Marketplace Websites: The Future of Ecommerce?

Ecommerce, it appears that everyone is doing it these days. And why shouldn’t they?  After all it’s dead easy to register a domain name and put together a simple on line store.  Ta-da! Your online, OK now what?

Well that’s when the hard graft starts. You will need to get your name out there, building brand awareness and crucially, trust. Stock management and overheads all have a role to play as well.  And after you have done all this you will be ‘thrown to the proverbial wolves’. Today’s internet savvy shoppers want every product at the lowest possible price, with fast, free delivery to an address of their choice. Be it work, home or Auntie Edna’s house just in time for her birthday (and woe betide you if it arrives late, because it will be on Facebook before you can say ‘refund’).

So all is not as simple as it seems for a new business that is trying to get a leg-up in the world of online trading.  Of course the word ‘Ecommerce’ has been around for a long time, longer in fact than the Amazon or Play.com websites. However, when we look at these businesses, we get an insight in to how traditional ‘pure play’ ecommerce traders have evolved their platforms in to marketplace’s, that allow smaller traders to piggyback off the brand name, by setting up trader accounts within the website. Now marketplace owners like Play.com and Amazon benefit from an increased product offering, with no additional stock overheads, increased cross selling opportunities and regular commission payments made by traders for every sale. 

So why join a ‘marketplace’ when it’s so easy to set up your own site?

Exposure – By trading on a marketplace website you will not only be benefiting from your own traffic sources, you will also be benefiting from traffic driven to the site by other marketplace traders. So even if your marketing budget is small you can still have substantially more traffic driven to your products than if your where to build a standalone ecommerce shop.

Simplicity – Understanding today’s tech terms is not everyone’s cup of tea.  With a marketplace this pain is taken away as somebody else has considered the importance of how ‘usable’ the site has to be. After all it’s in the marketplace owner’s interest to make the site easy to use, to attract more traders to the site.

Trust – Having a new build ecommerce site liked and respected by customers will take time. Will they commit to spending £££’s on a website that they have not heard of or has no reviews? Probably not.  By trading on a marketplace, you will benefit from the trust and loyalty which are fundamental to its brand.

Cost efficiency – With marketplace websites there is not usually an upfront set up cost, so you can start building your online presence straight away.  However long term you will need to consider if the commission you pay to the marketplace owners outweighs the costs of building your own ecommerce store.

Speed to market – Design considerations, site development, testing and SEO all takes time, and can give you a lead time of 6+ months before you own site can realistically be in a position to trade online. With a marketplace you can start listing products as soon as your account is created. Market places allow sellers to be online and trading…fast.

Market awareness - By joining a marketplace, you can easily view the prices your competitors are charging for their products, and see the marketing messages they are using. Any small business relies on targeted, intelligent pricing and marketing, and a Marketplace site can give you a real leg up in this crucial area.

Here at Rocktime we love Ecommerce, and our very own Source ecommerce platform provides the perfect launch pad if you're considering setting up a marketplace website. Like all the best platforms, it is built to open standards so you can explore the developer marketplace after the initial development phase if you wish.

Developing Ecommerce solutions for our client’s sites is something our tech guys have been doing since 1999 and they will happily talk to you about it until the cows come home. So if you fancy a cuppa (or two) and a chat then give me a call.  I would love to hear from you. Visit our contact us page here.

Author: Martin Bradbury

Google Shopping Changes in UK from February 13th 2013

Google Shopping paid for service 

What is happening to Google Shopping / Google Merchant Centre?
Google Merchant Centre, one of Google’s free products for eCommerce, is due to become monetised and linked to AdWords, here in UK (also in Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Brazil, Australia and Switzerland) as of tomorrow. There will no longer be a free service.

Google is planning to roll out a new commercial model for Google Shopping, built on Product Listing Ads (PLA). To keep Product Search listings active on Google, businesses will need to set up a Product Listing Ads campaign in Google AdWords.

Product Listing Ads are ‘AdWords search ads’ that include rich product information, such as product image, price and merchant name. Whenever a user enters a search query on Google.co.uk relevant to an item a business is selling, Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name.

When is Google Shopping / Google Merchant Centre changing?
In order to give merchants time to make this transition and optimise their campaigns, Google plans to roll out the new model gradually, via several steps. The first major change will take place on February 13, 2013, when visually cleaner results for shopping queries, including some new commercial formats on Google.com that will display products in a single unit, will replace current search results. These new commercial formats will be labelled as "Sponsored" and appear in the space currently occupied by AdWords ads.

Google Shopping sponsored  ads

The full changeover is expected to have been implemented sometime in June 2013.

Why is to Google Shopping / Google Merchant Centre changing?
Google is quoted as saying these improvements will create a better shopping experience that will benefit both shoppers and merchants. Shoppers will find products in one convenient place and quickly be able to compare features, find the best prices, read reviews, and identify great merchants -- while advertisers will be given more granular control over product listings and traffic.

Impact of Google Shopping / changes:
Many of our eCommerce clients who are performing well in organic search and have benefited from Google Shopping need now to decide whether they should in fact also consider a paid search campaign, as part of an Integrated Digital Marketing Strategy. Google Product Search allows consumers to easily find product listings and compare products by relevance and price in a Google search. Until now the registered Merchants streamed products via an XML feed with price, image, attributes etc, directly into the Merchant Centre, which then automatically showed up in the Google Shopping and Search Results.

Regular updates of the XML feed ensured that the prices, product description and stock levels were kept current.

Google Shopping free XML feed

To some extent, this move to a paid inclusion model, or ‘paid for service’ of the shopping results may help create a more level market by allowing smaller and larger businesses to equally bid for top positions. However, businesses with tighter profit margins and smaller budgets will find this new market may also be restrictive when it comes to assigning budget.

It will be interesting to see if Google Shopping will overtake eBay as the world's leading global commerce platform. Google is already pushing down the natural search results of Amazon in USA where Google Shopping is already being used and accounts for 11% of overall paid search spend.

It is doubtless that Google offers some of the most amazing free products from Google Analytics to Webmaster Tools, from regular products most of us already use like Gmail, YouTube, Picasa, Translate, G+, Blogger to some of the more niche and useful products like Creative Sandbox Gallery and Research Library in ‘thinkinsights’

Google offers many useful free products

How much will Google Shopping cost?
Paying for a product which was traditionally free is always a hard sell-in but with Google Shopping it really is still a great product for busy eCommerce businesses. What other online location is there that has 90% of all UK search traffic potentially looking for products to purchase.

Google is offering a short discount to merchants who create a Product Listing Ad campaign before 12 April 2013. The offer is a £75 credit for new account set ups in AdWords and a 10% monthly credit until the end of June, if the account is set up and launches PLAs before 12 April. The Merchant can pay in to the account and use it as a credit to pay for the ads that are driving customer traffic to their business website.
Google has uploaded a video to YouTube to help explain the Google Shopping changes, implications, cost to retailers and the growing importance of Mobile in Product Search.

Prices will depend on a few factors:

Cost-per-click (CPC)
The advertiser will pay each time a searcher clicks on their advert. No more than the maximum CPC will be charge by Google each time the advert is clicked.

Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) Percentage.
The advertiser sets a maximum percentage of the final sale value they are willing to pay. Once a customer clicks on a product listing advert, any purchase they make within 30 days of the click that can be directly attributed to the click will be charged a percentage by Google of the final sale value that was set.

Shopping product advert positions are determined by the Advert Rank.
Advert Rank of a product each time a relevant search is entered in to Google.
The Advert Rank is a score based on maximum CPC or the CPA percentage of how much a business is willing to pay Google and the quality score. The quality score is a measure of how relevant the search query is to the most relevant product in your entire Merchant Center product feed.

Product Listing Ads are visually much more appealing to searchers compared to traditional sponsored links on the search results page and businesses have reported that running PLA’s have experienced an above average click through rate.

Much of the Google search position results have to be paid for nowadays yet 46% of searchers click on the website in the first position on first page in the organic search results. It is more important than ever now that product optimisation be factored into an eCommerce website marketing budget. E-commerce is experiencing double digit growth globally and is forecasted to be a $1T industry by 2017 and Google has publicly acknowledged that 40% of their revenue is in the retail / e-commerce vertical.

Now is a good time to really build a strong eCommerce strategy to combat the competition and Google Shopping’s price comparison Internet marketplace and Google Enhanced Campaigns, also launched this week, will help businesses wanting to be relevant on paid search and for searchers to have a consistent online experience across a multiple number of devices when they are buying a product. Two years ago, Rocktime designed a Product Description Optimiser Tool. I think we get plenty more use out of it this year!

There are a number of blogs Rocktime has written over the last few years relating to previous updates to Google Products Feed in 2011,  Global eCommerce Opportunities in November 2012, and an ongoing update on the development in Social Commerce, What is Social Commerce and Social Media meets Commerce. We hope you find these useful!

If these sort of eCommerce search result questions are something you want to know more about and how to determine where your marketing budget can best be spent for a good return on investment then you are welcome to call our Sales Team on 01202 678 777 or email your queries for a chat.  



Author: Fiona Anderson

What is Social Commerce

Social media has changed the way we shop online. Consumers are receiving advice from friends and family and businesses through social networking sites and the majority rely on feedback from social media to guide their purchases via researching online product reviews on blogs, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.

There is a gorgeous (you have to see it!) Infographic here from Tab Juice, which shares with you the statistics, relating to Social Commerce, check it out:

Social Commerce Psychology of Shopping (Infographic).

Wikipedia definition of Social Commerce

"Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.  More succinctly, social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions".

Read the full definition of Social Commerce here.

The shift from e-commerce to s-commerce

Mashable report that "the shift from e-commerce to s-commerce has only just begun and reports that revenues from social commerce are expected to reach $30 billion by 2015".

To help understand how to get social commerce right, take a look at four startups that are making e-commerce social right now. 

Turning social into sales

There are a number of strategic ways you can turn social into sales, such as:

• Integrate the social networks with your site ie: 'claim this offer on Facebook'.
• Consider how your products are found in social media, web and mobile.
• Identify the demand for products, by using social networks and social media research tools.
• Acquire customers from social networks by engaging within the networks.
• Could you offer more online gifting options?
• Consider whether you and your customers would benefit from Geo location offers. 
• Review your customer retention plan in the age of customer reviews and comparison sites. 
• Gain an understanding of your impact and publicise it for ROI. 

Interesting times ahead

We all continue to watch social commerce trends with interest.  Last year Rocktime set up an internal steering group to grow our e-commerce website solutions for social commerce further.  Back in July 2011 this blog had a sole focus on social commerce, for more information on social commerce view the social commerce blog posts here.

Are you making the most of Social Commerce opportunities on and off your website. Talk to our sales team today to help you determine your room to grow.

Contact our Sales team.

Also if you find a website that is doing a great job with social commerce interactions on and off their website, feel free to leave a comment below.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Global E-commerce Opportunities

Our favourite website for keeping up to date with the latest internet statistics, Econsultancy, shared (September 2012) the results from a Search Laboratory whitepaper which uncovers the opportunities for global marketing for a UK enterprise organisation.  The complimentary White Paper is titled "Web Magnetism: Attracting global trade online" and is a must read for any business wanting to attract more international trade online.

The bespoke research identified the need for multilingual search marketing campaigns: the importance of customer centric approach to international growth and highlights why businesses may need to look further than Google for international trade.

With Global E-commerce sales likely to exceed $1 trillion next year and as a number of our clients, new and current are talking and working with us on the opportunities available for international marketing and international expansion of their websites, we would like to share with you a few of the report's key statistics.

You can also find these on the Econsultancy website in the form of a lovely infographic.

Note: The White Paper was informed by a UK wide independent research study in Q2 2012, which investigated the prevailing attitudes amongst 350 senior decision makes within 'large UK enterprises' (companies with 200 employees or more).

Some of the key statistics from the Search Laboratory report:

93% of UK organisations have been forced to rely heavily on the global markets to maintain or grow their revenues since the recession began.

64% of businesses are missing the potential opportunities that the Internet can bring them in terms of "being discovered" by overseas buyers.

81% of respondents deemed it important to have a locally registered internet domain in each of their overseas markets.

To find out more about how Rocktime can help your website grow for International E-commerce expansion, call in and talk to a member of our sales team.  Visit our contact us page here.

Author: Sarah Griffiths