E-Commerce

The past decade hasn’t been good to small booksellers — catalog or retail. Soundly beaten in price, selection and convenience by volume-driven big box retailers like Barnes & Noble and Borders, as well as online retailers such as Amazon.com, many of today’s smaller booksellers are barely hanging on. But at least one small cataloger has found a way to reinvent itself and thrive. Chinaberry, a two-title cataloger of children’s books, educational toys, and spiritual and inspirational gifts, has found its own path to modest growth over the past couple of years. The company mails a namesake catalog that offers children’s books and toys, and

For smaller catalogers like Chinaberry, the Web can certainly be the great equalizer. Here are some tactics used by Chinaberry’s namesake children’s books and toys catalog and its spiritual gifts catalog Isabella. Search engine marketing: Both catalogs use Google AdWords for prospecting. “Google is the most compatible for us in sending us our types of prospects,” he explains. “MSN is starting to do well, and everyone is waiting for the Yahoo! paid search relaunch. We’ve had Yahoo! on hold for a few months until its ‘Project Panama’ has its full rollout.” Affiliate marketing program: Using Performics’ tracking system, Chinaberry can monitor the online relationships

For many catalogers, paid search will be the single most important channel for new customer acquisition this year. Here are what I believe to be the 12 best ways to do it. 1. Focus on Google. The reality is, Google controls more than two-thirds of the search market and is growing rapidly. Yahoo! continues to lose market share each quarter. MSN is a far distant third. Ask.com is even further back. Allocate your attention proportional to your ad spend. Don’t completely ignore Yahoo! or MSN, but invest the most love and attention in your Google campaigns. You’ll be rewarded with the largest return for your time.

While it’s widely known that hard-sell e-mails with product offers can be effective, at least one cataloger successfully focuses 80 percent of its e-mails on providing benefit-driven content, such as style guides and recipes, which isn’t directly sales-related. The e-mail campaigns that Monroe, Wis.-based multititle cataloger The Swiss Colony develops for 10 of its catalogs take more of a soft-sell approach that works. Aside from its namesake food gifts catalog, Swiss Colony's catalogs include Seventh Avenue (home furnishings, clothing, jewelry), Midnight Velvet (budget jewelry and gifts), The Tender Filet (gourmet foods) and Ashro (Afro-centric women’s apparel), among others. Designed to develop good relationships between Swiss

About 74 percent of online shoppers that started the checkout process during the week of Dec. 4 to Dec. 11 abandoned their shopping carts before paying for items, according to statistics released last week by Think Partnership, an interactive performance-based marketing firm. From this, Think Partnership officials conclude that consumers continue to use retail Web sites for research rather than actual purchases. The average total dollar value in abandoned shopping carts was more than $57, illustrating how much money abandoned carts are costing online retailers. Further, the number of carts created in that week was 5 percent greater than the previous week. To tap

Cyber Monday is considered to be the kickoff of the holiday season for all retailers with a Web presence, from catalog players to brick and mortar shops and Internet pure-plays. After a weekend of holiday festivities, people are back at their desks and in their offices, and in the spirit of the holidays, they’re shopping. This season, we conducted a study of more than 36,000 retail Web site visitors over the 2006 Thanksgiving weekend and found that shopper satisfaction dropped significantly on Cyber Monday from previously high levels over the holiday weekend. This research offers a couple of lessons you can implement so you can

Consumer concerns about the security of the Internet will result in nearly $2 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales losses, according to a recent survey by research group Gartner Inc. About $913 million is lost, because consumers who do shop online don’t shop as much as they would if they weren’t concerned about security. Another $1 billion is lost because of shoppers won’t shop online at all because of security concerns. Other data revealed by the survey of 5,000 U.S. adults: * 46 percent of U.S. adults say that concerns about theft of information, data breaches or Internet-based attacks have affected their purchasing payments, online

If you’re on the fence about developing a podcast for your customers, consider the following: From April to August this year, there’s been a 71 percent increase in podcast downloading, according to a report released last month by Pew Internet Research. But how can you make sure your podcast is found by listeners looking for the topics you cover? Natural and paid search marketer Oneupweb offers the following tips to increase search traffic to your podcasts in its recent whitepaper, “The Value of Podcasting to Search Marketing”: 1. Offer your podcast as an XML feed. Creating an XML file that automatically uploads your

The number of consumers willing to provide demographic information in exchange for a personalized online experience increased 24 percent this year over 2005 to a total of 57 percent, according to a recent survey by multichannel personalization provider ChoiceStream. However, 62 percent of respondents still express concern about the security of their personal data online. The survey also showed that 30 percent of online consumers are members of social networking sites, such as MySpace. Broken down by age, however, 69 percent of online consumers ages 18 to 24 participate in social networking sites, while just 8 percent of consumers older than 50 do so.

The advent of e-mail as a marketing medium has provided catalogers and online marketers with the ability to reach their customers with personalized, highly relevant messages that drive them to purchase again and again. In fact, 39.6 percent of respondents to The Direct Marketing Association’s “2005 Postal and E-mail Marketing Report” used e-mail personalization to increase response rates last year; 93.2 percent of those marketers said the tactic was successful. But before you can start slapping your customers’ names and other personal details on all of your outbound e-mails, there are five things you’ll need, according to a recent white paper from catalog management