Quick Thoughts on Internet Retailer

My notebook is full of great notes I jotted down from sessions and discussions I had at Internet Retailer. I will be putting up some posts on various topics and insights from the conference but for now I just wanted to throw out some quick thoughts:

If you don’t have a lot of money, you can’t lose a lot of money–Jim McCann, keynote speaker and founder of 1-800-flowers.com

Jim McCann gave an incredibly interesting keynote address about how he has grown a small flower shop business into a multi-channel, multi-market, business approaching $1 billion in sales. I liked this idea because I think it represents the type of bold entrepreneurial spirit I see in some of our successful Yahoo! store merchants. Often times the merchants seeing the biggest gains are the ones placing the biggest bets. He also talked about thinking like a small company and always innovating.

Venky Shankar gave an informative presentation on metrics that matter for retailers. One statistic he listed was that 70% of people 15-34 are on social networks (such as MySpace, Facebook, etc) and that 40% of those using social networks used them to learn about a brand or product. If the 15-34 year old demographic makes up a sizable portion of your customer base, you may wish to invest some time in SNO (social network optimization). What can you do to connect to these buyers and become an asset or destination for these communities?

Maris Daugherty presented on using trends to influence purchase decisions. She talked about the three main types of shoppers: info seeking, conquerors (those on a mission to buy), and impulse shoppers. How does your site speak to these groups? Do you have original and comprehensive product data (description, specs, buyer’s guides, etc) to be the one source of authoritative information on a product or brand? If not, what are you doing to get there? With conquerors, is your site optimized to allow for the quickest access to a specific product through navigation or landing page targeting for search marketing? If not, how can you remove barriers to a quick and worry-free purchase process. With impulse shoppers, are you cross-selling products in product pages, checkout, packaging products together to drive impulse purchases? There may be (and likely are) stores that have all three types of buyers so the trick here seems to be understanding the percentages, and how each is driving revenue so you can maximize your tactics for the most profitable segment.

I’ll be sure to pass along other observations I found interesting from the show in the coming weeks.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Up next: Yahoo! Merchant Solutions post-conference party report

FlyingPeas Adds Featured Customers as well as Featured Products

The following post contains excerpts of an interview I did with Terra Malcom Carmichael regarding her store, FlyingPeas.com. Terra’s store sells “hip” and high-quality baby products, but more than the funny t-shirts or funny bibs (or even the great custom design), what caught my eye and the subject of this post, is her page that features friends and customers—Yummy Mommies. I contacted Terra and asked her some questions about how Yummy Mommies fits in with her store.

Tell me about FlyingPeas? When and why did you start the business?

I love babies and all the fun products that come with them. I’ve done my share of buying baby gifts (as well as for my own little men), and while shopping, I’ve often found that most of the cool products weren’t very high quality, and the high quality products were boring (baby blue, green or pink). On the rare occasion that I found a product that met my “hip and high quality standards,” I was ecstatic. So I started FlyingPeas in an attempt to make it easier for people to find products that fall at the intersection of “hip” and “high quality.”

Where did you get the idea for Yummy Mommies?

Many first time moms have no clue what to get. We don’t know WHAT to get, HOW MANY to get or WHEN to get baby products when we are pregnant for the first time. And even once we are seasoned moms, we sometimes just want to hear what products others like or have had success with. So, I created Yummy Mommies as a place for people to choose and display their favorite products for all the world to see (and buy!).

Also, the fashion industry has realized that women don’t want to wear “moomoos” just because they are pregnant. So, along with this realization, we have more options – and options that help us wear our bellies with pride. I mean, who would have ever guessed 10 years ago that we’d pay $200 for a pair of jeans we’d fit into for 4 months?! Not me. But it’s happening all over – and it’s because we want to look good… particularly when we have a big ol’ belly and people are going to be looking more often! So… my friends and customers are yummy, especially because they are mommies or mommies-to-be.

The Yummy Mommies section at FlyingPeas.com

What has the response been like so far? Tell me how this helps drive traffic and sales for your site?

I can tell you that it’s the number one viewed page on my site but I don’t know how many sales come from this page…. It’s more of a fun page to give my site more personality.

How are you promoting this idea in your store or offline?

I send out a newsletter each month featuring a yummy mommy of the month as well as other new products and specials. I’m to the point now where people are submitting their friends – and even wives - to be yummy mommies.

How are the products chosen that are displayed? Are these the chosen person’s favorites or things they have bought in the past?

These products can be things they’ve purchased in the past, experienced in the past or even just things they like.

Any chance of a Yummy Daddies category coming soon?

Yummy Daddies doesn’t roll off the tongue as well, but I absolutely think there’s something there! Be on the lookout for this very soon!

My thanks to Terra for sharing those insights with other Yahoo! merchants. So the question to ask yourself is “Would this work for my business?” Pet store owners could have featured pooches. A garden product store could post photos of the “garden of the week/month”. Your customers get a chance to show off their passions or interests. You get to build a sense of community and encourage others to pass along your address as a destination. And all of that traffic can hopefully lead to more inbound links to boost your search rankings or hopefully boost your revenue with new customers or repeat sales.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Blog to the Future

The Yahoo! Store blog will soon celebrate its first anniversary (birthday?). As such, it’s a good time to look back at topics we have covered, and more importantly discuss what you may want to see in the future. First, a quick retrospect (can we even do that only after a year?).

Some topics we have covered

• Best Practices for
  • Building Trust with Buyers
  • Building Community
  • Shipping
• Guest bloggers
  • Rob Snell: Yahoo! Store Caption Linking Secrets and Southern-Fried Search Marketing
  • Scott Sanfilippo: Keeping the Holiday Momentum
• Links to free reports and resources for merchants
  • Everyone loves free
  • Increasing conversion in the buying process
  • Free marketing strategies report
• News about Features
  • Yahoo! Site Explorer Authentication
  • Open for Business Control Panel Launches
  • Design Wizard and Add Product Wizard Launches

We also included articles on the holidays, answered merchant questions, dove into some RTML, and talked about getting started for new merchants.

Some topics for the future

• Interviews with SEO and SEM experts
• Interviews with top Yahoo! Store owners
• Links to more conferences, webinars, and other events of interest to Yahoo! merchants

And now for your feedback

The sole purpose of this blog is to build a strong community of Yahoo! merchants by providing information and sharing best practices to get open, get selling, increase traffic and revenue, and make your online venture a success. We not only want your active participation and feedback, we need it.

Tell us what you want from the blog. What topics do you want to see more of? What are we not doing on the blog that would help grow your business? Join the conversation by posting a comment. Send us an email if there is a question you want to see covered on the blog.

And most of all thanks for reading,

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Firefox Extensions—Tools to Help Small Business Merchants Work Smarter

I was chatting with an acquaintance the other day and mentioned some Firefox extensions I use on a regular basis. The person just stared at me blankly as if I was speaking a different language—maybe I was speaking “tech-geek” and didn’t know it. So I figured if in a “techie” place like Silicon Valley someone (granted not an engineer or web developer) was only vaguely familiar with Firefox (or more importantly why it is useful) and had no clue about extensions, there may be a number of new merchants that could benefit from this information.

Developers and tech-enthusiasts: You, of course were the early adopters of Firefox and helped push the market share for this browser. You don’t need convincing of the usefulness of Firefox extensions. Just scan my list of useful extensions for merchants and add your own to the comments if I missed any good ones (feel free to take exception with my picks too).

So this post is really targeted for those fence-sitters that may be considering downloading and using Firefox but who really aren’t sure of the benefits to them in their daily tasks of running an ecommerce site, or maybe you have it downloaded but aren’t sure what the hype is about. Apart from being widely touted in the press as faster and more secure (use the links below to follow up on those claims), Firefox allows users to install “extensions”—small utilities that are available for free which users can just download, install, and use. These extensions can help you perform common tasks from within your browser that would normally require launching other programs or additional browser windows.

And without further ado, here are my picks for top extensions merchants may find useful:

Web Developer Extension

This extension is invaluable for web developers, especially so for developers using CSS to customize Checkout Manager pages. A few of the key features include:elope

• Live editing of HTML and CSS
• Outlining block level elements (useful for seeing how pages are constructed)
• Resizing the browser window to test your designs at common screen resolutions
• Measuring and layout tools (ruler and grid lines)

CSS Viewer

Ever want to know the CSS attributes of a page without having to view the page source or CSS file to get this info? This extension gives you the ability to hover over page elements and see the CSS attributes assigned to any element.

Colorzilla

Along the lines of the CSS Viewer, if you have ever seen a color or color combination on a site that you wanted to try on your site, this handy little extension can grab any color and convert to RGB or hexadecimal value for pasting into the Store Editor, a graphics editing program, or another design tool.

IE Tab

Opens a link in a tab in Firefox using the IE rendering engine allowing you to view how a page will look in IE. Anyone using custom CSS will appreciate being able to stay in one browser but test against both.

Session Saver

Ever close your browser by accident and wish you could get right back to the same page? This handy little widget allows you to do just that. Firefox allows for multiple tab browsing which is really cool, but if you are conditioned to click the close button for the window you may find yourself very thankful for this little widget. This may not work for all areas within the Store Manager that require you to sign in, but a quick check did show it worked for some.

And two SEO tool extensions for good measure:

• SEO for Firefox
• RankQuest Toolbar

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

More Firefox resources

• Wikipedia article on Mozilla Firefox
  
• Download Firefox
• PCWorld article on Firefox