With everyone eagerly anticipating Green Monday, Amazon — undisputed Cyber Monday leader — has published a Holiday Season tips viewlet on the heels of their Holiday Season Tips.

Definitely worthwhile to take 15 mins and listen to Amazon best practices straight from the experts (we love this type of online presentation as webinar fans).

If you don’t have 15 minutes, then here’s a quick summary: focus on superior customer service from merchandising, fulfillment to buyer communication. That’s 75% of the Amazon secret success sauce.

Share This

This week, “P.” in Meridian, MS, writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
Most of the time the shipping price data in my inventory contains an actual price, but sometimes it has text, such as “See Site.” However, some shopping providers only accept numeric values for shipping. Can I write a rule that turn these non-numeric values into blanks?

Good news for P: there’s a boolean function called ISNUMERIC, that returns “true” if its input is a number, and “false” otherwise. That means he could create the following rule:

IF(ISNUMERIC($shippingprice),$shippingprice,"")

and then assign that rule to the shipping field in the appropriate templates. Of course, most of our default templates already have a shipping-price formatting rule that does this where appropriate, so the real answer to P’s question is: you don’t have to; we already did it for you! But that wouldn’t be as much fun for you guys to read about, would it?

Share This

No letters this week. Instead, I thought I’d introduce some new functions that we recently rolled out. One of the things that lazy productive programmers do is try to find patterns in our code and create new abstractions to hide complexity. I know my readers will scoff at the notion that ShoppingAdvisor contains any complexity, but I have to do SOMETHING to look busy around here.
(more…)

Share This

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

1 - You find yourself wishing that McCormick & Schmick’s served breakfast. (Wait a minute, they don’t, do they??)

2 - You’ve started a list of your favorite Fairmont martinis by #, not by name. The Vesper is #1. I only have 475 more to try.

3 - You’ve already sorted your booth tchotchke’s into 3 piles: trashcan, Craiglist, and keepers.

Share This