Posted on December 18th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
FutureNow’s “2007 Retail Customer Experience Study” surveyed 300 online retailers to find out the state of the industry. Their key findings:
74% offered estimated delivery times
58% correctly answered an e-mail question within 24 hours
52% of retailers had physical stores; only 10% of all retailers offered in-store pickup of orders
43% offered free shipping
42% provided shipping costs [...]
Filed under: ecommerce, marketing, online retail, strategy | No Comments »
Posted on December 18th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
Here’s some exciting news for video content creators… Google has launched Video Sitemaps, a tool that allows webmasters to submit video content into the Google search engine(s) more effectively. We’ll be implementing this as a core functionality in the SilverDock application servers shortly.
Why is this exciting? Today, the video-web is similar to the [...]
Filed under: ecommerce, effective online video, marketing, online retail, strategy, video | 1 Comment »
Posted on December 13th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
Here’s some more interesting data from eMarketer: online retail sales are expected to grow to $245 billion by 2011, from about $131 billion in 2007. That’s a 17% annual growth rate from 2007 to 2011.
Filed under: ecommerce, online retail, strategy | No Comments »
Posted on December 13th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
eMarketer is reporting that online video advertising will grow 207% between 2008 and 2011 — to about $4.2 billion. Assuming that 2007 online video advertising comes in around $800m (based on eMarketer’s previous estimates), this represents a 430% increase from 2007. By my math, that’s a sustained 52% annual growth rate for online video advertising.
Does [...]
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Posted on December 13th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
New government data indicates that retail sales, instead of slumping, actually surged in November. Moreover, the surge was broadly distributed across pretty much all sectors.
What’s going on here? Shouldn’t the subprime debacle be crushing retail this season?
Apparently not. My hypothesis: the subprime mess is superimposed on an otherwise not-terrible economy. Subprime [...]
Filed under: ecommerce, online retail | No Comments »
Posted on December 13th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
According to the Hitwise 100 Retail Index, Amazon.com was the most-visited retail Web site on Cyber Monday.
Amazon deserves credit for continuing to innovate aggressively in an industry that is often slow to challenge conventional wisdom. From Amazon Prime, to their wide embrace of third-party sellers, to Amazon’s recent introduction of Product Video (which silverdock.com was [...]
Filed under: cyber monday, ecommerce, product video | 2 Comments »
Posted on December 11th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
Kudos to YouTube for creating a phenomenal consumer video site. It’s still quite surprising, though, that YouTube keeps going down for maintenance during prime viewing hours. Their current downtime (as of 10pm PST) appears to be less serious, but has still killed most administration functionality.
Google is reknowned for its network infrastructure, and there [...]
Filed under: YouTube, effective online video, outage | No Comments »
Posted on December 8th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
Did you know that you can use your SilverDock Product Videos in eBay listings? It’s true! SilverDock is an eBay Authorized Video Host. For details, see eBay’s official “links policy” at http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-links.html.
Now you can take your existing SilverDock Product Video content and use it on eBay — with all the benefits of SilverDock’s [...]
Filed under: ecommerce, online retail, product video | No Comments »
Posted on December 8th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
Bob Tedeschi of the NYT reports:
Aided by less expensive and more sophisticated technology, stores like RealmDekor.com, CleanAirGardening.com and SitStay.com are competing with retailers as well as bigger sites like Amazon.
The article (Small Merchants Gain Large Presence on Web) talks about how smaller retailers are cleverly using online promotion and marketing to compete with much larger [...]
Filed under: Yahoo Stores, YouTube, ecommerce, marketing, online retail, video, video campaign | 1 Comment »
Posted on December 4th, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
The Wall Street Journal has a short video interview about how innovative small businesses are using “viral video” to get their message out. The interview discusses “best-in-class” viral video strategies by WillItBlend (by Blendtec), Val’s Art Diary, and Moe’s Southwest Grill.
Here is some of the WSJ’s advice on making successful viral videos:
Videos that tend to [...]
Filed under: SilverDock, ecommerce, effective online video, marketing, online retail, strategy, video | No Comments »
Posted on December 2nd, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
Inexpensive broadband access has unchained viewers from the TV, and now television executives and entrepreneurs are feverishly experimenting to figure out how “TV” will change as a result. That’s the primary message of Lots of Little Screens: TV is Changing Shape, and article by Denise Caruso in today’s New York Times.
Interesting message, but short-sighted. [...]
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Posted on December 2nd, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
Armed with better data, it’s time to update our analysis of the Yahoo Stores outage on Cyber Monday. As we noted in another post this evening, ComScore has published data on Cyber Monday sales — turns out, it’s only about 0.6% of annual revenue, overall (less than our earlier estimate of 1%). We [...]
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Posted on December 2nd, 2007 by Raj Gajwani
ComScore is reporting that Cyber Monday generated $733 million of online revenue. They’re estimating $123 billion of total online revenue for 2008, which implies that Cyber Monday accounts for about 0.6% of annual revenue. That’s a bit of a surprise; apparently Cyber Monday is only 2x the volume of the average online shopping [...]
Filed under: cyber monday, ecommerce, online retail | No Comments »