Well, we’ve just about (but not quite!) recovered from the first ChannelAdvisor Insite event of 2007 which took place yesterday in central London.

Over 30 UK online retailers joined ChannelAdvisor and Google (who were Platinum Sponsors) for an information-packed day of presentations, discussions and workshops about the current opportunities for online retailers in the UK.

The day started with a look at recent UK eCommerce Trends followed by an introduction to the fundamentals drivers of success on marketplaces (such as eBay and Amazon Merchants@), shopping comparison websites and paid search campaigns.

After lunch the group then split into two ’streams’ to dive into some more advanced strategies for optimising each of these channels in preparation for the rapidly-approaching Q4 busy season. Attendees also got the opportunity to hear first-hand from Aidan O’Curry and Richard Keelty from Google Europe about how Google Checkout and Google Product Search can drive more sales and reduce costs for online retailers.

A big thanks to our sponsors: Google (Platinum), PayPal (Gold), Cybersource (Gold) and FOEB (Silver) without whom the Insite series of events wouldn’t be able to happen. We look forward to the next events up in Manchester on the 5th September, and then on to Glasgow, Birmingham and finally Dublin.

If you were at the event yesterday - thanks for coming - we’d love to hear your comments!

Share This

PayPal announced the launch of their great-looking Back-to-School site featuring The Find listings from merchants that offer PayPal as a payment option to consumers (here’s an article from AuctionBytes on the launch of this program in June ‘07). Well done campaign with school and age-specific recommendations and nicely-embedded video testimonials from kids of all ages on what they want for the dreaded first day back at school.

So how do you get included as a merchant in this promotion? First, check out our recent webinar on TheFind.com to learn more about the unique approach this fast-growing comparison shopping site is taking. Then let ChannelAdvisor help you syndicate your products to TheFind.com as well as many other sites through our ShoppingAdvisor product.

I highly recommend bookmarking PayPal’s Back-to-School Flash Card Flip game for a chance to win a $10,000 grand prize. Wait, on second thought I’d rather not have you compete with me.

PS: PayPal now has a new new logo / branding, looks a little cleaner.

Share This

Google posted this afternoon that the announced changes to the Top Ad Placement formula are now in effect. From discussions we have had this change has been difficult for many retailers to understand and has caused some confusion about the impact. In short:

Old method

Top ads (above the natural results) were placed based on a combination of the quality score and the actual CPC paid.

All other ads (right hand rail and beyond page one) were placed based on a combination of the quality score and the amount the advertiser was willing to pay (the max CPC).

New method

All ads are placed based on the combination of quality score and max CPC.

In talking with a couple folks at Google last night at the Google Dance one of the reasons for this change was that good, quality ads that did not have “auction based pressure” were not getting elevated to the top spots. In Google’s view the presence of this is out of the advertiser’s control and as a result the ability to get to the top could be constrained by a factor that was out of your control. This change should allow ads to get to the top even if they are the only advertiser bidding on that keyword. Google is encouraging advertisers to watch their results closely which is always a good idea.

Share This

Several of us from ChannelAdvisor are attending the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference this week in San Jose. SES San Jose is historically the largest search conference and this year is no exception.
Highlights thus far:

Keynotes - very solid keynotes from Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com and Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience at Google. Both stressed that search technology still has a long way to go to help users find what they want faster. Search is an “impatient activity” and both sites are changing how they display results with the goal of getting users what they are looking for, faster. Interesting to see how this develops as they have taken very different approaches to solving this problem. Google believes the best way is to integrate other types of search results (maps, books, images, etc) in the core search results and rank them based on relevancy - this is Universal Search which was rolled out in May of this year. Ask.com has taken a different approach and places different types of results in different places on the page using a columnar approach with what they call Ask 3D. Look for some new commercials from Ask starting next week that attempt to really set them apart in this regard.

Google Dance - as always, Google knows how to throw a party and last night’s Google Dance lived up to high expectations. Between product demos, food from the Google Kitchen, meeting with the Google engineers or just a full on dance party there was something for everyone.

Catching Up - SES is a great event to catch up with customers, partners and other friends in the business not to mention just getting a pulse on what everyone else is talking about.

More sessions and meetings to get to before heading back to the office and putting all we have learned to work.

Share This

This week, “D.” in Richmond, Surrey, writes:

I’m trying to setup a filter so that my feed contains ALL items whose brand is “Acme,” and items from other brands ONLY if their price is £5 or more.

What Is A Filter, Anyway?
We talked about filters a few posts back when we talked about Boolean functions. To quote myself:

[A filter is] a business rule that outputs “True” or “False.” You can think of it like this: the filter is asking “Should I exclude the item?” If the rule returns “True”, the item is excluded; if it returns false, the item is not excluded.

What’s tricky is that D. has expressed his filter backwards: he’s described the items he wants to include. To properly write the filter rule, we have to turn that into a description of the items he wants to exclude. So in the spirit of Bizarro-land, let’s start from the end of his description.

He wants to keep items “ONLY if their price is £5 or more.” That means he wants to exclude items if their price is less than £5. A filter that would do that is simply: $currentprice < 5. But wait: he wants to include items if their brand is “Acme,” regardless of the price, so the exclude rule is really that the price is less than £5 AND the brand is not Acme. That would look like this:

$currentprice < 5 AND NOT($brand = "Acme")

Ok, I’ll admit sometimes it’s not always obvious how to write these rules, so here are some rules of thumb:

• Always try to think in terms of items you don’t want in the feed.
• You can apply multiple filters to a template, so always try to think of the simplest rule that will throw out some of the items you don’t want. For example, if you want to filter out ALL items that are less than £5, and you also want to filter out ALL items that have the word “blue” in the title, make a separate filter for each of those conditions and apply them both to your template. Note: this is different from filtering out items that are less than £5 AND have the word “blue” in the title.
• If, like D., you want to exclude items based on one criterion (e.g., price), except for the ones meeting another criterion (e.g., brand), use the “AND/NOT” pattern I described here.

Good luck, and send me your questions!

Share This