Macalua.com

This is too painful to hear. Hitwise is reporting that “U.S. visits to online retail Web sites have declined for the eighth consecutive week”. According to the report, US visits to a “custom category of 500 retail websites declined 3 percent for the week ending Oct. 25, 2008, compared with the same week the previous year”.

“These declines have strong implications for the upcoming holiday season as well as offline sales,” said Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise. “Everyone is aware of the role that the Internet plays to influence offline sales through research, so this slowdown may indicate a further ripple effect in sales in retail locations.”

Definitely not good for retailers’ Q4 aspirations. As demand shrinks, retailers will have to outspend each other on customer acquisition, which will cut into their margins, which will ultimately cause the biggest Christmas Party budget cuts for the people they rely on for outsourced help (me). Great.

Here’s the full report.

Tis a sad, sad day for Philippine SEOs when a notable local dotcom player starts dissing on the value and merits of search engine optimization.

SEO’s are costs that do not, for the moment, give any form of worthy results. Our experience in e-commerce with myAyala for the past 8 years has indicated that the cost of SEO is better spent on an offline campaign. i.e. print add or TVC about the website or an offline promotion requiring an online fullfilment.

The best way to get good search engine results is to simply build consistent and loyal “visits” to your site. In the Philippine context, an offline campaign is necessary.

I really think that person may have been referring to paid search rather than organic but the last paragraph make it sound like he is really hating on organic.

Strong words from a company whose flagship category homepage (flowers) metadata looks something like this:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”flower delivery philippine, flower delivery philippines, flowers to philippines, flowers to the philippines, philippines flower shop, philippines flower shops, send flowers philippines, send flowers to the philippines”>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Online Philippine flower shop that allows you to send flowers to the Philippines. We deliver to anywhere in the Philippines.”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>
<META NAME=”Revisit-After” CONTENT=”7 Days”>
<title>Philippines flower shop online |  Send flowers to Philippines</title>

Ano ba talaga kuya?

Will online ad spending suffer because of the bleak economic times? Jury’s still out on that one. But if there are budgets to be trimmed, traditional media seems to be the first choice.

According to a June McKinsey & Co. survey of 340 senior marketing executives worldwide, 91% are using online advertising, and over one-half indicate that their companies plan to maintain or exceed current levels where possible. Even more telling, 55% of marketers said they’re cutting expenditures on traditional media, precisely in order to increase funding for online efforts.

With search adoption increasing, more and more marketers should look at shoring up the budgets for the channels that provide the best ROI, while drastically reducing cost for the ones that ummmmmm give you good branding returns.

The Philippines should be the test bed for all things social. Pinoys own Plurk. It’s a wonder how this app has captured the imagination (and productive hours) of almost everyone in the office. I have theories as to why apps like this thrive here but will reserve that for a future post. If you want to catch the bug, start here:

Brian Smith recently shared a detailed overview of what an ecommerce company’s marketing focus should be. It’s a great starting point/yardstick for businesses making the move to online. It also provides a pretty slick roadmap of the online channels and tools you should be busying yourself with, complete with links to the leading vendors/technologies in the market today. An excellent read for beginners and a nice refresher for the initiated.

OK so call me an alarmist. Amazon and eBay have adjusted their sales outlook for the fourth quarter and their numbers aren’t rosy at all.

Amazon.com projected it would earn $6 billion to $7 billion during the fourth quarter, down from the $7.2 billion it had previously forecast. That’s bad news for investors: Last year the fourth quarter accounted for 43% of the Seattle retailer’s annual profit.

Shares plunged 14% in after-hours trading despite Amazon.com reporting a 48% jump in third-quarter profit, buoyed by the free shipping service that prompted customers to buy more. The company has added products and cut prices to lure more shoppers and take market share in the downturn.

Last week EBay Inc. predicted its first-ever quarterly sales decline and cut its annual earnings forecast. The two companies’ forecasts suggest that the deepening financial crisis will hit online retailers just as hard as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. (From LATimes)

It’s sad to know that some people are more concerned about Christmas party budgets, giveaways and end of year bonuses. Time to dig down and deep people.

It’s always sad to see this happen to anyone.

Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday that it would lay off at least 10% of its workforce over the next few months as it grapples with the deepening economic crisis, continuing the Internet pioneer’s tough run since it spurned a buyout offer from Microsoft Corp. this year.

About 1,500 employees will lose their jobs as part of Yahoo’s plan to slash costs by $400 million from its annual expenses of $3.9 billion in the next few months. Yahoo is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and also has offices in such cities as Santa Monica, San Francisco and New York. It declined to say where the cuts would occur. (From LATimes)

This nightmare affects everyone. I think we were a little ahead of the curve as far as tightening belts go but even that seems inadequate. I’m wishing for the best, but I’ll be looking at 2009 with Scrooge eyes - not because I love seeing people suffer, but when survival is at stake, you have to do what you have to do. I’m definitely adjusting my expectations level for next year. (more…)

The year’s winding down and for most ecommerce companies are throwing everything they can at the conversion beast. This is make or break season for most companies, and with the fourth quarter/holiday season coming up, now is the perfect time to go implement those conversion-lifting projects you’ve identified but never really found time to do.

One area that I’ve championed but never really got to do is rewriting product descriptions. While most landing page optimization initiatives focus on trust-building elements and finding the right layout/label combinations, I can’t stress enough how important your product/service data set is and I would wager this type of LPO-related enhancement has the highest incremental conversion potenial - simply because you placate the highest item on your visitor’s needs heirarchy: is this what what I was looking for?

There are two important points to remember when embarking on a content overhaul:

What makes for kingly content?

There’s no right or wrong answer to this. At a minimum, I would require an intriguing benefit-laden paragraph to open it all, a generous serving of bulleted, easy-to-scan product technical specs to reinforce these benefits and to cap it off, a closing paragraph that reinforces why your customer should be shopping for this product on your site.

Determine your priority SKUs

Chances are you don’t know where to start. It wouldn’t be too bad if you were to rewrite just a couple of pages, but if you’re a retailer with half a million SKUs, identifying which SKUs to prioritize is a daunting task already. Now you know why this initiative didn’t leave the concept stage for the past 2 years.

Do you start with the fastest moving SKUs and work your way down? Do you go with the products that have the highest profit margins? There are more than a few ways to skin this animal but I prefer the following criteria:

Highest Traffic SKUs with the Highest Profit Margins AND with the Least Amount of Sales

That’s it for now. I’ll share more insights once we get the project fully underway.

Yesterday was the most awesomest day!

BTW, thank you Fingerhoffer!