I was recently in London for ChannelAdvisor’s Catalyst UK Conference and we joked a bit about the ever present “Mind the Gap” phrase which is broadcast in the Tube stations. As I watched Google’s Searchology event last week I couldn’t help but think that this phrase also applies to the technology and business of search. With each release of search query share statistics Google continues to add share and increase its lead on Yahoo and Microsoft. We see this in the results our clients get each month in Paid Search. Searchology and the release of Universal Search just reinforced the fact that Google is a search company and fundamentally Yahoo and Microsoft are not. Making large acquisitions will not change that – it is either part of a company’s DNA at all levels or it is not. Yes, Google is moving into Apps and other areas but search remains at its core.

So, does this matter to a retailer? I mean after all retailers are not choosing to advertise on Google because they offer the best search results or paid technology (I have often said that even if Google had the Overture platform advertisers would still be there). They go where the traffic is and providing a superior search experience will ultimately be where users start their web experience. If you believe that we are only 5% of the way towards perfect search technology then Google clearly is much further along. Mind the gap indeed.

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From time to time, I’ll post little site tidbits here that I don’t see mentioned anywhere else. Here’s one I found out the other day.

We were working with a customer who was rejected from MSN Shopping submission because of site requirements, in particular, to be on MSN Shopping you must:

• spend at least $5,000/month.
• have at least 2000 products in their catalog

If anyone can find these publicly mentioned on MSN’s site, feel free to post the link; I had not seen this mentioned anywhere.

Have a great Easter weekend.

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Big news from ChannelAdvisor today for eTailers that want to cost-effectively manage and scale their paid search campaigns without adding costly resources or sacrificing ROI targets. Today we are launching our new SearchAdvisor product after a lot of kick-*** work from our engineers over the last few weeks.

They have essentially taken our cool in-house search platform, sprinkled some pixie dust on it and turned it into the single solution to manage keywords on a product or sales margin basis for Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com (yes, all of them), allowing you to know which keywords drive the most profit…and which keywords fail to drive a profit.

What does SearchAdvisor do for online retailers? Lots of great things:

• Integrated Campaign Management
  Use a single interface to create, manage and analyze paid search campaigns.
• Search Marketing Analytics
  Robust reporting that allows you to optimize campaigns based on the profitability of individual keywords enabling you to view campaign performance by order, products sold or revenue generated.
• Bulk Campaign Upload
  Define your search marketing campaigns and keywords, then launch your paid search marketing efforts to all supported engines with a single click.
• Automated Bid Management
  Create and manage bidding rules that automatically adjust your bid strategies based on performance, eliminating the daily workload which allows you to focus on your overall success.
• Multi-Channel Reporting
  Integrate and track all of your multi-channel performance including paid search, natural search and comparison shopping engines from a single application allowing you to maximize your time and profitability.
• Landing Page Optimization
  View the performance and compare landing pages based on combined revenue, expense, conversion rates and profitability across all channels.

If creating, analyzing and optimizing multiple campaigns on multiple search engines or evaluating and acting on per-term profitability is giving you headaches, SearchAdvisor may just be that silver bullet you’re looking for.

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The Wall Street Journal maintains a great blog on holiday sales news that especially during this merry time is an excellent resource for tracking how online retailers are faring. Yesterday it reported on an interesting ForeSee Research study.

Netflix, Amazon.com, LL Bean, and QVC.com ranked best in customer satisfaction during the holiday season, according to ForeSee Results’ Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index. Ranking at the bottom of the index: CompUSA, Costco, and CDW.com. The study found that department stores — including the sites for J.C. Penney, Sears and Target — scored huge improvements, and that in general, most retailers scored higher than last year. Overall, customers were more satisfied with apparel Web sites than with mass merchants or electronics retailers.

Amazon continues to lead the pack of online retailers in customer satisfaction (disregarding Netflix for a moment as more of a service provider then traditional merchant). There is no consolidated list of marketplaces available (eBay is tracked as an internet auction provider) but that is pretty easy to create using published American Customer Satisfaction Index data and the WSJ post:

Marketplaces Customer Satisfaction Ranking (2006 data unless otherwise indicated)

1. Amazon (87 — 2005 score)
2. eBay (81 — 2005 score)
3. Yahoo! (76)
4. uBid (73 — 2005 score)
5. Overstock.com (71)

For good measure I am also including below satisfaction scores for the leading search engines although scores for Microsoft and Yahoo! should be taken with a grain of salt because of their big product portfolio.

1. Google (81)
2. Yahoo! (76)
3. Microsoft (73)
4. Ask.com (71)

The simplified implication for online merchants is of course to take a good look at the top-rated channels as that is where the buyers are flocking.

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I hope everyone is enjoying their Q4 right now. I know all of our servers are appreciating the extra love and attention from the holiday shoppers.

While everyone is frantically fulfilling orders, and maybe placing a few of their own, I felt this would be the perfect time to talk a bit about how all of that data is stored in our system. Fascinating holiday reading I know, so I’ll try my best to keep this entertaining and stick to the high level points of why your business should care.

Data is King
In my last 2 posts, I’ve focused on how all the “work” in our system gets distributed by bank style queues and self-heals from “evil monkey” errors through rollbacks and retries. Now it’s time to focus on the data itself. Every single scrap of information that powers your business: from the titles of your inventory to the buyers who purchase your products to the pagination setting you use in your views, all of it is stored in a database. Specifically at ChannelAdvisor, it’s a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database (yeah yeah, we know we need to upgrade to 2005, but we are always conservative in upgrading our servers until several Microsoft patches have burned in first). If all of the application servers that processed the “work” were the linemen, the database would be the quarterback. The database holds all of the cards – it knows the score, the play, and where to pass the ball. Data is king!

As Spiderman would say, with great power comes great responsibility (although I still think Batman could whoop him). With such crucial information stored in the database, many steps must be taken to make sure that data stays safe. The first of these steps we take at CA is to distribute this information across many servers – last I counted I believe we had 21 quad-CPU, 32 gig Dell database servers actively serving the Merchant and Pro products, for which this article is geared. These are not your typical MP3 servers, these suckers have some honkin’ horsepower available to service our customers’ needs. (more…)

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