Traaa-tra-traaaaaa.  I would like to announce the launch of my ecommerce consulting company Vendlab.  We will be providing services in the following areas:

• Search engine optimisation
• Paid search
• Social Media
• Website Analytics
• Online marketplaces (eBay and amazon)

We are looking for online marketing specialists to help us deliver projects, so if you are willing and able, please get in touch.

I noticed when using Google’s keyword tool the other day that they are now including actual traffic data. Previously only a relative indication of traffic volume was given. This is exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, and more obviously, it helps when selecting keywords for the SEO and PPC campaigns. Secondly, I think that it will be really useful as a barometer of what people are interested in. For example:

• Product selection.  When selecting products to purchase, it can be used to judge which products are most popular by search volume
• Brand popularity.  By looking at search volumes, it will be possible to get a measure of the popularity of a brand.

Previously this kind of detailed information was only available through products such as hitwise which cost a fortune.  I also wonder how keyword tools such as wordtracker will react to the release of this data. Their data is taken from Yahoo, which is a poor measure of search volumes.

I have finally managed to upload my blog database and am ready to supply you with my insights into the eCommerce world.

Thanks to everyone who helped me out, particulary Sam from Arena Flowers, Sue from Tamebay, Melvin and Anna.

I have been playing around with the next flavour of the month friendfeed.  For the uninitiated, friend feed allows users to aggregiate all the social media feeds into one place, see my friend feed here friendfeed.com/trevorginn. Friendfeed has the following difference to other aggregator sites (or certainly plaxo and facebook)

• The friend feed can be made publically available so a logon is not required
• Other users can comment on items in the feeds

There is no denying that this is a very user friendly tool but I can’t help thinking that it is not all that different from other sites which aggregiate feeds such as Facebook and Plaxo and also pretty easy to emulate.  Will it be the twodogs* of the social network market, popular until everyone else bought out exactly the same thing.

* a popular alcopop which faded from view when everyone else realised that it was easy to mix neat ethanol with fizzy pop and sell it to teenagers.

After starting up my own eCommerce Business, Hello Baby, I have been somewhat forced into the exciting world of postage.  This I think is one of those things which no-one really writes about, so here are my thoughts on the most efficient way of getting things out the door.

Using Mailing sacks

Polythene mailing sacks are much quicker to use than brown paper and cheaper than jiffy bags.  Most things that we send out are boxed and so don’t really need any additional packaging. 

Use a Franking machine

Franking machines are expensive (mine cost about £300) but save both time in going to the post office and money (the postage is cheaper).   We have just printed out address onto the end of our franking labels so that each package only needs two labels, the address label and the franking label.

Don’t Use Recorded Delivery

My experience of running an eBay Drop Shop made me start off sending everything recorded delivery.  This is all very time consuming and make postage more expensive for my customers.  Overall for low priced items I think it is unnecessary. 

Use Labels, not Document Wallets 

If your eCommerce software allows you to print address lables, this is much faster than using document wallets, which are a bit fiddley. 

I had never used twitter much until the last few days and I am getting quite into it.  I think it is a great tool for the following reasons:

• Communicating with friends and colleagues.  By using twitter, you can broadcast your activities to an interested audience, promoting activities such as blogging or speaking engagements.
• Adding interactivity to a blog or other online profile.  Writing a blog post takes time, but updating your status is easy.  By adding a status box to your blog will add more frequently updated content
• Updating status across multiple social networks (see below)

Some businesses including eBay are using twitter as a communication tool.  I note however that eBay has less than 100 followers.

One of the reasons why I hadn’t used Twitter previously was that I thought that it would be too time consuming to publish regular updates.  However I have discovered some shortcuts to automate some of the publishing.

Integration with Facebook and MySpace

Using the Facebook Twitter app, Facebook status and tweeks can be synced so that one will update the other.  There is also a wordpress plugin for updating myspace status.  This obviously means that you can use twitter to create a single status across all your social network profiles 

Integrate with Blogs

Using a service such as twitterfeed, when you post to your blog a tweet will appear on your twitter feed.  This is a great way of publicising your blog to people following your twitter feed.

Sales reporting is hugely important, but unfortunately can be rather time consuming. On eBay it is a real pain to analyse sales on a per item basis, as sales relating to each SKU are spread across multiple listings.  Sales data therefore requires analysing the sell through rate and average selling price of each product, deducting relevant fees and then comparing this against the trade price.  Your sales management tool may do this for you, but otherwise it is a time consuming manual process

I was therefore very excited to hear from Andy Geldman from Auction software review that a company called Prime2S had created an Excel plugin which pulls data from eBay using the API.  Functions available will for example pull items numbers for listed items, fees associated with items numbers and feedback details.  These functions could be used to entirely automate the creation of eBay reports.  They could very useful in building an automated versions of Scott Wingo’s eBay Dashboard, which he suggests in his book eBay Strategies.

It is a pity the Prime2S haven’t produced their own spreadsheets using their plugin, missing a trick there I think…..

This post suggests initial steps to be taken when launching a site to ensure that the process of search engine indexing gets off to an early start.  These steps should be taken as soon as the domain has been purchased, whilst the site is in development.

Step 1. Holding Page

Google and the other major search engines take time to index a site and also take the time that a site has been active as a ranking factor.  It is therefore important to create a holding page on the chosen domain as soon as possible.

As soon as the information becomes available the <title>, Meta-tags and page content should be optimised to contain the keyphrases for the site.

Step 2. Launch Blog

It is a well know ranking factor that search engine place a premium on unique, frequently updated content.  For these reasons, as well as to introduce the people running the site to the wonderful world of blogging, a blog should be started on the domain as soon as possible.  This blog should be placed at the same URL as the final destination of the blog e.g. www.yoursite.co.uk/blog

As soon as the blog has been launched it can be added to blog search engines and directories such as Technorati and Google blog search.

Step 3. Build Incoming Links

Best practice for getting a site initially indexed by Google is to quickly build some quality incoming links.  The following are sources of quick link wins:

• Sites you already own e.g. a blog
• Supplier sites
• Business Partner sites e.g. your web developer

Step 4. Google Webmaster tools

Google webmaster tools, including Google Sitemaps, are a set of tools which allows webmasters to inform Google as to the constituent pages on their site and also provide the webmaster with information on the performance of their website e.g. number of pages indexed.  Installing Google webmaster tools on a site is an important step to getting a site indexed on Google and therefore all sites should have google webmaster code integrated from launch.

See http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Step 5. Google Analytics

All live sites should also implement Google Analytics so that we can immediately start measuring the performance of the site.
 

I was interested to read today about a book called The Future of the Internet.  What interested me about this book was not the content of the book (which I am sure is excellent and I look forward to reading at a later date), but the way it was being being marketed.  The book can be bought through amazon or downloaded for free on the web through a creative commons licence. 

I think that this is interesting as it shows the way in which I think publishing will be moving.  The author is giving away quality content for free, presumably in the hope that it gets a wider readership and promotes his personal brand. I first came across this idea reading Wikinomics where they talked about Cory Doctorow, a writer at boing boing who gives his science fiction writing away for free.  In Cory’s opinion, the problem facing writers in the internet age is not copywrite theft but obscurity.  I did note when reading wikinomics that despite praising Doctorow’s stance, they charged for their work.

In the future, authors will make very little of their money from their actual books (not that many of them make much at the moment) and more from other activities which the book promote such as speaking and advertising.  If done properly I think that an author can make many more money by using their book as a promotional tool, than by selling the hard back copies.  Here is how many future author will market their work:

• Self publish the book through a service such as lightening source or lulu
• Sell hard copies through Amazon’s advantage program.  Although I haven’t the data to prove it, I think that there is a possiblity that giving away the content online will actually boost hard copy sales.
• Give away the content for free online.  This will allow the book to be promoted virally through the web and the content to be indexed by Google
• Write a blog which forms a community around the book’s topic
• Promote the book though Google Books search and amazon search inside

An author can then make money through sales of the hardback book, advertising on the blog and in the book, speaking engagements and consultancy.  Given that many books have short print runs (when I went to see a publisher he reckoned that I would sell 2000 books which would net me about £2000)

A counter arguement is of course that people only value what they pay for.  That is to some extent true, however I think that the promotional benefits of widely distributing work, far outweighs any negative effects.

Recently there have been some pretty major changes to the way in which feedback is left on eBay.  The most significant of these changes are as follows

• Sellers can no longer leave negative feedback for buyers
• Once left, feedback cannot be removed
• The Feedback % only refers to the last 12 months of activitity and not lifetime.

eBay reckons that the changes will have the following effects:

1. Buyers will be more honest when they leave Feedback since they will not fear retaliatory negative Feedback.
2. Increased trust in the feedback system.
3. Greater differentiation between sellers.
4. Encourage sellers to leave feedback on payment

I think that the changes broadly achieve these aims.  I have always viewed feedback as a bit of a blunt tool, given that in the past all active sellers had a feedback rating of 97% or more. Feedback was high because the fear of negative feedback in return lead to few buyers leaving negative feedback.  In my view onces a buyer has paid, they have done their part of the bargain.

 On the plus side the changes will make sellers work harder to keep a good feedback score, creating greater differentiation between sellers.  On the negative side, in placing all the power in the hands of the buyer, it increases the overhead of selling through eBay.  A small number of negative feedbacks will have an adverse affect on your score, but bending over backwards to please every customer is very time consuming.  I fear that buyers will become very free and easy with their negative feedback, making it difficult even for responsible sellers to keep feedback % high.

The one thing which I really don’t like is that it is now not possible to withdraw feedback.  This leaves no room for sellers to make amends to their service and request that the feedback is removed.  Once negative feedback is left, there is no incentive for any interaction between the buyer and seller.