Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

Visible.net is a new provider of state-of-the-art ecommerce and online marketing services.

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I have finally gotten time enough to launch my new eCommerce blog. If you already run an eCommerce store or are thinking about getting into selling online, jump on over to eCommerce Optimization and get helpful insider tips and tricks to assist you in selling more through your online store.

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I don’t watch much TV, and when I do it’s on my DVR so I can skip the commercials. But with the return of football I find myself watching live television again, and with live TV comes advertising. Thankfully the Pets.com sock puppet and GoDaddy’s scantily clad spokesgirl are gone, but I have noticed a resurgence in online retailers on TV.

The first ad I noticed was for eBay express, their site for selling new items. (just like every other ecommerce site, how novel) You can see all 22 commercials at whatisit.com. My favorite is in the top right corner, because everyone knows car chases and explosions are integral to the ecommerce experience. Wait, maybe a sockpuppet dog isn’t a bad idea after all.

eBay does a better job than Buy.com which thinks putting Scott Blum, their founder and chairman, on TV for 30 seconds is anything close to a good idea. Seriously, go watch the commercial. It’s creepy in a robotronic-kids-of-disneyland way.

This fall’s Buy.com commercial is actually the third they have run promoting 10% off of Amazon’s book prices. Compete.com analyzed the effect these commercials have had on visits and conversion rates for Buy.com and Amazon, starting with the introduction of the promotion last September. The analysis was published on Seeking Alpha. While the commercials raised awareness and increased the amount of Amazon customers visiting Buy.com, they did not help raise conversion rates.

Marketing is important, but dropping millions of dollars on national TV campaigns seems to be just as smart as it was in 2000 when Pets.com came out with that memorable sock puppet dog. From a 2000 Forbes’ article about the demise of Pets.com:

So indelible was the puppet that it was reportedly Pets.com’s best-selling product.

Of course, that should have been a warning. When your commercial mascot outsells your company’s actual products, you may need to rethink your business plan.

The picture above is the RSS feed of Yahoo’s new movie releases. RSS, or real simple syndication, is a great way to monitor massive amount of information. Every morning I check roughly 50 different blogs and news sites to see if anything important has developed in the world of eCommerce. Clicking through to each site would take hours, so I use an RSS reader to check which sites have updated their content and to read articles. Basically, RSS is a great way to keep informed of changes in the content of a site.

However, only 5% of American adults use RSS right now and 88% of at work Americans don’t even know what RSS is. (If this includes you, just click on the first link of this article to find out) Why am I suggesting its use then? First let’s look at an example of an RSS feed one of our clients, Spark Fun Electronics, uses. This is the news section on their homepage:

This is what their RSS feed looks like:

While their RSS feed doesn’t include pictures, this can be accomplished. It is the ability to quickly scan articles that makes RSS such a time saver. Now, back to those statistics. Most Americans started using email because it was included with AOL and was easily learned. I firmly believe RSS will experience the same adoption rate when the world’s most popular web browser, Internet Explorer, is updated with an included RSS reader. The new version should do for RSS what AOL did for email. Is your site ready?

Joshua Greenbaum in Intelligent Enterprise Magazine says he hates Web 2.0.

Why? Is it possible to hate an entire industry and set of technologies?

He argues that Web 2.0 only exists to collect more information on us, and market to us.

I agree that the more interactive nature of Web 2.0 is drawing us into a collective web of sites and information where it becomes easier to identify us, segregate us into demographic and psychographic groups, and ultimately advertise to us.

I would argue that this is a byproduct of Web 2.0, rather than its main goal.

Commercial sites exist for one reason: to sell something to us. Whether they’re selling a product directly or selling ‘branding’ through advertising, these sites don’t spend money on hosting, Web development, and content out of the goodness of their hearts.

Until we have a unified digital identity that works almost everywhere and that’s guaranteed a certain level of privacy, we’re going to have to keep registering for the Web 2.0 sites we want to use…and play with. I’m willing to give up a bit of privacy for the chance to see what’s new and what’s cool.

For now.

Even at this point, I’m starting to get reluctant to sign up for new Web 2.0 services. If sites like Zoho offer a no-registration demo (or full use!), that’s even better.

Make it worth my while, and I’ll give you some personal information. Let’s negotiate.