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This is part I of a II part series that I call 'm-commerce strategies for retailers'. The two parts are:
At shop.org this year and in many other conversations with retailers, m-commerce has become a hot topic. The success of the iPhone and it's application platform have capture the minds of consumers and retailers a-like. Google's Android system is nascent, but with a slew of new manufacturers and networks coming on board, set to be a solid challenger to the iPhone. Thus there will be a world with three + smartphone platforms out there:
Smartphones are real and will surpass PC-web usage sooner than you think
Most retailers agree that we have some great platforms out there and more coming, but many still aren't doing anything about an m-commerce strategy. There have recently been several interesting reports suggesting that by 2011, smartphone sales will outpace PCs. Now PCs have a huge installed base so just because those lines cross doesn't mean that we'll suddenly see Smartphone traffic dwarf PC-web, but it is an important datapoint that should be a wake up call to retailers. This figure shows the trend as reported by RBC:
At shop.org, John Donahoe revealed that eBay has enjoyed over $380m in GMV from m-commerce.
Morgan Stanley put together this chart which shows the growth of the iPhone plotted against other adoption curves such as desktop internet.
Hopefully, these metrics and charts have your attention and have you thinking about your m-commerce strategy.
What's your m-commerce strategy?
To-date, most of the retailers I have talked to have thought about m-commerce in one or two ways:
That concludes part I. In part II we'll dig into what m-commerce means for CSEs and what CSEs mean for m-commerce. There is an exciting new type of m-commerce CSE on the scene that we'll demonstrate that gives you a third opportunity to take advantage of this rapidly growing opportunity.
Seeking Alpha disclosure - I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.
Last month on sister blog Amazon Strategies, initial insight into what Sears is planning in terms of marketplace expansion was revealed. It appears that Sears has continued to move forward, at least on the CPC side, as they are currently beta testing an integration with Shop.com.
In the current configuration, third party retailer offers appears in results next to products sold by Sears Holding's brands. From running a few queries, tt appears the third party offers are listed after the native listings unless the Sears offerings relevance is extremely poor. Sears brands are always perched atop the merchant list as well. Since it's their site, both of these are expected from a user experience perspective. It's also worth noting that the product pages promote the top ranked offer significantly over the remaining merchants. When Sears carries the item, the remaining offers are at the very bottom of the page. When Sears is not in the picture, the lead merchant gets strong emphasis over other merchant offers. Many consumers probably won't even see the other offers on these pages.
This integration seems to be a big win for Shop.com, which has a solid offering but certainly not the largest product catalog in the CSE space. Since Shop.com pulls some of their offer data from the Shopping.com database, Shopping.com is secondarily looped into the Sears expansion. So if you have live listings with Shop.com or Shopping.com, your offers could be live on Sears.com soon.
The real question will become, which is the best method for advertising products on Sears.com? The varying rate cards of Sears.com, Shop.com and Shopping.com will certainly come into the evaluation process. For example, if you are a jewelry seller, you may be best off sending your products to Shopping.com only since they charge $0.50 per click compared to $0.55 by Sears or $0.75 by Shop.com. The Sears rate card has ranges for some categories so it's hard to compare directly in those cases without more information, especially against Shopping.com where pricing is tiered by product price.
One major upside for the Sears program is the daily budget option, currently available in Amazon's very similar Product Ads program but not on other CSEs. One major downside, though, is that they are only accepting manual uploads of offer data through their interface at this time, meaning keeping prices and stock up to date is more painful.
There is also the display/exposure question. It seems likely that Sears will promote more highly the products they can monetize at a higher level. It may vary but one would think direct Sears offers would mean maximum advertising spend to Sears more often than not.
Only time will tell, but with the traffic volume Sears.com sees, this program has the opportunity to make a significant impact on existing campaigns through Shop.com or Shopping.com, especially if this goes live before the holidays.
Shopzilla UK, DE and FR have changed their designs to directly mirror that of the Bizrate sites. The Shopzilla US site does not appear to have changed at all and is still quite different from the Bizrate US home page.
The changes suggest that perhaps the burden of maintaining two different sites is more trouble than it's worth for Shopzilla in Europe. Similar layouts would certainly make site maintenance easier, as well as standardize the display advertising inventory. Though the layouts are the same, the order of categories and other content is not identical between the Shopzilla and Bizrate sites, indicating that either the content is dynamic based on user behavior, or Shopzilla is using this opportunity to test different configurations.
This change also could be good for Shopzilla users as it seemed like the content on the old Shopzilla UK home page had been there an awfully long time.
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