Welcome back Rankers. I had a great week, I learned heaps, I spent 4 days on the Gold Coast, which was nice in itself. I was there, if you remember from last week, for the Professional Ebay Sellers Alliance conference. A lot of people said to me afterwards “Ebay, Jim, really what do you know about Ebay?” Well, absolutely nothing! I could say my wife knows more about Ebay than I do. I learned a lot from the people who were there because whilst they’re the Professional Ebay Sellers Alliance, basically they’re all really incredible online retailers. They started off in Ebay and now of course they’ve got properties all over the web. The thing I learned from a lot of them was about the sorts of things they go through on a daily basis in order to boost their sales and all that sort of thing. Of course in the world outside of Ebay and also within Ebay because you can get your Ebay store ranked, is SEO. One of the things I was talking about while I was there was greasing the Sales Funnel or lubing the Sales Funnel, basically reducing friction points through out the purchasing transaction process so that it’s easier for people to hand over their details and of course their hard earned cash. This company here Poster Revolution, out of the US, started by a guy called Adam Hirsh who actually wanted to take a bet with me that Gold Coast would beat the Magpies and being a good Australian host I said “Yeah, I’ll take that bet”. One of the things I found great about his site, he said that Ebay now only represent about 2% of their entire sales, if you look at one of their mailing list forms here, this is a classic example of using micro copy to reduce those sticking points when filling out a form. When we talk about micro copy we’re talking about putting little things in there that enable people to go “OK I don’t mind handing over that detail, OK that makes sense to me” rather than bailing out at this point when someone asks for my birthday. Because I was filling out the form and my first reaction was “really you want my birthday!!! Oh I see”. I might actually get a poster on my birthday, I doubt it though because he’s already given some cash for winning the bet on the AFL. It’s those sorts of things with your own forms that you can try out and test. Make sure you’ve got your goals set up in Google Analytics so you can look at the Sales Funnels and see where people drop out of that purchasing process and then go back and look at the forms and say “What else can we do here to make the decision easier for people to continue on in that transaction?”
One of the things that came out of the conference that was really important for Australian online retailers to look at was Google Product Search. I first talked about Google Product Search back in 2009 when it became part of Google Universal Search. It’s the old Google base that was sort of Google classifieds but it’s now integrated into search. I’ve started seeing with a few types of searches in Australia where you’ll start to see it in the normal search results but a lot of the times it will be only in this link here where you see Shopping on the side on Google. For instance if I type in Linksys E1000 Wireless Router and I look at everything we can see here that we’ve got a Shopping result, this is at Google.com.au, it’s a #3 result. Now, your site could actually be in there. That’s just another way to get onto the first page of Google. You can also see down here we’ve got a video on that particular router. It will show up for some searches and not for others. For instance, if we put in the model number of this particular projector, we’re not seeing any shopping results here but if someone is looking for a price they may click on the Shopping tag. What’s interesting for me in this instance is that we’ve got Ebay but we don’t actually have any of the big brand retailers. When you look at the Australian Dollar today a lot of those offline Australian retailers are going to be going through conniptions at the thought that Australians are going to go online and buy from the US again. In a lot of instances, and this instance this morning, I found prices cheaper in Australia than what they are overseas for certain items. If you’re not being found in search, then what do you expect, people are just going to buy from what they can find.
There was also talk at the conference, and an excellent presentation from the CEO of Channel Advisor, Scott Wingo, talking about setting up Google Product Search. There were some Australian retailers, who I spoke to afterwards, who were a little bit confused by that because one of the things that Scott said was that you need a UPC (Universal Pricing Code) to attach to a product. That’s only the case with some categories, specifically media and software. But if you’re doing fashion, if you’re doing jewellery, whatever these other categories are, homewares for instance you don’t necessarily need to do that. So to set up your store if you like in Google Product Search just head across to google.com/prdhp. If you want someone else to set it up for you, we do that, there’s plenty of other people that do it. It’s basically setting up a data feed that corresponds to your site. If you’re not used to doing that then I’d recommend you get a professional to do it but if you just want to find out about it first so that you know the right questions to ask a supplier then head across to the site and go through the process of setting it up. Google Product Search was only launched in Australia this year in May so that’s why we’re not seeing a lot in there. But, I’ll tell you some of the big offline retailers that I have seen in there and that is dicksmith.com.au and they’re about the only brand name retailer that I know of who’d be in there. If you’re seeing other ones then please let us know.
It was a great conference, learned a lot and I would suggest, offline retailers will love this-not!!! There was one online retailer selbyacoustics.com.au. that started off as an Ebay retailer, then went across and set up his own store and got more and more successful. Now, he’s got so successful, he’s had to set up some retail outlets, so that’s the whole experience in reverse and I love it.
That’s it for this weeks show, We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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