Back by popular demand, we’re excited to announce the expanded 2007 series of ‘ChannelAdvisor Insite‘ conferences, taking place in cities all over the UK and Ireland this summer.

If you’re an online retailer, planning your strategy for Q4 and beyond, then take a day away from the distractions of the office, and come to one of these highly informative one-day events.

Join ChannelAdvisor and industry experts, and your peers as we focus on some of the most effective strategies and techniques for boosting sales and improving the profitability of your online business. We will cover topics such as eBay, Amazon Seller Central, Google Checkout, PayPal Express Checkout, Paid Search Marketing and Shopping Comparison engines and, with a combination of presentations and workshops, equip you with the tools required to go back to your business and make an immediate impact.

This summer we shall be visiting a total of six cities with the Insite event - starting in Bristol on the 16th August, then London, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and finally Dublin in mid-October.

And, thanks to generous sponsorship by Google (Gold), Cybersource and the FOEB (Silver), we are able to keep the cost to a minimum - only £49 + VAT per person for a full 8-hour day of learning! I think you’ll agree this represents tremendous value-for-money - in fact, as we’re limiting places to 25 delegates per event, we expect all six events to be oversubscribed. So if you’re interested in taking your online business to the next level this Christmas, be sure to sign up straight away and reserve your place.

Here’s a link to the official Insite website where you can see more details on the agenda and register to attend. Hey, why not bring someone else from your company as well so you can bounce ideas off each other during the day and take action when you’re back in the office?

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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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News.com reports that Yahoo! is retiring Yahoo! Auctions effective June 16th. Launched in September 1998, Yahoo! Auctions quickly expanded into other countries but soon stalled in the U.S. when it started charging fees (and eBay was gaining significant momentum). Even the “Look! No Fees!” hail mary did not halt its decline into no-auctions-land.

With demand and sales declining we ceased support for Yahoo! Auctions last summer. But until recently Yahoo! Auctions consistently maintained its number two spot behind eBay for product listings (particularly popular for collectibles).

However, Hitwise is showing Yahoo! Auctions at 0.19% of auction traffic, proving that buyers will not always come if you build it …

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With the launch of Panama early this year, there has been a lot of industry buzz around Panama improving Yahoo’s advertising fortunes. Early reviews have been positive. Because people ask us a lot how Panama is working for our customers, I thought it would make a good post.

In 2006, our clients’ Yahoo spend as a percentage of Google spend steadily decreased. The decrease was due to a number of factors including lower search volume, lower clickthrough rates (CTR), and most importantly for our clients, lower return on investment (ROI) on Yahoo relative to Google.

However, in the first two months of 2007, spend on Yahoo as a percentage of spend on Google began to increase. During this time, most of our clients were migrating to the new Panama platform (because our client base is primarily retail, many had declined to do so during Q4). With the official launch of Panama in February, our clients saw this as an opportunity to re-launch campaigns and, given the promise of Panama, retry a more robust keyword set (keywords that have been deleted or taken off-line over time due to poor performance on Yahoo).

In March 2007, though, spend on Yahoo as a percentage of spend on Google decreased substantially. Why did this happen? In February, the increase in Yahoo spend did not result in the corresponding increase in sales required to hit our clients’ ROI goals. Because the conversion percentage and ROI declined on Yahoo in February, our clients’ spend on Yahoo necessarily decreased in March to ensure that they were hitting their ROI goals. Based on aggregate ROI on Yahoo relative to Google in March, I don’t anticipate a further decrease in this ratio and I suspect that Yahoo spend as a percentage of Google spend will level off or slightly increase moving forward in 2007.

From Yahoo’s perspective, Panama seems to be having some benefits. In 2007 to date, we have seen Yahoo’s CTR increase (even as keyword volume has increased), suggesting that Panama may be having a positive impact on CTR. But, if ROI is not sufficient for our clients on Yahoo, our clients (working in collaboration with our full-service paid search team or using our self-service tool) will cut spend on the lower ROI keywords and exercise a bit more caution experimenting with new keywords. This is one reason, but certainly not the only one (search volume!) that spend on Yahoo trails spend on Google.

(more…)

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Get ready for a bumper few days of online sales! The British Retail Consortium (BRC) forecasts that consumers will spend an estimated £4.3 billion in the week running up to Easter, with a further £3.5 billion spent over the Easter weekend.

This equates to £832 million (20%) more than in an average week in April which means the average UK household will spend £350 over the next four days!

“Easter generally marks the end of the toughest quarter in the retail calendar. After using the first few months in the New Year to service post-Christmas debt and consolidate savings, consumers tend to feel a bit more relaxed about splashing out over Easter,”

Here are some of the categories that will be particularly hot this weekend:

• Clothing and footwear retailers will take £670 million over the holiday weekend.

• DIY and gardening will benefit from the four-day weekend, especially if the weather is fine. 6 million consumers are expected to spend £2.9 billion undertaking jobs left over the winter.

So, if you sell products that fall into one of these categories it might be worth promoting them on the homepage of your website to ensure maximum exposure to shoppers. And be sure to make sure your feeds to the shopping comparison sites are up-to-date and accurate so that consumers can find your products wherever they chose to shop online.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, approximately 8 million Easter cards will be sent - with a value of £22 million.

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