Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies

Is there a method to Microsoft's cashback madness?

Microsoft acquired the Jellyfish CSE and has used it as the core of their rebate program.  Pundits have dismissed this as futile, but over at eBay Strategies, we have some new information and thoughts that could change your opinion.

More m-commerce ramblings

Our friends over at ReadWriteWeb attending Internet Retailer today caught a relevant talk by Nic Covey, Director of Insights for Nielsen Mobile detailing trends in "m-commerce" and outlining some good data points.

To me, there are two distinct version of mobile commerce:

1. SMS purchasing
2. Purchasing through the mobile browser

SMS purchasing is meant to capture the impulse buy in all of us, and surely we've all seen those late-night low-budget commercials to buy ringtones via SMS.  But this innovation has made its way to places like Papa John's, Tim McGraw concerts, CosmoGirl and Stuff (which printed shortcodes next to products), and even Amazon and American Eagle.

But there's also another use case, and that's to cement brand recognition and tie-in.

In Amazon's particular case, TextBuyIt allows one to send keywords to Amazon's shortcode (262966), reply with "1" or "2" to buy an item from returned results, and answer a call confirming details.  Amazon then associates your phone number with your 1-Click settings or your email address and shipping information.

One thing that Amazon's particular case serves is comparison shopping on the road without massive graphical overhead.  It's simple and direct and cements Amazon as the "go-to" for price checks.

American Eagle is doing this to drive in-store traffic, which lets you text yourself items from their e-commerce storefront to find the physical item in your local store.

As for mobile browsing, Nielsen says that 9 million people have used their phone to browse the Web and purchase things (RWW indicates that this is only 3.6 percent of mobile phone subscribers) -- which is paltry in comparison to the ~150mm+ online shoppers.

But it's a growing segment, which increased by 73 percent alone since last April. 

So I'm curious, if you're reading this far, have you ever bought something using your phone?  If so, tell everyone what it is you bought and why you used mobile in the comments.

written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor

Live blogging from Internet Retailer Conference

Here at IRCE, I'm in a workshop around affiliates and along with 80% of the attendees, I'm sitting here with my jaw open because instead of offering ways to maximize your affiliate business, this workshop has essentially been a 90 minute rant about what scum-bags affiliates are and tons of data that are essentially telling retailers to scale back or do extreme policing of their affiliate programs.

Why the anti-affiliate sentiment?
I decided to cover this topic on CSE strategies, because with ChannelAdvisor's ShoppingAdvisor product, we've seen more and more retailers going direct with their top affiliates, and keeping the bottom-tier affiliates in affiliate networks for closer management.  Retailers seem to be separating the wheat from the chaff.

Barbara Hurd from Harry and David talked about how they are fighting affiliates that are doing bad things like saying they have a H+D coupon code, but then send people to competitor's sites.

Vickie Updike from Miles Kimball - pointed to some research they did that showed affiliate drove only 17% NEW orders for them.  In other words, 83% of the affiliate orders were essentially coming to MK were intercepted and MK had to effectively pay for orders they would have gotten anyway.

George Michie went on a rampage and talked about the bad guys and their tricks such as:

• PPC fiends - these guys violate your affiliate rules and do things like buy your keywords at night (night pirates), or use geo targeting to avoid your corp HQ and buy in other regions.  You can catch these, but it's tough.
• Coupon sites - these guys are trained by the consumer press (today show mentioned twice - evidently Matt Lauer is big on coupons)
• Domain squaters - they buy things like plasmatvs.com and do lots of SEO and then charge for traffic to a bunch of affiliates.
• Loyalty programs - eBates kind of programs essentially want to take an affiliate % from traffic you should be getting - avoid them.

What's a retailer to do?
At the end of the day, the panel seemed to be saying that it's time to drop the hammer on affiliate programs, cull out the bad guys and focus more on Web 2 kinds of activities like blogs, user-generated-content, etc.

On the culling side, one of the panelists likened finding your 'good affiliates' like trying to find the good guys in prison.

Ouch - nuff said.