Will cut larger checks, save paper.

Effective August 28, Affiliate network CJ will pay affiliates only once they have accumulated a minimum of $100 in commissions - in an effort towards eco-friendliness -  from the current minimum of $25, the new minimum direct deposit amount, however remains at $50. 

Smaller affiliates, especially in parts of the world where CJ doesn’t not provide a Direct deposit facility will have to wait longer to see their commission money.

The changes are as follows:

It’s good to see that CJ is showing concern towards the environment, but they should really think about providing direct deposit or paypal to countries besides the US, UK, canada and a few others. Affiliates in these parts of the world will still have to order checks.

Commission Junction’s BFAST affiliate platform is all set to close on the 15th this month according to a notice on CJ’s website.

BFAST, once part of Befree, a pioneering affiliate network, was sold to ValueClick in 2002 which later also purchased Commission Junction in 2003 and decided to integrate both the platforms under the CJ brand. One wonders what took VLCK so long to finally shut down the BFAST platform.

Got a press release in the mail today about a new social shopping widget platform called CybaSumo. It’s a strange sounding name (somehow also the reason why I instantly wanted to check out the website), thankfully the release also had info on what it means.

The Name CybaSumo is ‘Formed by
combining the Latin words cyba for “merchant” and sumo for “to buy,” ‘

CybaSumo, essentially is a widget platform for shopping. What makes it unique is the fact that merchants and individuals can use it to sell both digital as well as physical goods for 2.5% per sale.

Tomorrow, they will officially turn this website into a social-shopping platform by letting people buy and sell - in a widget that can be embedded into social networks of your choice.

If you are looking to log-in to the website to buy stuff, don’t expect much, the site only has about ten sellers at the moment, however, it’s great to see such platforms come up every now and then. As I have mentioned in quite a few earlier posts and comments, I think it is ideas like these that take web 2.0 to the web 2.1. The “contribution economy”, where all user-generated content is monetizable - for the users, where a website (or widget, or social-network) is simply a platform for users to not only create content on, but also make money from it.

Amazon.com recently introduced a cool way to promote it’s DRM free iTunes competitor, the MP3 clips widget. Bloggers who are amazon associates can now post 30 second previews of music they are talking about (or best sellers on the amazon mp3 store or all music from a genre or songs they recently purchased). This adds to amazon’s already extensive suite of widget type ads offered to associates.

Now that Microhoo is officially dead, could a YBay be on the cards somewhere? Thoughts?

Froogle - Google Product Search, which launched as Froogle many years ago as a price comparison shopping engine later changed it’s format to a simple product search engine that would display the stores that sell a product you are searching for, without grouping the stores that sell the searched product according to prices, but simply in random algorithmic order - each product listing displaying a merchant-specific description and other details.

This was probably because froogle would, at the time, crawl e-stores for price and product information and the index was anything but accurate. Since introducing google base, the product search engine has stopped crawling the web for product info, it instead relies on data-feeds submitted by merchants - in a manner much similar to Shopping.com, Shopzilla and other price comparison sites. Despite the added accuracy, few people actually use google’s product search feature independently of the top-three product listings that appear within universal search.

Now, again, google seems to be experimenting with the price comparison engine format, complete with one description, and product specs per product - which is great news shoppers - there is now a real price comparison engine that includes more buying options than any other out there. As for merchants, most of whom already have their datafeeds uploaded to google base, This would be one of the few price comparison sites that is completely free - merchants don’t pay for clicks or sales, and if your store offers competitive prices, all the better, expect additional traffic!

Not all searches are showing up as price comparison results, but more SERPs are changing their skin real quick. Probably not very long before the transition is completed.

In what is a giant leap in it’s mobile-commerce offerings, Amazon launched “Amazon TextBuyIt” yesterday - Something that will let customers find, and make purchases via something as simple as text messages.

“With today’s launch of TextBuyIt, any Amazon.com customer can now use any mobile device to shop and buy from Amazon.com, at anytime, anywhere they are”

How, Simply text a message to “AMAZON” (262966), with the name of the product (or UPC/ISBN, if you have those), search results - with product name, a single digit code, and prices - are immediately texted back to your phone. Reply to amazon’s reply with the single digit code amazon sent for the product that is to be purchased. That’s it! If it’s the first time you’re using the number to buy something you are asked your amazon.com account details from where amazon picks up your shipping and billing info, and calls you up to confirm the order)

There is a discussion going on here about the new service, the first few reviews seem positive. One of the comments made me think, we’re already into the ‘future’. “Imagine when you are wandering inside a BestBuy or circuitCity Store and really like some item and begin to wonder if you will find a better deal on Amazon… well, now you can just send an SMS and Voila!”

More on Text Buy It:
FAQs
Press Release

Update: Discussion also at Techcrunch

This is very exciting news. Everyone’s favorite affiliate network, ShareASale is hard at work on developing what they call a “v-commerce” solution - a video player/widget built for the sole purpose of affiliate marketing.

Carolyn Tang of SAS announced this to members of the shareasale group in facebook and is currently inviting ideas and suggestions in an ongoing facebook discussion here.

“we’re gettin’ with the times and exploring v-commerce. Nothing like bringing the magic of television online! Our tech team is hard at work developing a player with embedded tracking for affiliates to use on their sites.” ~ Carolyn Tang

Wow, this is huge. Online super-auctioneer, e-Bay always had an affiliate program, and it was always through a “trusted third party” At first, they were on a microsoft-owned affiliate network (remember clicktrade?) and later migrated to CJ sometime in the early 2000s.

Anyway, Today is an important day in affiliate marketing history. CJ has lost one of it’s biggest affiliate programs. e-Bay is going in-house. They announced this in an email to affiliates today that all the worlds ebays (including ebay US - Not including some of ebay’s non-auction properties such as stubhub, prostores, etc.) will need to be promoted via ebay’s own system beginning the first of April 2008.

“The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform. “

More details at the announcement page on ebay

Update: See also: AffiliateTip.com - Apparently, this was probably in the works since september 2006. See link on the affiliatetip post to “project rover”.

Coupon affiliate retailmenot launches social network. TechCrunch has the details

It’s the social-shopping week, it seems. I already wrote about two new social shopping apps on facebook that launched this week. Now, it’s e-retail giant Amazon’s turn to get facebook users to social-shop.

“By combining Amazon’s vast selection of products with Facebook’s millions of users, we are able to make activities like gift-giving more efficient and rewarding for Facebook users.”

In a news release earlier today, Amazon announced the launch of two new facebook applications - Giver and Grapevine. “Giver” lets users view their friends’ Amazon wishlists and share their own, “Grapewine” populates the user’s facebook feed with their activity on amazon.com (one gets choose what type of activity to share upon signing up).

“Use Amazon Giver to let your Facebook friends know and buy what you wish for, as well as gift suggestions, and Amazon Grapevine to show your friends what you’ve been up to on Amazon.com, such as writing Customer Reviews, adding items to your Wish List, and tagging products”

It would have been even more awesome if amazon had somehow added an affiliate marketing element to their facebook suite of apps. Say, if someone buys something on your wishlist by clicking on it - for someone else - you get the standard amazon associates revenue-share on the sale credited to your affiliate account. something like that would boost their apps’ usage and make social-shopping recommendations on facebook a lot more fun.

Europe Clears Google’s DoubleClick Bid

Social Shopping is Huge in China. “In China, 58% of all purchase decisions were influenced by user-generated content such as consumer reviews and rating sites, forums and discussion boards, blogs and other UGC. In the US, only 19% of purchase decisions were influenced by user-generated content.” (via emarketer)

Big news happened yesterday, and I almost missed it. I came across an article that I sort of bookmarked in my del.icio.us to read later, and forgot all about until I came across the same news in techcrunch again today when I had one of those “WTF?” moments.

Anyway, Amazon, it seems, has launched Product Ads - it will transform the retailer into a comparison shopping engine. Why there is no press release or an email about this, is something I have no Idea about, but apparently amazon is going to put product listings - from other retailers - on amazon.com and for a per click fee, direct traffic straight to these retailers’ websites, instead of buyers having to buy using amazon. This will eventually make amazon something very similar to shopping.com, price grabber, nextag, shopwiki, etc.

More on the story at: Tech Crunch, Comparison Engines, Redeye VC

“With Product Ads, as a seller you can participate in this cost-per-click program that allows customers to see YOUR products and price offerings. Customers viewing your products can click over to your website where they can buy directly from you.”

You love shopping online, in fact, you buy online all the time. That’s cool, but because online shopping also means having to keep a track of the shipments of your orders, it can be quite a headache at times.

G2web20.net, a web 2.0 apps directory, had a link to Trackmyshipments.com in their RSS feed today. TrackMyShipments is a free, online shipment notification aggregation service, by which I mean, it can provide to online shoppers, the ability to track their shipments in one place - instead of the websites of various shipping services - and - without the need to dig out tracking codes each time one wishes to track a shipment’s status.

The way this works is pretty simple. Shoppers need to forward their “Item shipped” notification emails from e-stores to the service, which then automatically uses the tracking codes in those emails to track shipments and update customers each time the status changes via email and/or SMS.

The TrackMyShipments’ algorithm extracts the shipper (eg Fedex) and tracking number automatically from the email without you having to do anything else.

After that you start to get email updates about where the package is, its status, its estimated arrival date etc. You never have to worry again about the status of your shipment.

I think this is a fantastic idea that online shoppers will love. I’m not sure how they plan to monetize their service. It’s free to use at the time, maybe a nominal fee for people with a lot of shipments to track or ads with SMSes and emails would be worth the kind of a service on offer.

BIG NEWS: AOL gets into affiliate marketing, buys buy.at. [Via Cost Per News]

No, Commission Junction hasn’t joined the cool affiliate networks and launched a widget advertising platform.

GAP, who have an affiliate program there, today announced something they call an AdPod - It’s a javascript that can be embedded to your website, and the widget will use meta-tags and keywords to dynamically display products and ads from gap that complement your web-page’s content; much like how adsense works with text-ads from google.

You may already be using or must have at-least have looked at an Adpod somewhere else on the web. That’s because an AdPod is what Tumri, a widget advertising network that’s been around for a while calls their widgets - The Gap AdPod is powered by Tumri.

What I am not sure about, however, is that if Gap is the only merchant that is providing a widget ad on CJ or if it’s only the first one. Has CJ tied up with Tumri like Linkshare did last month and will gradually roll out the widget to other merchants?

According to an email sent out to it’s affiliates by the giant online shoe store - Zappos, they are no longer going to offer free overnight shipping on the web-store.

We will no longer be promoting “Free Overnight Shipping” and we no longer will be promoting our price protection policy. Instead, we will be focusing more on our “free shipping” and our expanding selection of merchandise.

Earlier last year, Zappos started offering this facility to customers only a few days after Amazon announced their entry into the shoe retail business with Endless.com, a store owned by amazon that sells shoes and handbags, and ships overnight for free.

Clearly, Zappos seems to have come to realize that offering overnight shipping for free just because a new entrant in the market, albeit run by an e-retail pioneer, is offering such a scheme to get a share of the shoes and handbags pie, is just not profitable enough, even after doing Over $800 mm in sales in 2007.

Amazon, with is vast and diversified nature of business can afford to sell on very small margins. That, however, should not mean death for other e-retailers. IMO the future of e-retail is not in giant malls, but niche stores that know their product and can offer a quality of customer service that is at par with or better than big e-retail entities. By that, I don’t mean Amazon is the big brother or something, they are in fact doing a great job as a huge mall, and as endless - they run a fantastic niche store.

What I didn’t like is that Zappos quickly got afraid of amazon entering the market and started offering free overnight shipping, only to abandon the scheme later. If a niche store can’t afford the margins of their competition, they should work on bettering their product and service rather than copying their competition’s marketing tactics that they can’t handle.

Blogged with Flock

Was checking my RSS feeds after almost a week today, and stumbled upon this eye-opener.

The Get Elastic blog posts about a study that was done on 300 major e-retailers on the basis various usability and customer support related factors. The results make you wonder that e-commerce could really have been much larger/more trusted/liked than it is already only if e-retailers would pay more attention to giving customers a ‘better than simply “good”‘ shopping experience.

A few of the study’s findings:

Enlarge Image Feature - used by 76% of sites

Estimated Delivery - 74% of sites

Gift Cards - used by 58%

Timely and Accurate E-Mail Support - 58% responded correctly within 24 hours

Free Shipping - 43%

Pre-Checkout Shipping Calculation - found on 42% of sites

In Stock Availability - used by 39% (Especially important over the holidays)

Poor Fonts - 38% had fonts that are difficult to read - either too small or not web-friendly

Multiple Image Views - 38% offered this feature

More Than 4 Steps in Checkout - 35% of sites

Customer Reviews - 33% of sites

In-Store Pick Up - 10% of sites that have local stores

Mulitple Payment Options - 10-20% offer one or more options like PayPal, Google Checkout, pay by check or Bill Me Later

More on the Get Elastic Blog

Just noticed this while searching for some products on google.

The universal search now shows results from google products (what used to be froogle) just above adwords ads.

Somehow, this way of displaying product search results makes them a lot more viewable than earlier when they were shown just above standard organic search results, This new format does take a lot of eyeballs away from paid advertisements. this is bad news for PPC affiliates and advertisers who use adwords to promote their products but haven’t uploaded their datafeeds to google base yet.

Blogged with Flock

When Affiliate Networks start blogging, you get one additional reason to trust them a little bit more than you used to. It’s a cool thing for affiliate networks to have blogs, it means they are being transparent about their business and allow a forum where their customers - affiliates and merchants - can interact publicly with with network. I am sure you’ll all agree that one of the reasons we all love shareasale so much is because of it’s communication with the affiliate marketing community - they’re everywhere, on forums, twitter and their blog.

UK based Affiliate window, which already has a widget platform, an API, RSS feeds etc, is now the latest network to start it’s own blog, check it out here!

The official Affiliate Window blog has been launched! The blog will cover news and views from the Network, up coming events, new technologies, advice, comment and opinion about the affiliate marketing industry as a whole. All articles and features will be specially created by Affiliate Window staff from across the company, giving you a balanced, informative and interesting read. Already we have blogged about analysing programme performance, the recent AWin training event and our Website givaway.

Amazon sent out a press release a few hours ago announcing a new niche category on the online super-mall - the All Business Center - for small and medium sized businesses.

This latest offering from Amazon is a sort of niche social-network and retail store where small business owners can use the discussion forums to chat about their businesses and rest of the “business center” to buy stuff ranging from amazon webservices to office supplies and amazon fulfillment services to books and software.

While research indicates that small and medium businesses are experiencing a higher success rate in the early years, entrepreneurs still struggle with many day-to-day challenges such as poor inventory management, unexpected growth and low sales. The Amazon All Business Center provides customers with a single, comprehensive resource aimed at helping small and medium business owners address these types of issues and increase the odds of success.

All in all, a nice web 1.4.5 place to shop for business needs, it could be marketed a whole lot better if amazon added more social-networking elements to the mix other than just a plain old discussion forum.

Sugar, Inc, formerly known as Sugar Publishing, the online publishing company that publishes popular blogs targeted towards women has acquired a social shopping startup ShopStyle, reports Om Malik.

Today, the company decided to take the next step in its evolution and has bought Los Altos, Calif.-based ShopStyle, a social shopping site for an undisclosed amount of money. “We had content and community, and now we are adding commerce,” said Brian Sugar, CEO of Sugar Publishing. The company is also changing its name to Sugar Inc., in order to better reflect its broader focus.

The acquisition is seen as a move to make use of ShopStyle’s existing infrastructure and business model that is aimed at revenue generation to monetize the sugar network of blogs that currently lot as many as 5 million unique visitors a month.

More on GigaOM ->

After context-links, Amazon has taken yet another step to let the latest generation of internet publishers make use of amazon’s huge catalog to monetize their web properties/presence.

According to a press release sent out earlier today…

“Bloggers and active online social networkers have asked us for a fun and interesting way to display Amazon products on their pages as a way to showcase their favorite things. With Amazon Widgets, they can now do this and make money at the same time,” said Sean McMullan, Manager, Amazon Associates.

Amazon today launched seven new widgets in the Amazon Widgets Gallery, and there are more specialized widgets coming soon.

Some of the widgets released today (available at widgets.amazon.com) include widgets for wish lists, product searches, product previews, slideshows and amazon unbox videos previews.

This widget below is a tag cloud of some of the popular products on amazon:

In a Press release Amazon posted a few moments ago (and only a few days after Apple decided to stop selling NBC shows on iTunes), they announce the availability of NBC shows for download at Amazon Unbox - the (unfortunately DRMed) Tivo-compatible video download service.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and NBC Universal today announced that a wealth of quality TV content from NBC Universal is now available on Amazon Unbox (http://unbox.amazon.com), Amazon.com’s digital video download service. Amazon Unbox and NBC Universal are offering customers a variety of content packages, including up to 30 percent off when purchasing full seasons of their favorite TV series.

Popular NBC shows now available on Amazon Unbox include the Emmy(R) Award-winning series The Office, the critically acclaimed drama Heroes, and Emmy(R)-nominated comedy 30 Rock. Beginning on September 10, Amazon Unbox customers can download for free — in advance of their network premieres — the pilot episodes of NBC’s new shows Bionic Woman, Chuck, Journeyman and Life. New episodes will be available on Amazon Unbox the day after they air on TV.

NBC Universal Television Content Now Available on Amazon Unbox

Looks like overstock’s IP range has been banned at Wikipedia:

[Wikipedia] just blocked 65.116.112.0/21, which is an IP range (a) owned by Overstock.com (b) widely used by them for spamming, COI editing and attempted intimidation of administrators dealing with them.

Wikipedia bans Overstock.com - Gary Weiss has the full story ->

Finally! Arguably the world’s biggest e-retail brand - eBay has launched it’s very own app for the facebook social networking platform (a.k.a - The Social OS).

eBay has finally launched its Facebook application, which enables you to share your eBay items within your Facebook profile. While there are a handful of Facebook apps that have been created to interact with eBay, this is the official application that’s been created by eBay itself.

There’s a good level of integration for your eBay account to work within Facebook, showing items you’ve found on eBay (your watchlist) and check out the items your friends have added to their watchlists as well. Security options let you pick and choose what information you want to share, and how this information is shared.

Mashable has the story…

So, Amazon just launched the Flexible Payments Service as a part of their webservices offering - what looks like, from the pricing and other details on the page to be something very useful except for the fact that they are only offering the service to those with a credit card issued by a US bank.

Translated for me and my company, this means that paypal and the international merchant account with CCavenue are the only two ways a business physically not located in the US but doing business there can accept payments.

I was totally hoping that this would be an international service not just limited to the US when this was first announced. Nevermind though, paypal still rocks! (Yes, I read all the negative comments about paypal, but it’s just a question of using the service wisely and not falling for phishing, etc. attempts, while also offering consumers a second option other than paypal to pay for their purchases. Paypal IS secure and protects from fraud as long as the sellers and buyers take the standard common-sense fraud-prevention measures themselves first, and leave the rest on the payment service)

Jim Kukral says:

I don’t get why every online store doesn’t have a PayPal option? I mean, if you’re going to accept credit cards, and even checks, why not have a PayPal option?

I couldn’t agree more. from an e-retailer’s point of view, especially if you are selling cheaper goods, you are making a huge mistake if you are not accepting payments via paypal.

There is a reason paypal has as many as a hundred million users worldwide - it’s probably one of the first media of online transactions for internet users (they are after all, the primary method for paying on ebay!).

Paypal is also VERY easy to use. Sometimes I’m just too lazy to take out the credit card and type in the credit card number, expiry date and CVV2 number, along with my name, address and telephone number to pay for something on the internet. It’s just easier to type in the paypal username and password, press next and finish the transaction.

Jim writes that he uses Paypal as “Fun money” to make impulse purchases, and buy stuff he’d rather not use his credit card for.

If your e-retail website isn’t a huge brand yet, it makes a lot of sense to accept payments via paypal. A buyer doesn’t have to think 10 times before buying from you. if a store doesn’t deliver, it’s super easy for buyers to lodge a complaint with paypal, and paypal will make sure that fraud isn’t happening on it’s platform - a lot of buyers know that.

If you aren’t accepting paypal on your web-shop, I have a two words of advice for you - ACCEPT PAYPAL!

———-

oh, and talking about paypal, I recently filled out a survey for CJ, one of the questions there was if publishers would like CJ to make payments via paypal. - if they do that, that’d be super-awesome.

There is a very interesting new social shopping / video reviews website that Jamie Birch just posted about on the revenews blog.

Nuvy - is a youtube clone plus a comparison shopping engine, that - pays - users to upload videos, that are product reviews.

The idea is this: Anyone, can review any product on video, and upload it on the website, the community votes on how good the video is, and based on that, the reviewer is paid a anything between $1-$10.

Video pages are very similar to youtube - but also a little more - there are three tabs below each video - “Product Description” , “Comments” and ” Where to buy” (so that covers the social part in a simple but elegant way)

There are two reasons why I like this:

First, Nuvy is making really fantastic use of the social media/web 2.0 as an affiliate marketing platform.

Secondly, they are actually paying “consumers who are also content creators” - you don’t see that a lot on web 2.0, but that’s what web 2.1 is for - if users create content that helps make a social media platform money, then the users should be treated partners in the business, the best way, IMO is to reward users according to their contribution - in cash.

———————

Update: I was reading costpernews a while ago, and read Sam’s 600th post there where he is upset at the pace at which affiliate marketers are adopting the new media. So … To cheer Sam up, who is a fellow believer in the salvation of Affiliate Marketing through Web 2.0, I send this Trackback.

Well, not quite - I don’t advertise on Adwords CPC and one of the requirements to be eligible for beta-testing the PPA ads is that an advertiser must have generated atleast 500 conversions from their click campaigns in the past 30 days.

Nevertheless, Google has taken the PPA advertising platform global and is now allowing advertisers and publishers from around the world to participate in the CPA ad platform - which was limited to only US advertisers and publishers since first beta was announced three months ago. This would make google the primary and largest performance-based lead generation platform in many parts of the world.

This, once again, brings many affiliate marketers back to the question that was raised when the beta was first announced. “Will Google eat CJ and Linkshare alive?” Most affiliate marketers who have been in the industry long enough don’t think so. Google is on to something, but it isn’t quite affiliate marketing. they are an advertising company and adwords (CPC and CPA) is an advertising network - these are two different ballgames.

Sure, google could add to existing affiliate-marketing revenues, but the possibility of Adwords eating up a share of the existing affiliate-network pie is highly unlikely. The one way that google can really affect the affiliate networks of today, is if they do something about the newly acquired doubleclick and performics, like bringing the performics platform to all adsense publishers and adwords advertisers, making opening an affiliate program on performics as cost-effective as advertising on adwords. Such a thing, as of now, can’t be seen for quite some time in the future. Google seems to see Doubleclick as mostly a CPM based banner advertising platform. CJ and Linkshare are safe.

More on:

5 Star Blog, Cost Per News, Search Engine Journal, Inside adwords, Clickz

Few weeks ago, there was a mega-rumor started by the NY post that Microsoft is all set to buy Yahoo (this was later rubbished by Yahoo and many publications as what it was, a rumor). Then, yesterday, Jerry Yang, yahoo’s founder took over as it’s CEO and although he denied any plans for the sale of the internet giant, this has once again sparked the debate of yahoo’s potential sale or merger and many are speculating this would happen sooner than later.

eBay, however is rarely talked about as a company that could potentially buy or merge with yahoo — The weblog ebay strategies has posted some interesting reasons on why an eBay/Yahoo merger would make a lot of sense.

This fits in so many ways it really is a perfect match. This gets eBay back into Asia with ecommerce, it gives eBay/Y!/PayPal a Google Checkout option. The Y! toolbar+skype are a great desktop combo. Skype and YIM go well together. Y!’s graphical ads would come onto eBay and eBay sellers could buy them. Y!’s graphic ads could monetize Skype. Yahoo Stores is a great fit for eBay.

Just got an email from Blogger and “Head Geek” of the Web 2.0 marketing company Capulet, Darren Barefoot about a video project he did with Elastic Path - which is a an e-commerce company that also hosts a fantastic blog about e-retail (that I am a long time subscriber of and have linked to often from here).

“The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce” is a series of totally hilarious videos. “In a nutshell, the videos ask “what if real-world shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?” writes Darren in the email.

Here’s one of my favorite videos:

There are also three more equally funny episodes here and one new video is being posted each week. Enjoy!

Mitch Cohen, entrepreneur and undergrad student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada sent me an email last week.

Mitch writes:

I’m a long-time reader and subscriber of Final Tag. I wanted to shoot an e-mail over to you to let you know what I’m up to - I thought you may be interested because I’ve leveraged many of the teachings from your blog in my new “Web 2.1″ endeavor

(LOL @ “teachings” hehe … I just talk here, never thought these posts would be perceived as teachings, hehe. But thanks for the ego-boost.) Cool! :D. It’s awesome to know ideas are being extracted out of the what is posted here!

That’s the first email of it’s kind I have seen in my mailbox since starting the blog a few months ago.

Anyway, Mitch and his friend - also an undergrad students at the McGill university have started a “customer support 2.1″ web company called ClixConnect.

Here’s why it’s cool:

The thing about online shopping is that there is no time constraint. Stores are open when you want to shop. The live chat feature that many sites offer is a great way to make online shoppers feel they are interacting with real people and persuades them to make their buying decisions quickly. In most cases, however, the live chat feature is only available when a store employee is online. If one wants to shop at say 2 AM in the morning, smaller shops will have no live chat, and probably, the sale will happen ultimately at a larger shop where instant customer support is available at that time.

Clicxconnect enables small to mid sized internet companies, specifically e-retailers, to offer 24/7/365 customer support on their websites. The idea behind how this is done is pretty simple and unique - You take care of the customer support while you are online. When you are offline, someone from the clixconnect call center will take over and offer customer support on your behalf. Pricing, apart from a monthly fee is based on the number of customer support minutes provided by the clixconnect call center. Plans (with a certain number of minutes included with each) start from $79/ month - which most smaller e-retailers can easily afford to spend in order to attract much better conversion ratios and very satisfied customers.

That was only customer support 2.0. Here’s the 2.1 part:

In Mitch’s own words:

hat’s half the innovation. The hugely innovative component of ClixConnect (and the part that for which we were truly inspired by your blog) is that we also have a new technology in our software which enables automated chat recommendations for customers, based upon the product they are viewing. So say someone is looking at a red t-shirt on a website, an automated chat window can appear recommending a blue pair of pants to them.

That’s the “if you like this, you may also like…” feature as seen on amazon.com, but done by a human - well, at least it will seem to the shopper that a human is making the product recommendations. if the customer replies back, a real human takes over over. Cool, eh? the only problem here may be a scenario where a shopper wants to quietly browse the store and “people” keep interrupting her by recommending stuff - because of which the shopper gets irritated and leaves the store. That’d be too much customer support and that’s equally bad as too little customer support.

Since Facebook announced it’s API and opened itself up as a web-platform a couple of weeks ago, many internet companies have taken advantage of the same to promote their businesses to users of the social networking phenomenon. Most of them, web 2.0 type businesses like twitter, ilike and last.fm

It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.

Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.

Some may think that facebook, known as a social network of mainly college-students may not be the right market for blue-nile and similar e-businesses. That, however is not the case anymore. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote presentation, the fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 and older, and currently 60% of its users are outside of college.

[via Get Elastic]

I was browsing techcrunch the other day, and noticed the ad of a sponsor there, Adicate - an online advertising network with a twist.

Adicate has taken the television advertising approach to the world of online advertising - they allow publishers to sell ad-spots on their websites - by the hour.

Adicate claims to already deliver as many as 35 million impressions each day using this model.

Their pitch is also pretty convincing. An email from them that I recieved upon requesting more information states:

One of the advantages with Adicate TimeAds is that advertisers can show their ads at their own prime time. This means that a medicine company can advertise for stimulants daytime, diet pills around dinnertime and sleeping aid at night time. This also gives the advertiser the unique opportunity to stand by waiting in the advertising period and interact with the customer immediately.

Now I don’t sell medicine, but this logic can potentially be applied to many other areas. For instance, advertising a job-site just before the end of the work day, etc.

I haven’t signed up with them as an advertiser (or publisher) yet, so it is still to be seen what kind of statistics and targeting they provide to advertisers - which can be a very crucial thing with such a system.

Nonetheless, looks like an interesting new concept and worth giving a try, although I am not too certain if adicate will be able to introduce and create the CPH (Cost Per Hour) advertising metric as a standard in online media.

This is one area where CJ can claim to have done it first.

Finally, Linkshare has announced today, a webservices offering (API?) for affiliates that they are calling the “Automated LinkGenerator”

From Their Email Announcement:

Automated LinkGenerator creates LinkShare affiliate links for any product on a merchant’s site that offers LinkGenerator. This new feature provides the same functionality as the LinkGenerator tool in the Individual Product Links interface, without having to log into the Affiliate Interface to get your links. This new tool does not replace Merchandiser (LinkShare’s datafeed), but will be helpful for getting direct links from merchants that do not offer Merchandiser feeds.

If you are interested in using the Automated LinkGenerator, please email us at linkgen_request@linkshare.com to have this new tool enabled. Once you are enabled, the Automated LinkGenerator will be located under the LinkShare Feed Synergy Services area of the Affiliate Interface. To create an Automated LinkGenerator link, you will use a REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services to request links for a given merchant URL. You will then send a URL from the merchant’s site to LinkShare using the specified link format (see the Automated LinkGenerator Help area).  The URL can be sent through a browser, a tool like wget or curl, or an automated script.  For each URL provided, LinkShare returns a click link.  You can request up to 1,000 links within an hour.

Read/write Web has a recent post that notes that google is soon (exact date unknown) going to integrate ads into Google Maps.

The good news for web publishers and developers is that Google would be sharing revenue from these ads to those sites and web-apps that have used Mapplets to create their google maps mashup.

On the lines of the Retail knowledge center, google has just announced the launch of the “Tech B2B Knowledge Center” - a minisite with case studies, tips and tricks, ideas etc for B2B businesses that use Adwords as a medium of online advertising.

Google Tech B2B Knowledge Center 

GoDaddy.com, the leading registration company for Internet addresses, has agreed to take over and manage more than 850,000 domain names belonging to customers of a troubled rival, officials announced Tuesday.

This is good news, I had a few domains stuck with registerfly that hopefully will be on godaddy soon. That would make much easier to transfer them to another registrar - which was very difficult to do with registerfly.

The full AP news story here

We have seen affiliate marketers use new web 2.0 social platforms such as twitter and squidoo as a medium of promoting their websites - There is another social network I hadn’t previously taken very seriously as an affiliate marketing platform.

I just realized that affiliate markers are turning to yahoo’s answers service in a bid to drive traffic to their websites.

An affiliate I noticed is answering questions related to a particular niche and directing traffic to their website - what’s more, the affiliate is also using text-link-ads to drive traffic, not directly to their domain, but to the page on yahoo answers that has a link to the domain(that is how I came to know of this, a link was bought to a yahoo answers page on one of the niche blogs I sometimes write for).

This may seem like black or grey hat SEO to some, but I perceive it more as social media marketing, or what I sometimes call, “Participation marketing”. The affiliate is actively participating within the social media doing what he/she is expected to do, and making money in the process - without spending on domains, hosting, search marketing campaigns etc - driving probably what should be very handsome ROI.

On the negative side, I didn’t notice any disclaimer on the answers stating that the answerer owns the said website(s) for the purpose of profit - it would be a good idea to add such a disclaimer, just to be safe and not misguide the traffic.

Yet another example of smart affiliate marketing!

More and more web-apps are getting on the television screen. The latest is e-Bay, at least for time warner cable’s subscribers.

eBay on TV