a very powerful technology which helps a merchant to place the best possible product in front of the appropriate consumer via a search engine technology which is significantly more powerful, and absolutely more feature rich than any of the "home grown" merchant solutions that I've seen. Their system allows an intelligent ranking system for products, which invisibly gathers consumer behaviors and preferences and incorporates that information into the existing product information. Again the real result is that a consumer will do a search, and actually see exactly the right product at the right time typically resulting in more sales. However, each of the products, and the "search tool" itself exist on the internet in addition to the merchant's original site. The people at SLI systems also have intelligently positioned their system to show well on search engines. So, I believe a merchant would gladly pay for a service such as SLI Systems simply because of the value their product brings with reference to the consumer experience. But in my mind, any "marketing" successes are additional to the standard technology.

Once again, I think this falls into the category of "Almost Free" marketing as the merchant is actually paying for the cool technology which introduces consumers to their desired products, not necessarily the marketing. I am NOT trying to suggest that SLI Systems presents their concept the way I have in this article, or even that they should. Rather, I strongly suggest that you get a demonstration of their product to make any decisions whatsoever. This section is simply saying that when selecting third party technologies of any kind, a merchant should be aware if there are any marketing byproducts, positive or negative, which arise as a result of the third parties' efforts.

Statistics and Analytics – Positive vs Negative impact
This is a bit of a difficult and technical issue, but the information could be advantageous. When a third party is used for aid in tracking product, or site popularity with reference to marketing, they always have an effect on the site, but that effect could be positive or negative. The industry standard model for third party click tracking (outside of those using server log files) typically happens in this way: the "content" sent to the marketing entity is adjusted to point to a tracking page at the third party's site, which tallies the click, and then forwards the consumer to the merchant's site, or final destination page. Well, the consumer found this link somewhere, typically a search engine such as Google and the data may also have come from a shopping comparison site. One factor governing the popularity of that record is the URL to which it points. In our scenario, the link points to the third party site, which then redirects to the merchant's site…NOT GOOD. A better method is to track both the click and the purchase on the merchant's site to get a relatively accurate click-to-purchase ratio. But the real point here is supposed to be "FREE" marketing. Here's how it works for this one – by tracking clicks on your own site instead of relying on the method mentioned earlier, you will be increasing your sites popularity in the search engines, and therefore be receiving "FREE" marketing efforts. (MerchantAdvantage with Chanalytics(sm) is a tool to aid merchants by sending the merchant's product URL and then tracks clicks using the merchant's site).

Resold clicks to undisclosed sources
This one is a little bit touchy, as it reveals some industry information which is not flattering to those participating in the behavior.

When we were doing our research and development of our Chanalytics(sm) product, we scrutinized every data bit and bite which was transferred to or from our systems. In doing so, we learned a great deal of information. In addition to the information necessary to create Chanalytics(sm), we found some of what we thought were anomalies, or discrepancies in our application. As we were troubleshooting, we found that it was not a flaw in our system, but a strength in our system which was evidenced. Because our Chanalytics(sm) product only uses private information to track which channels were used in the channel feeds, we see exactly where feeds are sent. We assumed that the click would be from that same channel. When they weren't, we thought it was our application mis-reporting. In truth, we sent our feed to a channel; let's say "BobsMarketing.com" Shopping Comparison Site. Although our internal system showed that the send was to BobsMarketing.com, and the associated fees were tied to BobsMarketing.com, the perspective consumer actually arrived from Froogle!!!! So, our test merchant was actually paying BobsMarketing.com $0.35/click for clicks from Froogle, WHICH SHOULD BE FREE. Suffice it to say, a merchant should have their own account at Froogle, and should "read the fine print" to be sure they do not pay a Shopping Comparison Site for what should be free clicks. In essence this section is to encourage you to keep your free marketing free, and is perhaps not a NEW free concept. Still pretty interesting, isn't it?

eBay Stores
This section is unproven, untested, and …well you get the idea. Read it and see what you think. Here are the issues at hand;

First, eBay Store owners typically have rapidly changing inventory as compared to standard online retailers. They typically have limited supplies of products, and the products often move quickly. Because of this, eBay Store owners often overlook Shopping Comparison Sites as a viable marketing possibility as the catalog feed could easily become outdated too often.

Second, eBay Stores typically get their consumers from the eBay community, not outside the eBay community, and that seems to bother the eBay community. So much so that they are willing to subsidize marketing efforts outside of their own community by simply having the merchant append some code to the product URL for links back to the eBay store from outside of the eBay community.

So, if you were an owner of an eBay Store and had the ability to quickly and easily send your most accurate inventory to Shopping Comparison Sites, while automatically appending some code to the url, you would be a candidate for receiving a HUGE reward. So huge that I wish not to say what it is in this article, but rather send you here - http://pages.ebay.com/help/specialtysites/referral-credit-faq.html to see for yourself. Suffice it to say that this is much more than FREE marketing; this is actually marketing for profit.

WrapUp
Well, I'm sure that there are even more ways to creatively advertise for free, or "almost free." But the real purpose of this newsletter is to inspire the readers (merchants anyway) to open their minds to various marketing possibilities. Many merchants are implementing at least two or three of the ideas mentioned in this newsletter and congratulations to them. Many merchants do not have the ability to implement some of these ideas mentioned above – well this is my chance for a quick "FREE" marketing endeavor.

MerchantAdvantage's Channel Management with Chanalytics(sm) can help with virtually every idea mentioned in the sections above in some way! (right now MerchantAdvantage is offering a FREE Live Demo of Channel Management with Chanalytics(sm) click here to sign up) But as a matter of integrity, all of the above could be accomplished without the use of Channel Management, it would just be much more difficult. I hope you've found this information valuable, and that it helps with your Online Retailing endeavors. Happy selling.

Michael Lambert, CEO
MerchantAdvantage.com

INCREASE YOUR PROFITS AND
REDUCE COSTS - RISK FREE!
Because Nobody Knows Your Business Like You Do,
for only $245 a month Channel Management Gives You the Ability to:

Quickly Submit Your Top Selling and High Profit Products Only to the Channels Where They Perform!
NEW! View Up to the Minute Performance of Your Channels, Storefronts, Categories, and Products with Chanalytics!
Quickly Identify and Remove Poor Performing Products!
Free Setup— A $400.00 Value!
FREE Live Support for 30 Days!
No Activation Fee, No Locked in Contract!
Channel Management Supports All Channels! (Shopping Comparison Sites)

CLICK HERE NOW TO SCHEDULE YOUR LIVE DEMO!

or CALL NOW! 1.800.550.9466

www.merchantadvantage.com

PAGE TOP

SLI Systems:
Is your current site search doing a good job of helping your site visitors find the products they're looking for? If you're not sure, or if you think your site search could be improved, SLI Systems, a MerchantAdvantage Partner, has just what you need. SLI Systems provides a hosted site search solution that drives more traffic to your site and delivers more relevant results once they get there - helping you to gain new customers and increase sales. For more information, or to contact SLI Systems for a free, 30-day trial, visit:
www.sli-systems.com, or email
sales@sli-systems.com.

"MerchantAdvantage is here to be your partner in growing your business in the multi billion dollar and complex world of online shopping. We are here because you are online.^sm"

Michael Lambert, CEO

• Pricefish sets Monthly Fee
Pricefish announced a new level of service by offering a monthly, fixed fee plan. Using this plan, the merchant pays a set monthly fee and receives unlimited traffic or unlimited clicks. The feature is designed to let merchants run their store and not have to scour click through costs.

• Survey Says...
In a recent survey, 25% of small business buyers said both past relationships and price comparisons are equally valuable in making a purchase. In the same survey, 62% based decisions almost completely on existing relationships. As new businesses continue to come online, they will comparison shop, seeking to establish these relationships. This makes comparison engines a large scale lead generation device capable of beginning new relationships which can turn into long term partnerships.

• Search Engine Optimization
According to a 2006 study by MarketingSherpa, fast or high growth merchants had only 19% of their overall traffic from natural search or driven by search engine optimization (SEO).

For information on how MerchantAdvantage may help your business grow please contact us:
Chip Arndt
Executive Vice President
Business Development and Strategy
305.895.9466 x113
partnerships@merchantadvantage.com