Social Shop on Facebook with Amazon’s latest apps

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.

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Europe Clears Google’s DoubleClick Bid

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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)

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Amazon Product Ads - Amazon becomming a comparison shopping engine!?!

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.”

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A Web 2.0 way to track shipments for online shoppers

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.

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

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First(?) Widget ad spotted on CJ

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.

(more…)

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No more Free overnight shipping at Zappos!

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.

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e-retail has a lot of room for improvement, usability and customer serivce wise

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

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Google puts product searches above ads this season

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.

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