By giving an audience widgets that provide a service and make their lives more interesting or convenient your brand will be on its way to far more free real estate than you ever expected. In helping brands develop widget presences, I can say that for brand managers and agencies alike, the first time through can be an emotional roller coaster. Early in the process, brainstorming sessions are filled with far-flung, fantastic ways to bring enterprise information into the everyday lives of the audience.
Comparison shopping engines are an important part of the e-commerce channel marketing mix, Scot Wingo, CEO of e-commerce channel management services vendor ChannelAdvisor Corp., tells Internet Retailer. But they’re a better spend for some categories than for others, he adds. Wingo says, for example, that comparison shopping engines are strong in categories such as consumer electronics, less so with products such as apparel and jewelry. That disparity is partially a function of how matching on the engines works. Consumer electronics products have a multitude of hard attributes that lend themselves to point-to-point comparison, for example, while jewelry and apparel selection relies more on a shopper’s subjective opinion. That said, ChannelAdvisor customers spend anywhere from 15% to as much as 40% of their online marketing dollars on comparison shopping engines
Despite a lot of publicity that eBay is going after fraud, the bottom line is that the buyer better BEWARE when they purchase something on eBay, or for that matter, any digital auction site. This morning, I read a story from Wales, where a person just got caught selling laptops that didn’t exist.
A few weeks ago, the chairman of online auction site Bidz.com forecast good news ahead. The company was headed for another blowout quarter, David Zinberg said, with sales topping the already-rosy projections made in November. The announcement was designed partly to quell questions that had been swirling around the Culver City-based company for months. The questions involve, among other things, what critics say are irregularities in bidding patterns on the site, as well as persistent customer complaints that have led the Better Business Bureau to give the company a grade of “F.”