IDWholesaler sells lanyards themselves, including custom lanyards that can be imprinted with a company logo. So it’s important to their business to rank on various keyword phrases that include the word “lanyard”. Instead of trying to promote their products directly, however, they turned to the community of artists and craftspeople who make beautiful jewelry-inspired lanyards. The popularity of this art is easily seen in online communities and on stores like Etsy.com where you can find beautiful, one-of-a-kind lanyards for ID badges or other purposes (like holding eyeglasses around your neck). IDWholesaler engaged these artists with a unique contest.

Lanyard Contest Sub-site

The engagement point for the contest was a special subsection of their website devoted to the lanyard contest. These pages informed contestants of the rules of the contest and its prizes, and allowed visitors to vote on their favorite submissions. It also encouraged visitors to follow the design contest on Facebook and Twitter, and to share a keyword-rich link using the AddThis widget. Every artist who submitted an entry was given a “badge” to include on their own website with optimized keyword text links back to IDWholesaler.com.

Lanyard Contest Facebook Page

Of course, many crafters love to blog and participate in online forums as well, so the contest spread like wildfire, with the participants blogging about their progress and sharing the contest with fellow artisans. In the end, IDWholesaler received 70 entries and over 3600 votes. But the whopper numbers are the SEO-related ones – they received an 8% increase in inbound links, and a 43% lift in non-paid traffic related to the term “lanyard”.

So for those of you looking for creative ways to spread the word about less-then-exciting products, think outside the box like IDWholesaler did in this contest.

Special thanks to Kate at IDWholesaler.com for bring sharing the results of this campaign with us!

Comparison Shopping Engines

Comparison Shopping Engines, or CSEs, have grown in popularity and number over the past decade. They represent a large marketing opportunity for online merchants. These sites take submitted product data feeds from many merchants, match up the products offered by each store, and allow customers to compare prices across the various stores. In addition to comparing base prices, often customers can also enter their shipping address and then compare the total price including shipping and sales tax.

In exchange for sending targeted traffic to a merchant’s website, the merchant pays certain fees to the CSE. There may be a flat cost-per-click depending on the category of items you sell. Other CSEs having a bidding tool that lets merchants choose how much they are willing to pay for each click, and they rank merchants based on their bids, highest to lowest.

For many shoppers, Comparison Shopping Engines are the first place they visit to check prices. Given our current economic situation, bargain hunting is becoming more and more prevalent, especially online – where people can compare prices without spending any money in gas. For this reason alone, CSEs now drive 15% of online sales (source Practical Ecommerce).

Value-Added Services

CSEs also provide retailers with additional value-added services. The most common example is customer reviews submitted by people who complete an order at a given store. These reviews including a rating (usually 1 star for the lowest rating, and 5 stars for the highest) and a textual review where customers describe their shopping experience with the store. In addition to comparing prices, shoppers can also compare the overall store ratings that previous customers have provided. Individual reviews allow shoppers to see what other customers liked or hated about a particular store, for instance, the customer service was great but the shipping rates were too high.

Conversion analytics are often provided by CSEs to merchants who use them, via a bit of JavaScript that is included on the conversion or receipt page. This helps merchants determine their ROI (return on investment) for the money that they spend with the CSEs.

Getting Start with CSEs

If you’re looking to get started with comparison shopping engines, take a look at the biggest ones on the market:

• Google Shopping
• NexTag
• Pricegrabber
• Shopzilla
• Shopping.com

Beginners may also want to focus on free CSEs, including Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, and TheFind.com.

Rue La La Valentine's Day Email

One of Rue La La’s best marketing features is that it’s “exclusive” – you can only get in via an invitation from someone else. Of course, you can get an invitation from thousands of people on Facebook or Twitter, so it’s not really that exclusive. But it FEELS exclusive, whether you’re a new shopper or someone handing our your URL so you can get the $10 credit when someone uses your URL. In fact, you’ll see my URL in the email above (feel free to use it if you’re shopping, in case there’s a Charles David boutique coming up soon!)

The beauty of the email is that it’s personalized, but not just in the boring kind of “Hi, Susan, here’s why you should love us” kind of way. Instead, in a very Martha Stewart’s Good Things kind of way, they’ve given me valentines that I can print out, cut, and give to my friends. And they are really cute and clever – working the “Rue” part of their name into the messages, along with one little snarky one about leaving me alone to shop. (I printed that one out for my husband.)

Of course, there’s a clickable call-to-action, the “Start Inviting” text with the arrow in a pink circle, that lets you invite people by email too. And it’s all tied together with creative use of a hand-drawn heart and bright pink highlight text that plays on their name.

Brilliant. I’d bet real money that Martha approves, too.

How structured are you when it comes to your e-commerce marketing plans? Sure, if you’re a bigger company, you probably have at least one employee dedicated to marketing, if not an entire department. But smaller companies often try to squeeze marketing in as an after-thought – after I package the orders, after I return phone calls, after I order new inventory, after my designer finishes the new promotional graphics for the homepage, after… You get the picture.

Make sure your 2011 New Year’s resolutions include “Improve my marketing efforts” by starting the year off on the right foot with a retail marketing calendar. Often used by brick-and-mortar stores to plan window designs, newspaper ads, and merchandise promotions, a marketing calendar is extremely effective for e-commerce too.

While it’s easy to say you’re going to do a better job at marketing, when your time gets short this year, you’re likely to forget about this. I’ve easily gone several months without doing so much as sending out an email to my subscribers, simply because I procrastinated and/or forgot, being busy with other tasks. Your boss or your vendors may bug you about certain tasks, but your customers aren’t likely to remind you to market to them! This is why a retail calendar comes in so handy for online merchants – it gives you a guideline for accountability, so you don’t forget or procrastinate.

Brandeo has a nice (and free!) Excel template marketing calendar to use, along with a one-month example to get your started. But it’s easy to create your own as well, whether it’s inside Excel, Word, or on your desk blotter calendar. Think of the categories of marketing you need to include: sales and promotions, online ads, social media, blogging, affiliate programs, etc. Then break the year down by weeks, and include tasks in each category that address your company needs. Also think about holidays, yearly events (back to school, the Superbowl, industry conferences) that affect your business. You might come up with something along the following lines:

For a great list of holidays, special remembrance days (like “Grandparents’ Day”), and events (such “Super Bowl Sunday”) check out this holiday list provided by Kyle Design. It also includes special religious days for Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Islamic faiths.

With a marketing calendar in hand, it’s a lot easier to stay on task with your marketing efforts. Each week, when you set up your task list or assign responsibilities to staff, make sure to refer to the current and upcoming weeks on your marketing calendar to make sure all efforts are being planned and prepped for. Also, track when you do or don’t accomplish an entry on your calendar, and note special successes and failures for use next year.

Here’s to a wonderful marketing year for your business in 2011!

However, if you’re actually trying to SELL something, or to drive traffic through search engines, or both, it’s incredibly beneficial to take a look at beefing up the content on your site’s product pages.

But HOW do you add more content?

Manufacturer’s Description

Most e-commerce sites start with the manufacturer’s description. There’s nothing wrong with using this, in most cases, but you don’t want it to be the only content on the page. The truth of the matter is that many of your competitors will have the same product and the same copy on their pages, too. So if you include the manufacturer’s description, take one of two approaches:

1. Label it as such: Include a section of your product page specifically for the “manufacturer’s description” and label it with that phrase so that customers know what they are reading. Include your own description as well, and keep them separate, so that people can easily see what you wrote versus what the manufacturer wrote. See the following screenshot from Amazon (UK) who clearly distinguishes between the two descriptions.
   
   

   Manufacturer's Description on Amazon

2. Rewrite it: If you don’t want to label it as such, make sure to do a thorough job rewriting the text so that it doesn’t appear to search engines to be the same content as found on other sites.

Your Own Description

Much better than canned text is a hand-written and thoughtful description of the product you’re selling, along with a convincing argument for its purchase. This is the time to list not only the features of the product, but to detail how it can be used and what its benefits are. Most of the time, the manufacturer’s description doesn’t do a good job of selling, so here’s your chance to really woo your customers.

Something to note about implementation: if you’re going to include separate descriptions for your own copy and the manufacturer’s, it’s a good idea to store them separately in your database. The reason I suggest this is for when (or if) you start an affiliate program and need to provide a product feed to your affiliates. You can give them the manufacturer’s description in the feed, instead of your custom product copy, so that the content you worked so hard to complete doesn’t get spread across the internet. You can also use the same approach when you list your product on marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay, and comparison shopping engines like Nextag or Shopzilla.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are considered the holy grail of user-generated content on an e-commerce site. Why?

• Customer reviews are inevitably unique, because people don’t typically submit the same review to multiple sites.
• They give other customers a sense of third-party endorsements – which is why it’s good to include even negative reviews from customers.
• If reviews are provided regularly, search engines see this as fresh content and are likely to give the page a boost in rankings, to crawl the site more often, or both.

Zappos.com is a company that really puts customer reviews to work for them. In addition to displaying the reviews on the product page, they have enough volume to also show recent reviews on higher-level brand pages. Here’s a snippet from their Reef Sandals page:

Customer Reviews on Zappos.com

Employee Reviews

The downside of customer reviews is that they are hard to generate, especially for a site that is still working to build traffic and sales. You don’t want to write a fake customer review, because it’s not ethical, and they can often be easy to spot. So if you’re not getting them yet, ask your employees to contribute a review, publish it on the website, and note that it’s an employee review. With their permission, you might even list the employees’ names or qualifications with the review. (For example, if you’re selling textbooks, list their major or degree subject.)

Although it won’t be seen as an unbiased opinion, like customer reviews often are, an employee review still provides unique and fresh content for your pages. It also gets a person’s voice onto the site, and if a customer feels a connection with a person, they are more likely to make a purchase.

Q&A

At this point we start to get into some of the lesser-used strategies, one of which is a question-and-answer section. Although not applicable to all products, a Q&A section can be developed based on customer inquiries that come into your call center or email. Chances are, if one person took the time to contact you to ask a question, there are ten others who wondered the same thing but didn’t bother to ask (or buy).

A Q&A format is nice because it starts to put words into the customer’s voice. People who read the questions can often relate, thinking “I wondered that myself” or “Good question”, which creates a more personal experience. It also has the added benefit of reducing customer inquiries, because they are more able to find answers to their questions up front, rather than relying on one-to-one communication.

If possible, think in advance what some common questions might be, and provide answers to them as soon as you list a new product.

Product Documentation

If you sell a product that comes with documentation, include the contents of that documentation on your website, after getting permission from your vendors. PDF documents are scanned and indexed in search engines, and there’s a good chance that this kind of content can bring in visitors. Granted, they may already own the product in question and are looking for support, but they may be interested in buying accessories, related items, or additional quantities of the item as gifts.

Restaurant Equipment Solutions, a site that sells restaurant supplies, does a great job of providing digital copies of documentation for their products. Here’s a screenshot where I’ve labeled the different documents that can be viewed for one of their refrigerators:

Product Documentation

Ingredients or Specifications

Many products lend themselves to having descriptions that include their ingredients on specifications. Ingredients and even nutritional details can be specified for food, vitamins and supplements, and health and beauty supplies. Specifications are extremely useful for many products, but especially for electronics and computers, which need to interface or interact with other equipment.

Other Content Specific to Books

If you sell books, there’s even more information you can include on your product pages or in separate documents. An excerpt is a great way to let customers get a feel for the contents of a book online. Editorial reviews give opinions by professional critics, and help better detail what a book contains. The information from the book jacket gives an overview on the book, and information on other titles in the same series or by the same author. And the “about the author” section provides customers with information about the author’s education and background. All of this information is worthy of consideration for adding to your website.

The benefit extends beyond Digg’s site itself, however. The more people discover your content through social bookmarking sites, the more people you have writing about you, linking to you, and subscribing to you.

The problem is that e-commerce and social media bookmark sites have a “ne’er the twain shall meet” relationship. Digg strictly prohibits commercial content in its terms of service. And even if a site doesn’t prohibit it, you won’t get very far with a post that tries to sell people something. After all, that’s not why people use the sites.

You’ll often see newbies on Digg submitting homepages, products and categories in the hopes of finding a magic bullet to boost their traffic and sales. These posts rarely get any natural clicks, and if the submitter gets enough people to vote it into the recommendation engines, they’ll quickly get buried. Worse still, the entire domain (including all subdomains) may get banned entirely from Digg.

Fortunately, content that works well for an e-commerce blog also often works well on social bookmarking sites. Top ten lists, images of product design, breaking news stories relating to your store – all of these can be great content for social link sharing sites. Remember why people use these sites – to discover interesting content – and keep that in mind while writing your blog.

The key is to make sure that the page you’re submitting isn’t blatantly commercial – in fact, make sure it’s not even subtly commercial! Trim away any links to products, especially obvious ones with product imagery. Don’t talk about how you sell any items that might be a part of the story, and definitely don’t include any prices. You can always add inter-content links back in after the story expires from the social link scene. But at the time of submission, there shouldn’t be more than a single link to your store in your main navigation or footer.

If that’s not feasible for your business, another idea is to create a completely separate site with content that relates to your store, and dofollow links back to your site, but without an “in your face” connection between the two. Submit and promote your content site, and as it gains popularity, use it to drive traffic through to your store.

It’s also good to vary the type of posts you submit. People will start to notice trends when they vote on your stories. If everything you submit says “Download…” and eventually leads to a free trial for your software, you won’t have many friends. (I use that example because I just unfriended someone like that myself.) Also make sure you’re also submitting news stories from popular sites (major networks, for example) to keep things varied. A good rule of thumb is that no more than 10% of your submissions should be to your own site.

Digg users especially are highly tuned to spam, so do your research well and participate for awhile without submitting, to get a feel for how things work. Then work really hard to generate great content. A little preparation and a lot of understanding will help you succeed in driving traffic to your e-commerce site through Digg.

Me and Big Jason Henderson

In January I was lucky enough to attend the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami for absolutely nothing. Quite literally, all I paid for was gas for the drive down, parking, and my hotel room. I was the lucky winner of a free ticket to the summit itself, the pre-workshop the day before, a VIP party, dinner in South Beach, the Gala dinner and party poolside…pretty much everything the event had to offer. And for this wonderful package I have to offer a belated but truly heartfelt thank you to Jason Henderson of Big Marketing, Erick Mott and the team at Lyris, and Todd Lebo and everyone else from Marketing Sherpa. All were tons of fun to hang out with and I learned a lot at the conference that I was able to bring back and put into action. So I wanted to share the top forty takeaways from my two-and-a-half-day jaunt down I-95 to Miami.

Me and the Lyris Team

1. “Adequecy is the enemy of excellence.” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments
2. On email signup forms, consider the offer – are you just offering the newsletter? Gee. Wow. What’s the incentive in signing up for a newsletter? Instead, offer something useful.
3. Use specific statements of quantity, not vague statements of quality.
4. Your copy should focus on what the customer gets from your company, not what your company gets from the customer.
5. Your call-to-action should communicate value.
6. Don’t offer a conclusion about your company. Offer hard facts that lead the reader to an inevitable conclusion.
7. Use images to create value. If the hero shot or smiley-faced girl doesn’t communicate anything of value, replace it with something that does – and use it to guide the customer’s eyes.
8. Every button should make a promise, should tell you what you’re going to get.
9. "Free" is good. "Completely free" is better. "Fully-functioning, completely free" is even better.
10. Link to your privacy policy on your signup form. (It can open in a popup window.)
11. There is no one optimal sending frequency – it differs for everyone. TEST.
12. Address the consumer’s needs and how you can fix those needs.
13. The only goal of your email is a click from the recipient, not a sale. The landing page leads to the sale.
14. It’s important to know how few of your repeat customers are responsible for what percentage of your sales. For example, 12% of Coke customers are responsible for 80% of its sales.
15. Customer retention is both relegated to the back office, and in and of itself fragmented/diluted. Joseph Jaffe, Author of Flip the Funnel
16. When it comes to social media, people don’t want to talk to shoes, but shoes keep trying to talk to people!
17. Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.
18. In B2B it’s important to focus on lead nurturing – 80% of marketing leads wind up lost, ignored, or discarded.
19. Existing site traffic is full of potential subscribers, so optimize your best entry paths (look at your analytics) and lead them to your subscription forms.
20. Segment your lists for more effective email marketing – “batch and blast” is the past.
21. In B2B marketing, the name of the sender affects open rates twice as much as the subject of the email.
22. In social media, your audience is made up of three groups – silent majority, vocal minority, social authority. The latter has the highest ability to spread your word.
23. Connect with subscribers wherever they are – this is the intersection of social and email.
24. Enable campaigns with social sharing buttons – 89% who use it say it effectively extends their reach to new markets. Sergio Balegno of Marketing Sherpa
25. Turn your fans into an outside sales force.
26. Before you send out your newsletter, send out tweet asking people to subscribe.
27. Track who is sharing to segment the vocal minority or social authority from the silent majority.
28. Email is about sending your site to people. Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx.
29. Traffic is expensive – eyeballs cost money.
30. Consider affiliates, co-brand deals, licensing, natural search, paid search, tv press, sponsorships, list rental, and opt in email…of these, opt-in email is by far the cheapest.
31. Strike up a co-registration deal with someone in a similar but not competing market. The best co-reg deals are barter/trade and don’t cost you (or the other company) anything.
32. For many companies, double opt-in subscriptions are really overkill…how hard is it, really, to just unsubscribe? (Don’t take this as advice from me, it’s a paraphrased quote!) However, double-optin is preferred for co-reg, sweeps, and 3rd-party leads.
33. Make sure your email has value, not just relevance.
34. Sources of opt-in names can be newsletter offers, customer service call-ins, trade events, tele-prospecting.
35. Make emails easy to forward to a friend. Then ask your subscribers to do so!
36. Best placement for email signup forms is top left or right, "above the fold", and on every page of your site.
37. Use benefit-oriented language in your signup form.
38. Make sure there’s at least one form field and not just a button, because people are used to seeing form fields and that field is the widget that their eyes are used to associating with signing up for something.
39. Tell people how often the emails will come when they sign up.
40. 

    Cricket Lollipop

    
    And finally, even kids don’t want to eat lollipops with dead crickets in them, even if they are a novel idea. Thanks anyway, Bamboo Cricket, at least I can guarantee I won’t forget your name!

Note: Cricket lollipop photo courtesy of Offbeat Treats.

$1000 for Haiti - Affiliate.Com T-Shirt

Affiliate.com is running a great contest with these awesome t-shirts they gave away at Affiliate Summit recently. I wasn’t lucky enough to attend (being busy with the Email Summit in Miami in January and about to head off to the Miva Merchant conference tomorrow), but Tom Wozniak at Affiliate.com was nice enough to send me one in the mail (along with anyone else who emailed and asked). And the person with the most creative blog posts wins the contest – the prize being $1000 in case, and a $1000 cash donation in that person’s name to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund. It’s a win-win…at worst I get a great t-shirt, and at best I get cash and Haiti gets $1000 no matter what!

This got me to thinking about all the things online retailers have been doing to show their support for relief efforts following the tragic earthquake in Haiti on January 12. One of the first ones I noticed was when my favorite members-only sites, Rue La La, closed its boutiques for almost 24 hours. In a quote from their facebook page:

Rue La La joins the rest of the world in grieving the tremendous losses to the people of Haiti. Out of respect for those who have lost loved ones, their shelter, and life’s basic necessities in this tragedy, we cannot stand by while relief efforts are underway without taking action. We are halting our Boutiques from now until Saturday at 8AM ET. We ask that instead you take this time – as we are – to make a donation to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Effort.

Then, this weekend, as I was on a mad hunt for children’s soccer cleats for my daughter (which they apparently do not carry anywhere in the entire county), I discovered fairly prominent “Donate to Haiti” graphics near the top of all pages on both Foot Locker’s and Champs Sport’s websites.

Footer Locker Support for Haiti

Champs Support for Haiti

When you click on the links, the following page describes how the company (Champs is owned by Footlocker Inc.) has made a cash and footwear/apparel donation to Haiti and how you can too. There’s even an easy way to send a text message that will make a $10 donation that simply gets charged on your next cell phone bill.

Melissa Joy Manning is another site I came across last week for a different post. She is donating 10% of all first quarter proceeds to benefit Haiti through the Red Cross. I like the fact that this company’s donations are long-lived…it didn’t just last a week or two, but an entire three months.

If you prefer to show your support openly, how about a To Haiti with Love t-shirt? They can be found at a number of retailers online and off. Theory is one (also in mens).

To Haiti with Love T-Shirt

Are you a retailer supporting Haiti? Or a shopper whose favorite store is making in-kind donations or other efforts? Let us know about it by leaving a comment.

1. Post a recipe that ties into your site’s theme. If you sell children’s products, make something kid-friendly. If you sell purses, do a couture-purse inspired cake design. Include pictures!
2. Announce an upcoming sale. Even offer a preview exclusively for blog readers, where they can see which products are included at what sale prices via a special link that’s only included in the blog. (Note: This tip also works well in email marketing…think RueLaLa.)
3. Introduce a new product line that you’ve just added. What makes it stand apart, what are the benefits, and which products are the expected best-sellers?
4. Support a cause! Identify a popular movement, and make sure it’s one that you believe in. Then describe how you help, whether it’s with financial contributions, or efforts like recycling and reusing packing supplies to support a greener planet. Ask your readers to pitch in.
5. Introduce a staff member, your entire web or CSR team, or even make it a series and showcase one employee every week.
6. Write about the pick-and-ship process, what happens after the order is placed.  Our friends at MyCubanStore.com place a video of the process on their invoice page; go purchase a guayabera and see for yourself.
7. Share your celebrations! Show photos of your recent store events, company picnic, or holiday party. This can be a great way to humanize your store.
8. Talk about your website itself, instead of your company and its business. It’s a great way to get the some visibility and link love from the tech community. PlumberSurplus.com has made their entire blog about this!
9. Demonstrate a product with a video. Show its uses, how it works, or the process of assembling the product, such as how Zappos demonstrates their knife sharpener.
10. Roll out the red carpet! See if you can find any way to include Hollywood. Internet surfers love celebrities; take a look at any recent list of “most popular search terms” if you don’t believe me. Has one of your products been worn by Suri or carried by Angelina? Brag about it, even if they didn’t buy it from you. Just don’t lie and claim they did,
11. Make a list (and check it twice). Much like this one, blog posts that are bulleted or numbered lists are easy to scan and popular with readers. Make a list of your best selling products (and why), or your top tips for surviving the holidays, or 5 ways to choose the perfect Christmas gift…you get the idea.
12. Think travel! During the holidays or summer you find a lot of people traveling. So pick a place you’ve been to recently, show pictures, and describe the location and some fun activities. Incorporate your products wherever possible – apparel for the locale, luggage for the trip, toys and books for the free time, or a digital camera for the memories you’ll make.
13. Launch a contest. Create or find a great prize and give people one entry per day throughout the contest. Once they enter the first time, email them daily (with their permission) and remind them to come back, and after they enter show them some stuff to buy.
14. Give a quick office tour so your customers can visualize what it’s like to work there. And if you break new ground, show the process of creating your new workspace, from demolition to the finished result. Everyone loves a great “flip” video!
15. Showcase products around a particular theme, such as A Girl Needs Pink at 1928 Jewelry.
16. Write generically for SHOPPERS. What challenges do all shoppers face? Think of topics like comparing prices, avoiding shipping hassles during the holidays, handling returns, shipping internationally…some topics are universal no matter what products you sell.
17. Answer a question your customer service team received by phone or email on your blog for others to read. Keep the caller/emailer anonymous, though it might be a nice touch to use the first name only (if you get permission first, that is).
18. Share your corporate values, ideals, or culture. If this is all you talk about, it’s boring. But sprinkling it in with more people-oriented content lets your readers know what you stand for.
19. Focus a post on parents or the family as a whole. Offer ideas for together time or family fitness. It’s ok to work your products in, but you don’t have to – this is a great value proposition on its own. And parents make up a large portion of online shoppers, so lots of readers will find it relevant to their lives.
20. Go back to the early days of your company and tell its history. Did it start out in your garage? Do you have a picture of packages stacked up in your driveway? A video of you removing a batch of your famous pretzels from the oven in your kitchen? Share your grass-roots beginnings.
21. Incorporate the arts. Feature works from a local artist or write a review of the currently-running show at the community theater. Position your company as a patron of the arts.
22. Run a poll. There are several plug-ins for major blog platforms, as well as third-party polls, and it’s a good way to encourage participation from your readers. Publish the results as you go along so there’s something of interest to see along the way.
23. Offer up a great craft or DIY tip, like Free People’s homemade terrarium ornament idea.
24. Offer a free download – a desktop wallpaper image or a printable coloring page for kids are a couple of popular ideas.
25. Offer a coupon, of course! It’s great to reward your blog readers with a tangible benefit – real savings off the products in your store.
26. Do you attend trade shows or other industry events? Include a diary of your travel and activities along with photos.
27. Happy New Year! These are easy to do and schedule for a future date: just wish your customers a pleasant day for every major holiday of the year. Short and sweet is fine; customers don’t expect you to be blogging that day anyway.
28. Identify what your customers care about, and blog on those topics. Patagonia discusses wildlife and the environment, while Etnies has videos from extreme sports events as well as competition results.
29. Online retailers want to make money; shoppers want to save money (even while spending it). Offer tips on how to save money by shopping online. Some ideas are to purchase multiple products from the same retailer to save on shipping costs, to sign up for the newsletter to receive coupons and discount codes, or to provide bulk discounts to groups that purchase together (clubs, schools, mommy groups, etc).
30. Make a stupidly funny video. Or maybe not so funny? You decide.

Amazon Customer Experience Performance Metrics

This screenshot shows an overview of the calculations that, together, make up the Customer Experience Metrics. It’s taken from Amazon’s Seller Central in the Reports, Customer Metrics section. Each green box represents a particular one part of the criteria Amazon uses to gauge a seller’s performance on their site. For each criteria, Amazon also supplies a target value/percentage that a retailer should maintain.

Order Defect Rate

The first metric tracked by Amazon is called the Order Defect Rate. This metric is actually a roll-up of several statistics. The first is the Negative Feedback Rate. A few weeks after a customer on Amazon places an order, Amazon asks them to rate both the product and the retailer on a scale of 1 (least favorable) to 5 (most favorable). The feedback for the retailer determines this part of the metric. Negative feedback is any review with a rating of 1 or 2; 3 is considered neutral, and 4 and 5 are positive. The Negative Feedback Rate is the number of orders with negative retailer feedback divided by the total number of orders, all within a given timeframe. So if you sold 1000 orders, and 15 of them received negative feedback, then your Negative Feedback Rate is 15/1000, or 1.5%.

The second criteria that makes up the Order Defect Rate is the Filed A-to-z Claim Rate. Amazon’s A-to-z program is a method of resolving disputes between third-party retailers and the end customer. This rate is calculated by the number of orders that resulted in the customer filing an A-to-z claim divided by the total number of orders in the same timeframe.

The third and final portion of the Order Defect Rate is the Service Chargeback Rate. If a customer issues a chargeback through their credit card company for any reason other than fraud. Some examples are delivery of a defective or damaged product, failure to refund the money for a returned product, or the item was not received. The Service Chargeback Rate is NOT affected by chargebacks where fraud is claimed, such as the cardholder claiming that they never placed the order. Amazon absorbs any costs of fraud-related chargebacks. The Service Chargeback Rate is calculated as the number of orders with a service-related chargeback issued by the customer, divided by the total number of orders.

Any order with one or more of these problems – negative feedback, an A-to-z claim, or a service chargeback – is considered a defective order. The entire rolled-up Order Defect Rate is the number of orders with any of these defects, divided by the number of total orders within the same timeframe. If a given order has more than one defect, such as negative feedback and an A-to-z claim, it counts as only one defect. As an example, assume you had 1000 orders during December. Of those 1000 orders, 9 had only negative feedback, 2 had an A-to-z claim, 1 had both a negative feedback rating and an A-to-z claim, and 1 had a service chargeback. That results in 13 order defects, or 13/1000 which equals 1.3%.

Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate

The next metric tracked by Amazon, after the Order Defect Rate, is called the Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate. This represents how many orders you as the retailer cancel before shipping the order. Typically this happens when an item is sold that you no longer have in stock. If you are a multi-channel retailer, this is an easy thing to happen – the last item sells on Amazon, but before that order makes it into an order report, you sell the same last item on your own website or in your store. Since you can no longer fill the order on Amazon, you cancel it. This is a pre-fulfillment cancellation, because you cancel the order instead of shipping it. The Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate is the number of canceled orders divided by the total number of orders within a given timeframe.

Late Shipment Rate

Amazon expects retailers to ship orders within a given timeframe. Additionally, they expect retailers to notify Amazon through Seller Central that the order was shipped, and to provide tracking information to the end customer. If an order shipment notification is more than 3 days later than the expected ship date, the order is considered late. The rate is calculated by the number of late orders divided by the number of total orders.

Note: the default lead time is 1-2 days. This is the number of days between when the order is placed and the time expected to leave your warehouse. If your expected lead time is greater, you can specify this in your inventory upload file in the leadtime-to-ship column, if available.

Post Ship-Confirm Refund Rate

Before you confirm that an order has shipped, if you cancel the order, that is considered a pre-fulfillment cancellation. However, after you confirm that an order has shipped, if you cancel it and issue a refund OR if the item is returned and refunded, this qualifies as a refund. Reasons for refunds tend to be more varied than reasons for cancellations (which are almost always due to stock issues). Amazon still tracks refunds as part of the overall measure of performance.

Performance Targets

Amazon Metrics and Targets

For each of these targets, except the refund rate, Amazon provides a target value that retailers should try to achieve. This image shows the rates for one merchant, with the targets displayed under the label for each row.

The target rates are:

• Order defect rate: < 1%
• Pre-fulfillment cancel rate: < 2.5%
• Late ship rate: < 5%

What difference does it make?

If you’re wondering why you should care, the answer is that these numbers can greatly affect your bottom line, particularly if you are a high-volume dealer on Amazon. Better scores raise your ability to win the buy box. Additionally, excessively poor performance may affect your ability to sell on Amazon at all. For example, toy retailers may be prevented from selling during the lucrative holiday season of November and December if their performance isn’t good enough.

Fortunately, Amazon emails these metrics to you every two weeks so that you can easily monitor your scores. They are also available in Seller Central under Reports < Customer Metrics, linked to from the top navigation.