As is tradition every year here at ChannelAdvisor, we celebrated Halloween with a haunted house, costume contest and a flood of candy for employees’ kids and the “we eat more than our fair share” Finance team. Fortunately video telephony is not yet widely adopted or our Account Strategists would not be speaking much with customers on this day.

Here’s a bunch of photos from the event until we find a good Picasa plugin for Wordpress. That’s Mattney to the right and, yes, he won the contest hands-down as no-longer-in-his-prime Elvis.

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Stating the obvious, Google is constantly innovating with new and existing products and purchasing complementing products (Google acquires Jotspot, an enterprise wiki company) stomping its competitors left and right (I particularly like the recent comment by an analyst that Yahoo! should consider letting Google sell their ads, ditching its new search platform Panama as sunk cost).

Many of our customers here at ChannelAdvisor are very interested in what our friends on the Google Checkout team are working on and last week got some good news. Google Checkout now allows merchants to define coupons within their seller interface to deduct at checkout time either a fixed amount or a percentage of the purchase price and restrict remittance by cart size, frequency and new-buyers-only. For all of you that hate when someone reads of slides, here’s a screenshot:

Merchants can set up and market coupon codes in e-mail, on their site, invoices and catalogs and allow buyers to remit these during their checkout at Google, although I am not sure if and how they stack. Great timing for the upcoming holiday season.

Granted eBay’s shining star PayPal has had coupon functionality for quite some time and their redesigned Express Checkout looks better than ever (hmm, that button design though looks very familiar). But unless PayPal works on their economics (Yahoo! search incentives?) Google Checkout is going to continue to slowly but surely grab market share. Fortunately PayPal is not sleeping, making a splash last week with HP’s announcement that their Home and Home Office Store now accepts PayPal. Long live competition.

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Google announced yesterday a new Custom Searches feature that allows anybody to easily build a personalized search engine for one or more websites - essentially sending another industry packing. Do a search on vertical search engines and click on the only paid search link at the top by, you guessed it, VerticalSearch.com. Google’s new Custom Search Engine allows you to replicate their business in probably in a few hours (using the same URLs). If that’s how you’re making money today I suggest you head on over to Jobster to register …

As experiment-of-the-day I have created our very own ChannelAdvisor Stores Google Search Engine (CASGSE?) for all of your holiday shopping needs. What took all of five minutes to build now allows you to search thousands of products from over 250 merchants, ranging from iPods, sneakers, golf clubs, DVDs to pearl earrings. Personally, I recommend an iPod Video 30GB, BlueBay Electronics is selling them like hotcakes.

Would love to have a nice Google Gadget that we could just plug into this blog or any other page (here are instructions if you’re technically savvy), MacWorld has done a nice job just integrating this right into their site. There are also concerns about sharing the likely greater yield of focused, vertical searches. But this is Google, they are probably already working on v2 in their spare time.

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While it has not received a lot of coverage on our side of the big pond, we here at ChannelAdvisor are very excited to see eBay Express launch in the U.K. earlier this month (I am betting that many of our U.K. sellers feel the same way). Similar to eBay Express in the U.S. (launched in April ‘06), Express is designed to provide a more convenient, faster and safer shopping experience (a.k.a. convenience buyers vs. the traditional eBay “deal seekers”) with a much cleaner interface and a new relevancy-based search engine.

There are three features that distinguish eBay Express in the U.K. from the U.S. version:

• Only New Products. Contrary to the U.S., sellers may not list used or refurbished products so there is no “Show All” link in the top-right corner that exposes all available inventory.

• eBay Express-Only Listing Type. Sellers in the U.K. may list products ONLY to eBay Express rather than relying on eBay Stores or BIN Auction listings to syndicate to eBay Express with the same data and pricing as the eBay core site.

• Return Policy. Sellers must specify a return policy on the listing so that buyers understand what conditions may apply if the product is not what they expected.

While I personally prefer the U.S. approach on item condition (Amazon allows a buyer to view used products), what is more significant is the Express-only listing option available in the U.K. and eBay Express Germany. Although all eBay Express implementations are based on the same architecture, the U.S. team has opted not to allow this right out of the gate (although I know they are considering it). However, it’s a very attractive option as it allows a seller to tailor his messaging and pricing to the convenience buyer and potentially yield higher margins (especially in a channel that has somewhat of a barrier to entry with strict seller requirements).

We worked closely with eBay throughout the development of eBay Express UK and *ka-ching* are the first Certified Solutions Provider to support it (thanks to our developers that jumped at making this happen). Several of our U.K. merchants have already taken advantage of this and are getting their inventory up on this new channel. Once a merchant is approved to sell on Express (click here to get started) all that is really needed is to mark products that you want to sell and you’re done (eBay Express listings and orders are fully integrated into our application and work just like any other eBay listing so there’s really no learning curve).

Why should you care? If you’re a U.K.-based seller with new inventory you have to participate in eBay Express. eBay is going to spend a lot of money driving attention to this site and it’s significantly easier to use then eBay. And if you are not going then you are opening an opportunity for competitors. Now that’s never good, is it?

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