Flash sale sites are becoming regular e-commerce players (and the reverse)

Yesterday I was surfing on Gilt and Onekingslane plowing through hundreds and hundreds of difference products on these so called "Flash sale" sites; On One Kings Lane alone, there were 50 different sales going on simultaneously - at an estimated 100 products per sale (with some duplication) that's up to 5,000 SKUs being offered at one time. That doesn't sound like flash sale to me anymore - that's just a regular e-commerce site with a different (membership) twist. Simultaneously, Overstock, Amazon et al are offering sales/ discounts at al times and often, I find a so called "flash sale" product for the same price elsewhere. Couple of learnings from this for customers and Marketers:

- all e-commerce offerings converge rapidly: flash sales increase SKUs and bet on curation (Fab, One Kings, Gilt, Jetsetter, The Foundary, Joss and Main etc.); in the meantime, "traditional" e-commerce players like Amazon, Overstock etc. bet on massive # of SKUs but targeted (collaborative filtering and social-graph-based) recommendations; the end result is total convergence - seen at amazon with myhabit.com for example

- as flash sale sites become e-commerce sites - they desparately need to add a staple functionality of e-commerce sites: search. They have become too unwieldy and search is great for finding stuff!

- for the customer's sake - let's hope that flash sale catalogs become longer-lived so they can be indexed and searched through shopping.com etc; that way the consumer will have an easier time actually getting the best deal. 

And now let's all go back and hope for the next magical discount to come up!

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Is Microsoft the new All Advantage/ Zotspot?

Microsoft announced this week that it's going to give back advertising revenue to users when they make a purchase after conducting a Microsoft Live search. Ad Age has a good write-up. Does anyone remember All Advantage?http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Or zotspot? A quick search reveals other players such as Slashmysearch, Blingo, Winzy and Luckysearch. You might wonder, what do all of these have in common? They fail. Why? Because the economics of search require the search provider to make money somehow - and to have great search results. None of these players ever gave 100% of the ad revenue to the searcher but Microsoft is doing just that. If I was a Microsoft shareholder, I'd rather have them buy treasury bills than throw money at users - this really reeks of a desparate attempt to regain some lost search market share from Google.

In-store search has a lot of potential

Yesterday I went to my local Bed, Bath and Beyond (stock: BBBY) - unfortunately there was no time left for Home Depot...
I was looking for a CD-Rack (yes, some people still use CDs) and asked about 5 sales associates. The common answer was something along the lines of "yes, somewhere downstairs or maybe not at all" - which led me to abandon the store pretty quickly...
Everybody is in love with Online Search - but how easily could BBBY increase its in-store conversion rate by equipping sales associates with a little PDA that contained an overview of the entire store and would let them search for the item, answer the question and ideally print out a little map? I'm sure some stores are doing just this - but it seems like a logical extension of search into the offline world for me.

Electronic Trading comes to SEM, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft?

This week I attended a dinner that the friendly folks over at Webtrends had invited me to. It took place at Public down in Nolita and I highly recommend the lentil salad if you get a chance to go. My seat was right next to Greg Drew, the CEO of Webtrends and we had a very fun and interesting dinner conversation. One of our topics was their recent acquisition of Clickshift. Clickshift offers a seemingly nifty solution to all the manual work involved in today's PPC advertising world: thousands of keywords, manual optimization across several engines, ever-changing prices and thinly stretched resources, both on the company and the agency level. Clickshift's software supposedly does all the bidding and optimization for you once you've entered your goal for the campaign timeframe. It will even optimize across engines and manage all those keywords for you through the engine APIs. I haven't yet seen it in action but I'm certainly looking forward to it. Skepticism is warranted, of course.

The most interesting thought is the comparison you can draw with the advent of program trading on Wall Street in the 70ies and 80ies. Blamed by many for the stock market crash in 1987, this leads to an entertaining question:

Could further automation of PPC campaign management lead to a similar "Black Monday" in the SEM world? Imagine a day on which several programs either outbid each other and lead to a $1bn profit day for Google or - a collapse of prices across thousands of keywords....

Comments appreciated!

Christian Busch