Has it really been more than two months since my last post? And this one isn’t going to be up to my usual lengthy standards. I thought I’d share a transcription of an IM chat I had with our own Mark V. a while back:

Mark says: useful function would be to count the number of something in something: COUNT(”D-1000-3-BLACK”,”-”) would be 3
Mark says: would make it easier to use getpart when the number of parts varies
Anthony says: you know with GETPART you can put a negative number in and it counts from the end
Anthony says: like if you wanted the BLACK out of that, you could use GETPART(whatever,”-”,-1)
Anthony says: but if you really want the count, you could hack that with a regex
Anthony says: LENGTH(REGEXREPLACE(whatever,”[^-]”,”"))
Anthony says: that replaces everything that’s NOT a dash with a blank, so that the output of that is just dashes. Then length tells you how many

So there you go: two helpful hints in one blog post! I promise, though, I will post again in 2008!

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Last week we held a well-attended webinar on Amazon Best Practices that covered many topics around what opportunities exist on Amazon, listing best practices, how to optimize your merchandising, sales and customer service strategies as well as other programs available to third-party merchants from Amazon.

During the webinar we highlighted ChannelAdvisor customer Randall Scott Cycles, a Colorado-based retailer of sports & outdoor products (lots of great mountain bikes) with its best-in-class return policy on Amazon.com. I am emphasizing this here again because this is a critical area to your success on Amazon.com — specifically, Randall Scott Cycles:

• makes it easy to contact them for any product returns by providing a customer service phone number, email and physical address
• states a clear, comprehensive and generous return policy (even extends the return window during the holidays from 30-60 days when in particular new and anxious online shoppers emerge)
• describes the return process step-by-step

If you were not able to attend, you can now access a recording of the webinar on our ChannelAdvisor Webinars page. It is required viewing if you are interested in diversifying to this marketplace or are looking for tips to growing your Amazon.com sales (going multi-channel to reach more buyers is a “must” in this challenging economy).

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In September Scot Wingo told you all about just how big we think the Amazon selling opportunity is, and now that you’ve all already launched on Amazon (yes, you!), Scot and Max Leisten are going to tell you what they think are the best strategies for being successful there. Join us on October 8 at 2p EST!

We want to show you how to…:

• Meet and exceed the high expectations of Amazon customers.
• Optimize your inventory and pricing strategies for Amazon’s unique marketplace dynamics.
• Surpass Amazon’s holiday performance criteria.

It’s only an hour of your time and we always have excellent Q&A at the end.

Here are some reasons why we continue to think that Amazon is a great place to sell:

• Last year’s Amazon sales grew at double the rate of e-commerce – 38% vs. 22%.
• Amazon represented more than 10% of U.S. online sales in the first half of 2008.
• Consumers are buying more at Amazon – unit sales growth of 32% in Q2 outpaced customer growth at 18%.

Join us! See you there.

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