Month: June 2006

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Yahoo! Soft Launches Shopping Blog

At last week’s Internet Retailer conference, Chris Saito, Senior Director of Yahoo! Shopping, announced the soft launch of Yahoo!’s new shopping blog. During the conference I saw a few examples of interesting blogs driving sales or people planning to launch blogs (my favorite was a company that found a customer that had blogged about various products they sold for several years in a place nobody read it and they bought the content from him on the cheap and will post it, you guessed it over the next four years!) After Chris wrestled away a guy trying to pitch a 7th generation tagging idea or something like that, I was able to have a nice conversation with him for a few moments about Yahoo! and the role of shopping within Yahoo!

I’ve watched it for a week now and it seems to have a nice random posting by several people and I really like that it has a suggestion e-mail. I get the del.icio.us tag, the e-mail send and the blog via 360 (nice cross-sell). The clear addition of a print button is a bit puzzling to me, wouldn’t that encourage people to print the item and buy it offline elsewhere Chris?

Please let me know how it progresses. Thanks.

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Internet Retailer 2006 Workshop Summary: Site Search

Site Search: The Web’s In-Store Merchandising Tool
– 20-40% of online shoppers use search to find products (Forrester)
– 47% of searchers give up after one search

Insight: Users don’t care about searching, they care about finding. As such, search is one part of a “findability system”. Certain domains tend to be more searchable like books, CDs, jobs, clothing, etc.

Label – Best Practices
– Optional – better if button says “Search” rather than “Go”
– Filters and directionally suggestive

Input Field – Best Practices
– Eye catching and appropriate size
– Clearly visible, high contrast
– Do not put more than one input field per page

Button – Best Practices
– Non-optional
– Action-oriented wording
– Right next to input field
– Standard form element or image
– Make sure enter key works

Filter – Best Practices
– Only if it’s necessary, very useful or very commonly used
– Make options available
– Concise wording
– Limit number of advanced filters due to confusion

Be careful about going against common practices, titles, etc.

Simplicity is vital, do not clutter up the system!

Edwin Watts Golf – showed exponential growth in sales from simply fixing the search box – rags to riches story.

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The Motley Fool Suggests Google is “Killing the Internet”

So far this month there have been two noteworthy pieces written about click fraud and related issues.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban blogs that click fraud is “FAR greater” than imagined. Quite an interesting read and one coming from a wealthy Internet pioneer to boot. It’s clear that he has a strong opinion on this subject.

The second article is from The Motley Fool and is entitled “How Google is Killing the Internet”

While I encourage everyone to read the article thoroughly, here are some interesting quotes from Seth’s article:
“Markets don’t correct without competition and information, and I don’t think there’s enough of either here to make a difference. Yet.”

“I don’t know the answers — or even all of the questions. But if this problem is as bad as some fear, it could eventually put a major crimp in Google’s entire revenue model, if not the entire pay-per-click business. I would argue that the explosion of link farms and spamblogs is pretty decent evidence that the click-fraud biz is not only alive and well, but also thriving at the expense of all of us. Except Google. For now, anyway.”

It’s interesting to see such high profile articles or blog posts on these topics. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here.