Podcasting for Retailers
As always we have been looking for more ways to interact with our customers here at Sewell. We currently have a blog that is focused on providing tech support and tips on some of our products - it has been nice because it helps out our existing customers and attracts some traffic from potential buyers looking for a solid company that actually knows what they are talking about.In the marketing department, however, we really wanted to find a way to share more information with our customers before they make their purchasing decision to boost our conversion rate and decrease consumer dissatisfaction when they realize they ordered the wrong product - enter the Sewell Cast.The Sewell Cast is basically a podcast in which we highlight our most popular products and newer products that we are carrying that may be hard for our customers to fully understand with a few lines of text. We understand that it is not very likely that a huge number of people will actually subscribe to our podcast and listen to us talk about the products we offer and some emerging technologies.So why are we doing the Sewell Cast? Check out our HD DVI Network Media Player and look at the bottom of the product description. Users can press the play button (this requires the latest ActiveX drivers to be installed) and stream the podcast that deals with this product.It goes well with our history of experimenting with new communication opportunities - for example, we were one of the first internet retailers to offer live chat directly on our site with knowledgable, technical employees. I will keep you updated on the success of the experiment.
Yahoo shortens ad copy
In what appears to be an attempt at being more “Google-esque” Yahoo has announced the shortening of search engine ad copy from 190 characters to 70 characters. It’s not hard to figure out why they would do this - Google is eating their lunch in the search industry and that’s the length of their search ads.This is not, however, what they should be focusing on. Search engine market share will ultimately be determined by relevancy and the user experience - not the length of their ads.I think Yahoo made the wrong decision - we have always had a lot more traffic through Google than Yahoo, but Yahoo’s conversion rates (in our experience) have been slightly better. I always attributed this to the longer ad copy. I have heard a rumor that Google is currently testing longer ad copy - sometimes I think that Yahoo really wants to lose the search game…
Movielink, Vongo Follow-Up
Correction: I incorrectly stated that when you download a movie on Vongo that you have 24 hours after you begin watching it until it is deleted. This is only true for Pay-Per-View downloads, it does not apply to subscription downloads which are available as long as they are “in window” and your account is active - thank you to Ryc Brownrigg, the VP-Technology of the service (see the comments of the original post).This highlights one thing that I think both of these companies do really well - managing their buzz. Within 24 hours of this blog post I received an email from Movielink’s Director of Marketing and not long after that Vongo’s VP of Technology commented on the original post.As an internet retailer I also try to actively monitor the internet for comments made about our company. I use Google Alerts and I also try to get back to people who are talking about our company, but my hats are off to both of these companies who probably deal with thousands of mentions per week. Also, the responses I received were obviously not canned - both had read my posts and made that clear with their comments.Being proactive with PR opportunities and keeping a clear line of communication with people talking about you is invaluable.
Can’t get to second page of search results in Google
OK, I know that this is probably a temporary thing, but apparently right now google is adding an ad for Google Desktop at the bottom of their search results and I can’t get to the second page. It looks like they are only doing this on a few datacenters (some of our employees are getting the large, annoying ad that disables the navigational buttons at the bottom and some are able to browse just fine).Lame, Google - test your stuff before publishing it.
Credit card fraud - the retailer pays
One of the nicest things about having a credit card is the buyer protection offered by almost every card issuer. They assure you that if your card is lost or stolen you won’t be responsible for any of the fraudulent charges - Visa, MasterCard, American Express and their issuing banks are the heroes.But who really bears the cost of fraudulent charges? The retailer. That’s right - as a retailer you are responsible for determining whether or not a credit card charge is legitimate. In a lot of ways this makes perfect sense - if the credit card companies were responsible for these charges then small retailers could easily take them for millions of dollars. The point-of-sale contact needs to have a vested interest in qualifying their potential buyers since they have the only interaction with the buyer.There are many measures that you can take to protect yourself - first of all, use address verification on all orders. As a secondary precaution require buyers to put in their credit card verification number. Finally, if you are going to ship products internationally you need to check the IP address of the buyer and verify that it matches the same country the order is shipping to.I will admit that when I first started working in internet retail four years ago I didn’t realize that an order that was shipping to Lagos, Nigeria (with a million red flags) was fraudulent. We lost a little money on that order but we learned the value of doing decent fraud detection, especially on international orders.
Movielink vs. Vongo
Copy Vongo Movies: I think this is a helpful tip for anybody interested in copying the vongo movies to their hard drive to watch later - apparently you can do it by going in to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Videos\Vongo and just dragging and dropping the .wmv files wherever you want to be able to play them later. I am not sure what Vongo’s TOS are on copying the videos, but this is comparable to saving shows on a Tivo for later viewing so I don’t think you’ll have any problems.I recently wrote a post about using Akimbo, a way to watch television on-demand by downloading programming over the internet. So far the experience has been pretty good and it has really opened my eyes to on-demand programming.So far I have tried Movielink and Vongo, two different VOD services. First of all, I will probably never rent a DVD again - I love the convenience of being able to download movies without worrying about picking them up and returning them.Titles AvailableI did notice, however, many differences between the two services. First of all, Movielink seems to have many more titles, although many of them are movies I wouldn’t consider paying to watch. Vongo had much fewer titles, but seemed to have more that I was interested in watching.Movie QualityI realized very quickly that the quality of Movielink’s movies are much, much better. My first clue was that the file size of the average movie on Movielink is about 2-3 times the size of the average Vongo movie. Movielink films are high-definition a higher resolution and look great on a 42″ display. Vongo movies are not awful (they are still watchable), but definitely more suited to a 20″ screen.Download SpeedDespite the fact that the files were so much larger (averaging over 1GB per film) the Movielink servers are so much faster that the Vongo and Movielink downloads took about the same amount of time (1 hour per download). Note that this is over Comcast cable (they claim 4 Mbps, I rarely see 2) - this could be faster or slower depending on your connection.Viewing lengthBoth services let you download the movie and leave them on your hard drive for a month or two, but after you start watching the film you have 24 hours until it is deleted. This is convenient if you don’t know when you’ll have a chance to watch a movie (as long as your reasonably confident that you will be able to watch it within a month or two). Keep in mind, however, that your 24 hours starts ticking the second you start watching the movie.PricePrices for the two services were comparable - I have either paid $4 or $5 for each download (depending on the release date). Movielink wins the price war, however, since many General Mills cereal boxes have a free $5 coupon for Movielink inside. I have only paid for one Movielink movie (some movies are not eligible for the gift certificate).Movielink wins but needs more titlesOverall I prefer Movielink because of the quality of the movies. That being said, however, I will probably continue to use both services based on the content they have available. The winner of this battle will be determined by the availability of quality programming. If we learned one thing from the Beta/VHS wars it is that content can be more important than quality. I hope more companies enter this market (Google Video doesn’t count right now since it stinks) and drive prices down and availability up.
Beginner SEO Practice
If you are a beginner at SEO here is some good practice for you. This is especially useful for a retailer because many of the best terms to target are tail terms. When you understand how to best optimize for a few tail terms it will help you decide where your SEO time is best spent and how to design your site to be SEO-friendly.Simply find a keyword that nobody is optimized for at all. Unlike the popular SEO contest currently running to optimize for v7ndotcom elursrebmem you don’t need to necessarily find a term that doesn’t return any results (as they do with these contests). Just find a keyword that nobody is optimized for - a good example would be a string of words that returns a result without the actual string of words at the top.Tweak your landing page (the page you link to) and write a few good articles linking to your landing page from other sites (that are actually located on different servers - if you’re not sure what this means than just use two different hosts for your different sites). Get a few links from sites that you know are already indexed by Google and voila - you should see yourself climb pretty quickly.This is great practice and will really help you find out which factors are most important for SEO.
PR dancing or just DC’s rolling back?
I’ve been doing SEO for long enough now that a little bit of PR action doesn’t usually phase me, but I’m stumped by the dancing that I’ve seen lately in the different datacenters.The weird thing is that I am seeing movement so randomly across different datacenters, but I still think that they are just rolling back. As I said before, usually this much action indicates a pending update, but I’ve never seen the fluctuation last so long. I’m still going to predict a Google update at the end January.
Wireless VGA
OK, this isn’t approved by the FCC yet for residential use (you can use it in an office or industrial building) and it’s super-expensive, but wireless VGA is a really cool technology. You can essentially put your tower anywhere you want and use your computer as if it’s sitting right there in front of you.It’s called wireless VGA, but it is probably more correct to call it a wireless KVM switch since it also extends your mouse and keyboard. Wireless technologies that are available are pretty cool but they don’t even touch the products that were being shown off down at CES - Wimax is a wireless platform that various standards are incorporating to create wireless standards - a couple of examples are wireless USB and wireless FireWire.Now if somebody could just figure out how to power devices wirelessly… ideally without electrocuting us in the process. That would be pinner.
Sometimes it pays to be dumb…
We had a network outage at work that lasted from about 4:30pm to 7:30pm - not good for an internet retailer.I called our ISP and our T1 provider - both of them had me doing tons of complicated stuff that I didn’t understand. Finally, I called somebody more technical and told them to call and talk to the T1 provider - while he did that I simply unplugged all of the cabling between our router and the place that it leaves the warehouse. Then I plugged everything back in.I went back to my computer and it still didn’t work. Then I remembered that sometimes you have to restart a router when you feed it a live connection - I restarted the router and now everything is working fine.Wow - I could have spent a lot longer working on that if I had understood what they were talking about…