A Merchant's CSE

There have been lots of comments left on this blog about what CSEs do poorly and some ideas for how they should be doing things better.

I want to open the floodgates. 

I want to hear from all of you merchants, CSE execs / employees, e-commerce junkies and anyone else who has ideas for their 'perfect-world' CSE. 

What I want to do is gather your ideas, ideals, feedback and more and structure it in a new post later this week.

Some ideas:

• How would you send, track and manage feeds? Would feeds even exist?
• How would you pay for search placement, if at all?
• How would your perfect-world CSE promote the best merchants? The best deals?
• Would social shopping be a factor?
• What about SEM? How would you like your products promoted on the search engines?
• Email marketing resources
• What would it look like? How would it make users find your products better?
• Which CSE do you think does the best job right now? How could it build on top of that experience?
• Would it be creative like Jellyfish Smack?  What other "game-like" options would it offer?

So, here's the invitation.  Your forum is just a click away.

Comments open!

Written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor

Comments

[Nicolas]

A few ideas:

- killer CSE would be a perfect combination of online /offline/social shopping; quite a challenge in terms of user interface

- hListing (or any other standard) would make discovery of offers on merchant sites a trivial tasks, if adopted by merchants. Up to the merchants to opt-in / opt-out of CSEs depending of the strategy (free CSEs / paid CSEs)

- be open, open, open. Widgets are great, RSS rocks; syndication APIs are also important. See how to deal with the monetization issues

- open also means "put" not only "get" - people should be able to add value to CSEs, indicating a missing brand, a missing merchant, a missing product => social aspects

- more discovery tools - search is great when you know what you are shopping for - social is good for discovery + any other algorithm-based discovery tools?