I have just returned from Overstock.com’s Partner Summit in sunny Salt Lake City, Overstock’s annual event for key merchants selling on this marketplace.

First of all, the Overstock team knows how to put on a show. I heard a lot of positive comments about the format: one full day of company presentations with no other events (such as roundtables) and a second day of presentations by solution providers. No distractions or conflicts and merchants were divided into groups to give everyone an opportunity to see all content.

I also had the opportunity to provide an overview of our support for this marketplace to attendees (as part of a comprehensive channel portfolio, of course) and even met a few ChannelAdvisor merchants already taking advantage of Overstock’s ability to move a lot of product (all looking for more marketing opportunities and buyer search data to drive sourcing).

Three things that stood out for me at the event:

  • Overstock’s partner management program beats the pants off of similar initiatives at eBay or Amazon with most sellers that I spoke to very positive about the care they receive (of course nobody likes razor-thin margins). Every merchant has a dedicated account manager (that they may soon rate to provide feedback directly to Overstock’s management) and a new partner council has also met recently for the first time.
  • Deep and accurate product attributes are critical for Overstock’s syndication of product listings to its marketing partners (aka Comparison Shopping Engines) as well as natural search optimization. Online Marketing SVP Jacob Hawkins demonstrated the Google Base Product search interface to highlight that attributes yield more relevant and efficient search results to consumers (via Google, etc.). There are also signs that Overstock will soon be offering Google Checkout to its customers (Q3?) …
  • Paid search is in. First eBay and Yahoo! sign a search marketing agreement, then comes Amazon’s ClickRiver, and now Overstock is planning to launch a paid search program on Overstock.com that will give partners as well as other third-parties the opportunity to place targeted paid advertisement on the site. Details on which pages (search results, categories, and/or product detail pages) are not yet finalized, but this is a good means for Overstock to monetize it’s 9+ million monthly visitors to its site.

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