Welcome to the first edition of the eCommerce News of the Week from Gauge Interactive, I’ll be your host Mike Cristancho…oh wait, this is a blog post, you can’t have host. Oh well, I’ll start a new wave. My goal is to give our retailers and industry members an easy to digest eCommerce News sheet that you can apply to your business. I am to release an eCommerce News update each week and have 5-7 notable articles from around the web from industry leaders like Magento, Amazon, eBay, Google, and more.
Welcome to Thunderdome!
– For any client using rich snippets on your website it looks like Google is quickly phasing out that program in an attempt to clean us the Search Results page and entice people to use Google products such as Adwords or Product Listing Ads. https://www.thesempost.com/googles-review-stars-rich-snippets-continue-to-drop-in-search-results/ . In some ways I understand that they are scratching their own itch (and their bottle line), but it does hurt retailers that depend on organic search clickthroughs for competitively priced, and highly reviewed/rated products.
– In other Google news, the desktop SERP (search engine results page) has been restructured to show 3 to 4 top ads (Adwords). Google have since removed all right hand Adword text campaigns besides their Product Listing Ads feature. Here is a screenshot of a new result page:
What this means to you is the first organic entry is now further down the page. Generally 70-80% of the first organic term gets the click through, but with an “above the fold” that has more ads we are sure to see a decrease in click throughs for Google organic search. Sorry folks, you may want to beef up your paid search.
– In Amazon news, they have launched 8 white label brands for men and women in an attempt to gain more margin and become more profitable. They have seen incredible traction for their Amazon Basics product mix so this is only logical for them. Investors will only wait so long before they have to start making decent profits. – https://www.internetretailer.com/2016/02/25/browsing-through-amazons-new-private-label-clothing-lines
– As well, for clients that use FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) the prices have gone up for shipping and for warehousing as of 2/18/16 – https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201648210. This move comes in line with higher demand and limited capacity for Amazon. In additional the fulfillment industry as a whole is raising pricing in 2016 (UPS, USPS, Fedex, etc)
– Building on the “culture first” mentality, Zappos gave their team Leap Day off this year :). A novel idea that more and more companies are starting to accept. Zappos understands the value of goodwill internally [for their staff] and not just external for their clients/customers. https://www.internetretailer.com/2016/02/26/web-retailer-zappos-gives-its-employees-leap-day
– Lastly, on the “this is an interesting play” segment; Jet.com (ex-Amazon team members) have purchased large online retailer Hayneedle.com (#95 in IR 500) for an undisclosed amount of money. Ultimately, Jet.com got an outrageous amount of money in their last funding round and they are obviously going with the “acquire it, not build it” mentality – https://www.internetretailer.com/2016/02/26/jetcom-acquires-online-retailer-hayneedle
Until next time…
