The IRCE 2009 at Boston went fine for Mobius. We had a perfect location (3rd from the entrance/exit). People who visited us at booth no. 504 got a fair idea about our new product Re.flex and other services. I heartily THANK all the people who stopped by. We hope meeting you again next year at IRCE 2010

Here are a few pictures taken at IRCE 2009.















From left to right:

Andrew Sorensen, Director – US Operations

Mallacy Sherlock, Business Development – US

Uma Shankar, Director – Online Retail

Shri Harish, BD Manager


With our CEO Karthik Karunakaran (aka) KK




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The IRCE 2009 (Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition) at Boston is from June 15-18. Mobius Knowledge Services will be exhibiting for the first time. If you have registered to attend IRCE 2009 conference we request you to visit at booth #504 to know about our new product that we are launching.

Check out our Exhibit Hall

About IRCE (Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition):

The Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE) is the America's largets e-Retailing trade show.

Retailes will get to know the latest ecommerce technology in the world.

Ecommerce industry speakers will deliver sound advices, training, workshops,etc...

All paid conference attendees receive free web access to all presentation slides received from speakers prior to the show.

300+ Exhibitors | 172 Speakers | 700+ Attending companies.

Check out The IRCE Agenda

Check out the speakers list

MOBIUS LOOK FORWARD TO MEET YOU AT IRCE 2009.

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Apologies for the delay in posting this traffic analysis report.





We saw a great dip in the January traffic pattern for most Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) and unfortunately, there seems to be no remarkable improvement in February either. The detailed traffic data shows the decline in traffic flow in all major CSEs. The year 2009 has not been a good one for the CSEs as the visits by shoppers are showing a decreasing trend.

The only CSE with an increase of 6.50% in monthly visitors is Like.com with a monthly pages/visit of 2.5. This increment might not seem outstanding but when compared to other CSEs, it is by far the best performer for February.

In terms of monthly unique visitors, Jellyfish tops the list with an increase of 35.10%.

Nextag.com with a traffic rank of 41 attracts the most number of unique visitors.

Out of all the CSEs listed here, Pricewatch rules the roof in terms of pages/visit. Details can be viewed from the traffic analysis report of the previous month.

Though Pricegrabber.com was the undisputed winner in January, it has not fared that well this month.

After the end of the shopping season in December 2008, the fall in traffic for all CSEs is a growing concern in the online market. I have not included few major CSEs like Google product search, Yahoo shopping, MSN shopping due to non-availability of data.

Important Note: The above mentioned traffic data is gathered from Compete.com. It may not provide the exact traffic data and so, we cannot conclude the popularity of a CSE based on it alone. But, from this data one can discover the past performance of a CSE, which can help online merchants to choose the right comparison shopping engine for Data feed marketing. >>Continue Reading

I was busy working for our soon to be launched Microsite and other activities that took away a full 20 days. Thanks to those people who took time to mail me asking about my brief hiatus!

Like I mentioned in the first post of this series, the decision making process in online business is a continuous activity dependent on the interaction with the environment. When interacting with the environment, “retailers are better at transmitting signals than receiving them.”

So what are the signals that retailers transmit to the environment?

Ultimately, it’s the products & prices in various names and forms! And the carriers of these signals are search engines, comparison shopping engines, emails, affiliate channels and others. But that’s not the end of it. A retailer should also receive signals – you can call it market intelligence - from the environment. Retailers have to use this online market intelligence and make decisions on products, prices and channel strategies to run effective marketing campaigns.

But, do retailers have an antenna at their disposal to receive and interpret relevant market intelligence from the environment? Understandably, for an offline store, setting up and running such an antenna system would be a costly, time consuming task. But for an online merchant, it is not very difficult. Some smart thinking and a bit of technology would come in handy to set up an antenna to receive intelligence from each of his marketing channels.

So, what signals should that Antenna collect?

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the antenna could pick signals and tell you as to which comparison engine would receive more traffic for your products, calculate and tell you the optimum price to quote for your products, what products are hot in the market, and so on? I am sure, with this antenna, the retailers will be able to make informed marketing decisions.

Well, wouldn’t it do a world of good to have such an antenna at your disposal?

On my quest to understand the decision making process in the ecommerce environment, i'd be writing a series on "When Online Retailers Make Decision..." and this is the first post in the series. Subscribe to this blog to keep track of the forth coming entries.

Business decisions are supposed to be guided by information and experience.

In business, the decision making process is a continuous activity integrated in the interaction with the environment. There is always a consequence to every decision – either POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE - and it’s just a matter of time before you know if you have made the right decision or not.

I was trying to figure out how online retailers make the majority of their decisions. Are their decisions backed by relevant information or just plain intuition?

One time decisions: Well, there are few areas where online retailers do thorough research before they make a decision – decisions such as selecting the right ecommerce platform or a search marketing agency or shopping cart software. In most of these cases, the retailers have a clear idea about their budget, requirements etc. They usually have enough time to look at a few demos and typically discuss with friends before deciding to go with a particular solution. There are a lot of websites that provide loads of information to guide the retailer to make these type of decisions.

Daily decisions: However, there are also areas where retailers don’t do thorough research before making decisions – areas where they need to take decisions on a daily basis. These are the decisions that determine the success of the business in the long run.

Retailers must make daily decisions on the product mix they want to offer, the price they will bid on paid channels, the prices they set for their products, the size of the inventory they want to hold and much more. Retailers typically rely on intuition rather than information when they make these crucial decisions. They either don’t have relevant, ready to use information with them or they have too much information that is hard to interpret. Some retailers don’t even have time to look at information before they make these decisions. Even if decisions are based on information, in most of cases, retailers only have historical data in hand, which results in decisions that are based on hindsight analysis!

Informed decisions: Imagine that when you log-in to your system every morning, a dashboard displays a list of products that need your attention for that day. These products either require a change in price or a change in channel. Imagine if the same dashboard also gives you intelligent recommendations on the optimum price of the product and the best channel suited to market the product – after analyzing your internal data, market information and knowing your business rules and strategy.

Well, wouldn’t it do a world of good to your business if you had such a dashboard?


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There is a no limit on generating ideas and creating new applications in the world of Internet commerce. Pixazza, which was created by Pixazza, Inc. of Mountain View, California, has certainly earned the right to be called an innovative visual commerce application.

What makes Pixazza so cool?

Pixazza is an ad network. Its technology is designed to turn still images on a web page into ecommerce product links.

Refer the screen shot below.




Photo Source: www.Imnotobsessed.com

Who can use Pixazza?

Online Retailers/Advertisers: Pixazza is likely to become one more channel for online retailers to promote their products to consumers of other websites. If you are an apparel merchant, you may enjoy the services of Pixazza right away. However, if you deal with other categories, such as electronics, travel, home and furnishings, sports and so on, then you may need to wait for Pixazza to fully roll out.Currently, Pixazza supports a number of ad models, such as CPA, CPC and CPM.

Website Owners/Publishers: Bloggers and website owners with a lot of images on their website can use Pixazza as one more revenue generation stream. When consumers click on one of the product links from your images to make a purchase, Pixazza splits the commission with the publisher. I believe this could be a valuable source of income for publishers for two reasons: Pixazza ads don’t require separate real estate on the publisher’s web page and they do not get in the way of other ads on the site. If you want to become a publisher then make sure your site has plenty of enough images.

Experts: Pixazza’s door is open to everyone looking to generate additional income. Since Pixazza is designed to turn images into ads, Pixazza, Inc. requires a bunch of people to help it find products that featured in its partner websites. These experts would get paid on a commission basis.

Online Shoppers: Pixazza is not a shopping destination, but it does allow consumers to shop for products that are visible in images. To enjoy it, shoppers simply have to roll their mouse over an image on the publisher’s website. A window then pops up that shows the related or similar products that are available for sale in the image. To explore more, shoppers can click on the provided product link, and Pixazza will redirect you to the merchant’s product page.

Pixazza claims to be an AdSense for images. In Google AdSense, ads are served automatically depending upon the content available in the publisher’s website. With Pixazza, the same concept applies, but the groundwork of tagging and identifying the product in each image is done by human eyeballing and not by a computer algorithm, so the involvement of human labor is quite high.

Some of the retailers already signed up with Pixazza are…

Zappos
Overstock
Macy’s
Amazon
Bluefly and more…

The good news about Pixazza is that the Big G has shown keen interest in this new ad technology. In fact, Google is one of only three companies to fund Pixazza. Who knows? Tomorrow, Pixazza might be completely bought out by Google! :-)

Let’s wait and watch.

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In my last post I wrote about SEO myths and misconceptions. And, here are a few SEO facts that you need to know.



1. Normal results may vary from personalized results

2. Results may vary when you change Google’s SafeSearch filtering

3. You cannot judge the popularity of a long tail keywords

4. You need not optimize for long tail keywords, they would rank by themselves

5. Search engine algorithm cannot be perfectly predicted

6. Sitemap is necessary if your site is not crawler-friendly

7. Meta descriptions are used as a reference for a page by Google in SERP, but they have less impact on search engine optimization.

8. If you don’t have a Meta description, then Google may sometimes display your site information from DMOZ, if you are listed there or it would display a relevant content from your webpage.

9. Search engine bots cannot read images easily

10. Low page rank sites may outrank high page rank sites

11. Sites that appeal to users, also appeal to search engines

12. Bots cannot reach a URL if it has got too many parameters

13. Google advises to use “Nofollow” attribute for the paid links

14. Google can index 18 types of files (PDF, Postscript, .atom, .rss, .dwf, etc)

15. No SEO company knows search engine optimization fully

16. If any site steals your content, then you may file a Google’s DMCA request to claim ownership.

17. Sending automated queries to Google to check a site’s ranking is against Google’s terms of service.

18. Parked domain names won’t typically appear in search results.

19. Google can now crawl and index content that is embedded in flash, but there is no guarantee.

20. Google doesn’t accept money to crawl a website more often

21. Google considers over 200 factors while displaying results

22. Google has different data centers to retrieve results

23. Nofollow tag is applicable only for Google and not for other search engines

24. Your competitor cannot harm your search engine ranking

25. Google encourages you to write original content

Feel free to add more.


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There's a no defined SEO blueprint to fall back on!
Every website is unique and needs a tailored SEO strategy to get crawled, indexed and ranked well in search engines. Out there on the Internet, you’ll find articles, forum threads, newsletters and emails that talk about SEO tactics. But some of these tactics can be discarded as SEO myths.

Many SEO professionals and marketers have spewed out these SEO myths to delude their clients to reap in $. Newbie SEO professionals and ecommerce business owners become the real victim as they gobble up these myths without a second thought. I was one of the victims at the hands of these myths, and now when I look back at the start of my internet marketing career I merely laugh at my naiveté.

With this blog post, I just wanted to share few SEO myths and misconceptions that I have heard and read.

SEO Myths and Misconceptions

Myth 1: Once your site reaches the top position, it will remain there forever – if that was the case then internet marketing and SEO firms would fade away very soon.

Myth 2:In link building quantity overpowers quality - Definitely not, quality always wins. You may ask a question, how to build a quality link for my online store?

Myth 3: Do not build links aggressively - You should thrust-aside this if your website is smart enough to get natural backlinks from other like-minded professionals/users.

Myth4:Reciprocal link is good and will provide an SEO success – Gone are the days of old school SEO. It depends on how smartly you use it.

Myth5: There is a one specific or defined factor that will help your site rank well in search engines. No, the actual SEO requires lot of work. It comprises of…

Your business goals and thresholds
Online marketing strategy
Competition research
Keyword research
Information architecture and internal link building
Website design and development
Compelling copywriting with users and search engines in mind (continuous effort)
Quality link building/baiting (continuous effort)
Mixing social media strategy into SEO
Web analytics and conversion optimization
Never ending process

Myth6: Site structuring doesn’t matter in SEO – Hey, it matters a lot. It helps spiders and users to read your content.

Myth 7: Don’t bother about duplicate content – For that matter, most retailers use manufacturer’s product description on their site. That’s definitely not good for users and search engines. Please don’t do it.

Myth 8: Dedicated hosting is good for SEO – Is it so? Check this dedicated hosting, shared hosting, and SEO. Don’t forget to check what matt-cutts comments on dedicated and shared hosting. BTW, check out this funny picture of Matt Cutts. Thanks to BigOak for sharing this.













Myth 9: Google PPC ranking may harm your SEO ranking – Oh my God! This is really a big myth. There is absolutely no connection between Google’s PPC listings and organic listings.

Myth 10: Search engines, like Google pay attention to Meta keywords - I don’t think so. You need not bother about this too much. If you really want to get your hands into it, then use only relevant keywords without spamming and stuffing.

Myth 11: Submitting sites to 1000’s of directories will get you on top of SERP– Absolutely not, you’d simply be wasting your valuable time and money by doing so.

Myth 12: Search engines are the only channels to market your product– It is true that search engines are a great traffic puller, but there are other online marketing channels like comparison shopping engines, internet marketplaces, etc that give good traffic and sales.

Myth 13: Keyword density should be of 2-5% and is a real mantra for SEO success - There is no specific KD to be followed. Many newbie SEOers still practice this a definite SEO tactic.

Myth 14: Google Page rank is dead - No, it is still alive. GPR is one of the SEO factors, but remember it is not everything.

Myth 15: Having mirror sites will fetch you a good rank – This is same as duplicate content in others, which is of no use.

Myth 16: W3C validation will definitely rank your site higher – There are many e-commerce sites that are not w3c compliant but still rank in search engines. Don’t bother too much about this, but build your site with no major errors.

Myth 17: Content should have minimum of 250-300 words – Even shorter copies/content do good in search engines. There is no such defined numbers. Write unique product copies with clear cut marketing message filled with targeted keywords.

Myth 18: Search engine optimized sites will for sure rank high – Thumbs down! There is no such guarantee.

Myth 19: SEO can be done by anyone – Tom, Dick and Harry cannot do a real SEO. It is not easy.

Myth 20: Sitemap can guarantee SEO rankings – Actually No, your site should be spider friendly.

There are many such SEO myths that has shuddered the entire SEO community. It is wise to brainstorm every time you hear a strange SEO tactic. Discuss the concept with your peers and other SEO professionals to validate it.

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Believe it or not, it’s in terms of user experience. The E-tailing Group’s recent customer satisfaction index reveals that only eight out of 100 e-retailers scored an 80 or above on a scale of 100. The average score was 68.44, only slightly better off from the score in 2007, which averaged around 67.9.These 100 retail websites were scored on three broad categories which could be further split into 83 metrics. Execution of key pages (25 points), merchandising (43 points) and customer service tactics (32 points) were the three broad parameters on which user satisfaction was quantified.

"This customer experience index is a tri-fecta that requires sophisticated key pages, meticulous merchandising, and comprehensive customer service to round out the shopping experience," says Lauren Freedman, president of The E-tailing Group.

While key page execution scores the home page and other product pages in terms of navigation, appeal, branding and so on, merchandising evaluates a website’s search functionality, marketing strategies, and content. Customer service tactics review the availability, diversity, and quality of customer service provided by the e-tailers.

Given below is the list of e-tailers who scored an 80 or above in terms of user experience. Their scores for the previous year are also given along with the percentage increase.

Sears, 88.25, 67.90, 21.48%
Golfsmith, 82.25, 75.50, 8.94%
Frontgate, 80.75, 70.00, 15.36%
L.L. Bean, 80.50, 76.00, 5.92%
Discovery Channel, 80.50, 76.00, 5.92%
Amazon, 80.50, 73.00, 10.27%
Best Buy, 80.50, 68.50, 17.52%
Orvis, 80.00, 75.50, 5.96%

Merchants were also organized by category and analysed for user experience. Mass merchants lead with a score of 78, while Drugstores hit the bottom at 59.56.

Merchant scores for other categories were as follows:

Technology - 75.91
Office Supplies - 72.38
Books/Music/Media - 71.75
Sporting Goods – 70.66
Pets - 70.50
Department Stores - 69.05
Home/Garden - 68.73
Toys/Games - 68.50
Apparel - 67.94
Health & Beauty - 64.75
Accessories/Shoes - 64.22
Gifting - 60.43

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