Ecommerce MAXed

SingleFeed is proud to officially announce three new supported shopping engines – buySAFE, Like.com and shop.com.

About buySAFE, Inc.

Backed by the strength of underwriters Liberty Mutual, Travelers, and ACE, buySAFE partners with online merchants to provide their buyers trusted, risk-free shopping. buySAFE inspects online merchants, monitors their performance and bonds their shoppers’ purchases up to $25,000. After becoming bonded, SingleFeed can submit your products to buySAFE for display on their exclusive buySAFE Bonded Shopping Network.

buySAFE Buyer Benefits:

• The buySAFE Bonded Shopping Network has Safe shopper ratings and Shopping Advisor toolbar.
• 30 day of identity theft protection.
• Your purchase is guaranteed - Buy through the Safe Shopping Portal and your purchases are bonded up to $25,000 at no cost to you.

buySAFE Merchant Benefits:

• Safety ratings are added to your search results in Google®,
  Yahoo®, MSN® and eBay®.
• Increased consumer confidence that increases conversions (new and repeat buyers) in the range of 3-15%.

About Like.com

Like.com is the first true visual search engine, where the content of photos are used to search and retrieve similar items. Like.com utilizes “Likeness Technology” to create a digital signature that describes the photo’s content and enables a more accurate search for similar looking items and products. The site’s primary focus is on handbags, jewelry, shoes, and watches - allowing users to search and purchase items from thousands of leading and boutique brands.

If you did a search for “Red Suede Shoes” you have an option to select whether you wanted to see those shoes for kids, men or women. You can also select the price range of your interest, sale items, items that have “free shipping”, or refine your search by style, color, brand, material or by site (manufacturer).

Once you do a search and select a product, if you click on the “Visual Search” button you will see the item that you originally selected in addition to other similar products by color, shape and pattern.

Like.com Buyer Benefits:

• Like.com offers a wide variety of ways to custom tailor your searches (by color, celebrity, feature and more)
• Visual results help you to identify quickly if you like the products before you click to get additional details.
• Upload a picture and find similar items – how cool is that?

Like.com Merchant Benefits:

• If your target audience likes to be on the cutting edge of fashion then this is the place where you want to have your product line visually promoted.
• The products sell themselves, allow customers to find what they want without having to go to the stores to see the product line that they are searching for. Higher opportunity for conversions.

About Shop.com

Shop.com is one of the largest shopping sites on the web with a target demographic that is 70% female. Many years ago they introduced their OneCart technology, through which consumers could purchase items from multiple retailers all through Shop.com’s own cart system. They also offer a traditional CPC program. They also have a sponsored merchandising program, buying guides, display ads and promotional email campaigns that provide opportunities for you to have additional product exposure.

Shop.com evaluates each client to see if they would be successful on their shopping engine before allowing them to be a part of the shop.com network of merchants.

shop.com Buyer Benefits:

• Discover and compare products from your favorite stores in these categories: Apparel, Shoes, Accessories / Beauty & Health / Home & House wares / Electronics / Gifts & Registry.
• Compare products side by side having pertinent information like price, shipping method, and delivery scheduling options.
• Use informative articles, buyer guides tools and read expert advice to help you make an informed purchasing decision.
• Share opinions through product reviews, shopping blog and My Shop site sections.
• Make your purchase by using your secure shop.com account (OneCart feature) or purchase directly from the merchant.

shop.com Merchant Benefits:

• Greater success in having targeted traffic from the demographic that wants your product line. Shop.com consults with you to make sure that your product line is a good fit, looking for merchants who will be properly suited for the portal.
• Flexibility to participate in a CPC or CPO program.
• Added opportunities to be involved and marketed through many of the shop.com marketing programs, giving you additional product and company exposure.

San Diego Media would love to speak to you about automating your data feed into any or all of the consumer shopping engine feeds available through Singlefeed. Contact us at [email protected] or call 858-444-2701

As a buyer would having the full price of a product, including tax and shipping costs important or helpful? Google Base is now providing this information by including tax and shipping estimates on Google Product Search results in the U.S. If merchants have provided these critical data points you will now be able to see tax and shipping costs displayed alongside the product listings.

How does this benefit buyers?

The number of search results is decreased and just displays the results that have "Free Shipping and your estimated tax" cost which helps you to see more relevant results and details on the final purchase price.

How does this benefit merchants?

If you offer Free Shipping and you set up your pre-existing tax rules - your products will have a higher chance of converting to sales. Qualified lead traffic is always better.

When I worked for a popular hosted ecommerce company with 100's of customers, I was amazed to learn that 95% of them never did more than $5,000 in a month.

That's not very good.

For most of those sites it wasn't that they were new. In many cases, they had been selling online for years without ever really hitting their stride.

The other 5% of sites would grow month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year. 

So, why did the first group stagnate? And why did the second group get on a growth path?

One thing I have seen over and over is that getting to about $20,000/month or so is critical. Companies that achieve that keep on growing and going beyond that.

Sites that don't hit somewhere near that number seem to continue to struggle.

So why is getting to $20k/month magical?

If you do that it means:

1. You've found a way to get BUYERS to your site. There are many ways to do this - I probably know about 10 that have worked for someone. You just have to find one that works for you.
   
2. You have products that enough people ACTUALLY want to buy.
3. Your PRICING and merchandising is at least decent.
4. Your web site actually works. Believe it or not, this kills most sites.
   

From this point, do a good job with customer service and you will see more and more repeat business.

Your business can actually start paying for itself and for someone to work it. 

Keep working the winning formula and you'll find getting to $100k/month will be easier than getting to $20k/month.

It just takes some time.

Now, there is another set of challenges lay somewhere beyond $100k/month - and I'll discuss them in my next post - but if you are past $20k/month, feel good that you are in the select group of ecommerce companies that are succeeding.

San Diego Media is pleased to announce the launch of Fire Etc.'s new web site on MaxEXP.

Fire Etc. provides firefighting equipment  to Fire Departments, Military Installations and job sites all over the world. 

Fire Etc. had an ecommerce site selling fire boots, proximity gear and other firefighting gear online but wanted to take their online business to the next level.

By moving to MaxEXP, they now have a SEO optimized site that is ready to compete nationally.  As time goes by, you will see more and more products available for sale on their new site.

They've already achieved first page ranking in Yahoo for terms like firefighting gear bags, firefighting equipment, structure boots & fire gloves. 

Check it out!

Using Shopping Feeds is a great way to get your products in front of more buyers. 

Here are 10 tips for getting more clicks from Shopping Engines like Price Grabber, Google Product, Nextag etc.

1. Remove duplicate product descriptions.  Some engines will remove listings if you have duplicate product titles, descriptions or URL’s.  These should always be unique.
2. If you offer a promotion like "Free Shipping", put it in the promotional message field.
3. Fill in the keyword field for all items.  Make them different depending on the specific product.
4. Write your product titles the way a user might search for the item.  It makes sense to have a field in your product database for Shopping Engine title because you will want something different than on your site.
5. Use descriptive product definitions.  Use this field to give the shopper important information about the product and help inform them to make them a qualified user.
6. If there are any additional features of the products or stores that you want to include in the field you can try using Google Custom Attributes.  For instance you might want to highlight a 50 year warranty if it applies. 
7. Signing up with the engines to receive user ratings may help improve performance on the engines as this instills confidence in prospective buyers when they can see your store has positive feedback. Also we know that some engines, like Shopzilla, take ratings into consideration in their rankings.
8. Allowing Google checkout may get you more buyers and it also allows users to leave you feedback which can help your performance on the engines.
9. “TheFind” is another free engine.  So you should definitely get as much free traffic as you can!
10. Try some of the smaller engines like Become, Pronto or Smarter.  You may not get a lot of traffic but you may find that one of these sites is a good market for your products.  It’s always good to try out a variety of shopping engines.

Hope this helps you drive more traffic and more sales!