ChannelAdvisor

Bing Double Cashback ends Aug 27

Bing notified merchants via email yesterday that their highly successful double cash back promotion will end August 27th. The exact end date was previously unpublished.

Internet Retailer reported last week that Bing requested some merchants pull back on their cash back offerings to help extend the life of the program. The article suggests a few retailers of high dollar items were soaking up an unusually large percentage of the available funds that were making the program more difficult to sustain, but it's possible that the success of the program surpassed even Bing's own forecasts. Either way, consumers and retailers are both winners. Bing certainly benefited as well, both in terms of traffic/users and press. There has been significant coverage of the double cash back promotion, and rightfully so. Our data shows a massive increase in traffic and sales, with total revenue across our customer base more than doubling and some merchants seeing increases of 5X or more.

Shopping.com Makes Some Display Changes

I noticed this evening that Shopping.com has made some changes to the way offers display on their site. See screen shots below as well as some comments.

1) Category Drill Down: After running a search, the category drill down options are now appearing in a large box above the search results. They are much more visible than in the previous layout, but have pushed the offers down the page a bit.

2) Grid View: With the exception of the shoe category, which does not appear to have changed, every other product type I searched for resulted in a grid view instead of the previous list view (the list view is still available but not the default). This definitely allows consumers the chance to see more products at once and is  a better use of space on the site. It also effectively makes positions 2-5 much more visible, almost on par with position 1. This suggests the possibility for more traffic in those positions. In addition, product level ratings are displayed when the user hovers over the item.

I like all of these aspects, but also have some concerns. There is a quick view function that allows consumers to see the full title, description and a larger image. This is good, but requires a click on a small graphic in the upper right corner of the item, which suggests minimal usage. The majority of the clickable area for each item drills down to the product page, or in the absence of a product page, takes the user directly through the the retail site. For items for which there is no product page, this may result in lower quality traffic, mainly because titles appear to be truncated at 40 characters. In some cases, this eliminates key terms that help describe the product, meaning the user may see a less than desirable level of information about the item before clicking. Since the majority of the clickable area goes through to the retailer site for items with no product page, it seems likely that retailers will receive clicks from users who don't quite know enough about the product to make a purchase decision and are simply looking for more information about the product, resulting in a lower conversion rate. The image text does show the full title for items without a product page so that may help offset this.

In addition, logos, merchant ratings and the stock description field (which acts as a free text promotional field) are only appearing on the quick view and are not visible in the initial grid view. These three elements are key to communicating a retailer's value proposition.  I'm pretty surprised that merchant ratings have been removed from the initial view since they seem to be heavily weighted in the Shopping.com algorithm and because establishing trust is such an important part of any online shopping experience. This seems to favor larger merchants whose brand can convey trustworthiness, even though their Shopping.com rating may be lower than a smaller, less known retailer.

3) Green Prices: Prices in all views are being displayed in a large, bold, green font. This makes the prices very easy to see, which is great. In the Grid View, the total price (including shipping and tax) is smaller and not green. I'm not sure why this would be the case, especially since the product page price behavior has not changed. On those pages, the total price replaces the base price completely, which makes sense to me.

4) "Free Shipping" in Red: In the previous design, the free shipping call-out was a goldish color that did not stand out very well. The red version is much easier to see, and since it something consumers look for and retailers leverage significantly, especially during the holiday shopping season, this makes a lot of sense.

I think it might make sense for the quick view to appear on hover, meaning the consumer would see the full title, description, logo, merchant rating and stock description before having a chance to click. But I guess that makes it an awful lot like list view. Overall, it seems like the impact on items that have product pages will be minimal, but it's difficult to say the same for items with no product page. 

 

Google Product Search Requests Larger Images, Adds New Attribute

Google just announced a new attribute and requested merchants send larger images via a post on the Google Base blog.

The new attribute, "online only," allows retailers to indicate which products are available exclusively on their website versus other channels such as brick and mortar or catalog. The coordination of online and offline activity is a major focus for retailers, so it is makes sense that Google would want to start collecting this information. It could suggest future ties in to Google Local/Maps, allowing customers to quickly find the closest brick and mortar location where an item is available. If you want to ensure your store locations appear in Google Local, you can enter details here.

The request for larger images is one we've heard from many other shopping engines over the last year or so. The primary focus of this is likely to help create a better user experience for consumers, encouraging them to return. It may indicate that plans for an image hover feature or other preview function are in the works. From a merchant's perspective, there is no downside to providing the largest images possible. A high quality image experience on a retailer's site can help improve conversion, and a similar implementation on a comparison shopping engine should improve the traffic quality delivered to retail sites.

Free ChannelAdvisor white paper - online shopper's behavior

Based on feedback we received at our Catalyst conferences where we have an online consumer panel that retailers love, we started doing a bi-annual survey of consumer online buying behavior.  The 2H09 version is out now.   This information is something I think every online retailer, regardless of size should read and understand as you make your Q4 plans.  You can download the white paper here.

Highlights

Here are some highlights of what consumers told us in the survey:

1. Consumers are spending about the same amount of time online but are spending less money – scouring the Web for deals that yield higher savings and offer extra value above and beyond low prices.
2.  Shoppers don’t necessarily realize where they purchase and may not understand how Google Product Search and other comparison shopping engines function.
3. Amazon and eBay are top-of-mind retail brands, but Amazon commands twice the mindshare of eBay.
4. Free shipping and peer ratings/reviews hold more influence over purchasing decisions than they did in 2008.
5. 70 percent of consumers said they regularly purchase from eBay or Amazon.
   
6.  81 percent of consumers begin their product searches with Google and 11 percent begin with Yahoo – which is an increase of five percentage points in favor of Google, and a six percent decrease in Yahoo usage.
7.  Bing is making a quick impact since it launched on May 28, accounting for two percent of searches and 13 percent of respondents already having used Bing Cashback – a share that will grow in light of the recent Yahoo/Microsoft search deal.
8.  Shoppers are diversifying the comparison shopping engines they use to research products, prices and deals. We discovered some useful trends by comparing consumer behavioral data to actual internal sales data from thousands of online retailers that make up the ChannelAdvisor customer base.

The white paper goes into tons of details on these items, and they are strategic tidbits to plan your Q4 marketing plan.  Is Bing in your mix?  Have you diversified your CSEs?  Which search engines are you spending time on and does it match the consumer-side?

We hope this enables you to align your resources and plans to have a successful Q4!

SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor

Google Product Search Webinar Follow Up - Part 3

Yet more Q&A from our Google Product Search webinar:

Q9) Does it make any difference to send 2 different product feeds for Google Base and another for Froogle? or just one for Google Base?

A9) We're not sending any legacy Froogle feeds any more but I am aware of an instance where Google was still processing and using a legacy Froogle feed as recently as a few months ago. However, keeping those live in addition to a Base feed is superfluous when the feeds contain the same products. If the ID values of the items in the two feeds are the same and are tied to the same account/domain, the feeds are just overwriting each other.

Q10) You mentioned sending a feed every day.  Is that necessary if there is no change to the list of products?

A10) I wouldn't say necessary, but I will still suggest it. The webmaster video we pointed to talked about the importance of freshness so automating a daily process helps ensure you aren't penalized. That being said, I think if you missed a day once in a while the effects would be minimal, probably not even noticeable. But only sending a feed once every three or four weeks is definitely not ideal.

Q11) How can we distinguish (in Google Analytics) between organic results traffic and GPS-originating traffic?

A11) You can add campaign variable tags to the URLs in your feed. Google doesn't allow for redirect tracking in Google base feeds but any and all parameter based tracking functions are allowed. See here for more from Google Analytics.

Q12) Do you know if Bing is on the Google approved list to send along pixels when checking out trough Google Checkout?

A12) Since Google and Microsoft are direct competitors, it did not surprise me that I did not find Bing on the list of approved tracking partners for Google Checkout. Atlas still is, however. I don't recall when Atlas was added to this though I would guess they were present since Google Checkout launched and therefore that they were grandfathered in . It also could be that Bing didn't even try to become part of this list. (Update: Siva Kumar points out that Jellyfish is on the list. I assume that means if you have the old pixel installed it will continue to work. The new pixel documentation contains tracking on the Bing domain, so I would guess for merchants installing the current pixel, Bing will not see Google Checkout orders.  Thanks, Siva!)

Q13) (a) Does having Products duplicated affect results? (b) Does your Ranking, eg Alexa ranking have any affect on the position you appear in Google Shopping?

A13) (a) Duplicated content is generally frowned upon. If multiple domains with the same product content are found by Google to be part of the same company, they will shut all but one of them down. If you submit the same product content multiple times with different ID values, you are really only hurting yourself as you are putting yourself at risk of having your account disabled. In addition, you are potentially spreading your own traffic out across multiple records in the Google database. Since it is very likely there is some sort of popularity aspect to the algorithm, doing this is probably hindering the ability of a single instance of that product to gain traction.
(b) Since Alexa is owned by Amazon, I doubt Google has access to that data. Even if they did, I'm not sure they would use it since they are more likely to trust their own metrics. It was suggested long ago that the page rank of the product URL played a role in the algorithm. I've tried testing this before but haven't found anything conclusive, mainly because most product pages don't have page rank. If the page does have rank, it could play a role but it doesn't seem to be strong and in my opinion, this makes sense. Page rank is typically correlated to authority on a topic and justified based on strength of content, but strong content does not suggest best retail offer. Price and customer service (quantified through merchant ratings) are much more important to most consumers than web site content and therefore should be weighted more heavily.