However, developing a niche online retail business isn’t exactly easy. When Founder and CEO Rod Bland took on this particular project, he found that a large amount of time and specialist knowledge was required to create a website with the functionality the product range required.

Recently, Power Retail spoke with Bland regarding what went into achieving the right layout and navigation for RamCity, as well as some of the other quirks that niche retailers will often have to surmount online.

RamCity

Website: www.ramcity.com.au

Specialty Product: RAM modules

E-Commerce Platform: Neto

Payments: eWay, PayPal

Fulfilment: Star Track, Australia Post, Cellnet Logistics

Can you walk us through the initial concept and development that went into RamCity?

The business was first started in 2003, so we are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year. At the time I was looking to start an online business and by chance worked with a colleague who had just closed his online memory retail business, and I purchased the website templates from him in order to get started.

Fortunately I already had a lot of technical knowledge when it came to web hosting and systems management through my full-time job, but didn’t have a lot of programming knowledge. So that I could enhance and make changes to the website, I learned some programming from reading internet-based tutorials and also hired my friend who is a professional software developer.

Nowadays we mostly do website content changes in-house and the programming to deliver any new features we need are outsourced.

Another technological challenge was getting the data regarding the computer systems we were catering for; their RAM capacity, memory type and other compatible parts. This data needed to be published on our website without a lot of manual intervention, while also being able to repeat the import process every couple of months as new data became available. We gradually overcame this by developing our own in-house custom application about six years ago and it is still in use today.

Founder and CEO of RamCity, Rod Bland.

What is your current product offering and how you go about sourcing it?

Our main product offering is computer memory modules (RAM), and in the past couple of years we’ve expanded our product mix to include storage upgrade options, including hard drives, solid state drives, and associated tools and accessories.

The target market for these products is broad, as just about all businesses and people use computers and other devices like printers that may require a RAM or data storage upgrade at some point in time. We focus on those who need guaranteed compatible upgrades with a long warranty, a variety of payment options, and fast delivery. We also specialise in supplying upgrades to those with Apple brand computers.

About 75 percent of our RAM products are manufactured in a facility in the US. In simple terms, they purchase the wafer directly from the semi-conductor manufacturer, chop it up into individual chips, solder the chips to circuit boards, then program the modules and test before shipping. Some modules also come via original equipment manufacturers (OEM’s) like Samsung or Hynix, which manufacture the chips and the modules in the one factory.

Due to the pricing volatility of the RAM market, we re-stock every week. This means the RAM has to be shipped by express courier and usually arrives in Australia within a few days of dispatch. The RAM is then received at the Cellnet Logistics warehouse facility in Brisbane. Orders are then shipped direct from there to our customers within Australia via Star Track or Australia Post.

What’s unique about RamCity?

At RamCity, our core objective is to deliver the right upgrade, fast, the first time.

Beyond this, we also have built a reputation as a preferred supplier of RAM upgrades for Apple computers and have a number of other strengths that are displayed by our team. Not only are our staff highly experienced and knowledgeable about our product range, we’ve also developed strong in-house search engine optimisation (SEO) expertise to complement our unique website and best practice logistics infrastructure.

What elements of your business do you outsource and who do you work with for this?

We outsource a lot of our technology. The five we rely most heavily on are:

1. Saasu for accounting/inventory/financial management - We’ve been using Saasu.com since the business began and it’s always been a reliable and easy to use financial management platform that’s accessible to any of the staff who need it via a web browser. It does everything we need it to do and over time they’ve introduced a lot of new features which have been real time-savers.
2. Neto for our website and order processing systems - We started with Neto almost a year ago and it’s allowed us to heavily automate and streamline most of our business operations, as well as providing a solid platform for our website.
3. eWay for credit card payment processing - We’ve used eWay since the business began as well. Their service is so reliable it’s like turning on the tap to get a drink of water. It just works.
4. PayPal should get a mention too. Almost half of our retail customers prefer to pay this way and it works well.
5. Cellnet Logistics for warehousing and last-mile fulfilment services – The team at Cellnet do a great job looking after all aspects of warehousing and logistics on our behalf. It’s just like having our own warehouse without most of the usual headaches, and we get all the benefits of working with a large publicly listed quality assured provider at a price affordable to most SMB’s.

What technologies do you manage or develop in-house and why?

We maintain most of our catalogue management tools in house rather than use an off the shelf package, but we outsource the programming expertise to add new features, fix bugs etc. We do this because of the specialty nature of our business. I’m not aware of any off-the-shelf package which could come close to doing what we need without a lot of heavy customisation.

How do you fill your marketing budget currently? What do you find most effective?

Our current marketing mix is predominantly google adwords, organic search, then shopping comparison engines, then placed advertising on specific websites. AdWords is still the most effective in terms of the volume of qualified leads it can deliver, so it gets the lion’s share of the marketing budget. In the early days we didn’t use adwords at all as organic search delivered all the leads we needed. Over time as Google have evolved how they deliver search results to end users where it’s now heavily biased towards advertising, we’ve had no choice but to embrace AdWords.

What does the road ahead look like for RamCity?

We’ve made lots of big changes in the past 12 months, particularly with the new website. Going forward we’re focusing a lot on making the most of the features of the new Neto platform, and have a long list of enhancements still to be worked on.

The post RamCity: Targeting a Niche Market When the Chips Are Down appeared first on Power Retail.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the former Head of Google Wallet, Osama Bedier (who stepped down in May) believes that Google is paying such high fees to its partner credit-card companies that it’s losing money on every transaction made via the application. However, Google’s goal wasn’t to generate revenue, but data.

By collecting data regarding critical purchasing behaviour, Google would have an increased ability to create and target marketing to those consumers.

Peter Cook, CEO of payments technology specialist, Novatti, believes Google Wallet’s marketing agenda may be helping to stifle its uptake.

“Google sees that transactions give them another chance to display ads,” Cook says. “Think about the following – your customer is in your store, about to buy something through their Google Wallet on their phone and Google displays an advertisement, right before the final purchase, showing a cheaper product from your competitor across the road! Do you really want Google to control the final purchase moment of your customer?”

However, other Wallet initiatives seem to be struggling to get off the ground, with Google potentially scrapping a Wallet-based credit card in favour of creating a rival to Square’s card-reading tool.

Of course, the major problem with the Google Wallet app is that most consumers can’t use it. In the US, only two of the major wireless companies support it. Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile USA block the use of Wallet on their devices. These carriers have instead banded together to create their own version, Isis, and they’re not alone.

In Australia, the Google Wallet technology simply hasn’t been made available yet – a fact that Cook is clearly happy with.

“There isn’t a brand in Australia that can match Google for financial clout or sheer market power,” he says. “So who would win in a potential bun fight over ownership of customer data – a local bank or Google? Beware the Trojan horse called Google Wallet.”

The mobile payments market remains a prize that no single company has managed to capture. While many (including Google) continue to innovate towards a breakthrough, it would appear we’re yet to see a solution that truly fits the bill.

Read more on The Battle for Mobile Payments.

The post How Successful is the Google Wallet Experiment? appeared first on Power Retail.

Comparison Shopping wasn’t huge in Australia four or five years ago, but with the growing maturity of our e-commerce market, strong players like Getprice and Shopping.com grew, followed by a range of others.

So lets take a look at both marketplaces and comparison shopping, and where they should be placed in your strategy.

Marketplaces

In Australia, eBay dominates. With around seven million visitors per month it offers sellers a very large buyer base who are actively looking to purchase products each and every day.

Quicksales is the other alternative in Australia, but is far less active than eBay. Then there is Gumtree (free classifieds, owned by eBay) used more by individual sellers of single items.

Amazon is making their presence felt in Australia too, with their business development team reaching out to Australian sellers, asking them to consider listing on the US marketplace…

So should you be selling on eBay/Amazon et al? How do you do this and manage sales?

The short answer is most SMBs shouldn’t look past the opportunity of getting on front of that many customers. Especially on eBay Australia, more and more retailers are joining the fray, and seeing good results. Although eBay is still a very price sensitive market (we once dropped pricing by 20 percent to see a turnover growth of 600 percent!) brands can still have a professionally branded store front and presence on the platform. Look through the eBay Fashion Gallery for some nice store examples.

Some popular (and powerful) systems can integrate with eBay/Amazon and other marketplaces. ChannelAdvisor is the most flexible, also connecting with other European and US marketplaces, and new even TradeMe in New Zealand. MyOnlineBusiness offers ecommerce storefronts with eBay integration, as does BigCommerce and of course Magento.

eBay and other marketplaces may charge a listing fee and a ‘final value fee’ (or ‘success fee’ on sale completion). Expect to pay between 10 and 17 percent in fees on eBay, Amazon and similar platforms.

These systems will manage inventory, sales and often templates and design for you as well. I should know, I wrote the book on eBay, and have built a number of large eBay businesses using Magento and ChannelAdvisor. It works!

Comparison Shopping

Getting your products (and your brand) in front of people is a challenge when you get online. Getting on to a marketplace can help, and give you instant sales (although maybe at a low margin). But when you don’t have much SEO, and Google Adwords is still a dark art and expensive to you, the comparison shopping sites are a great option.

Comparison shopping sites operate on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, and each site might have different fees, often different per product category. Expect to start paying about 30 cents per click.

Ideally, your e-commerce platform can generate a ‘feed’ of products for these shopping comparison sites. And there are a few sites to choose from. The most popular ones are:

• Shopping.com
• Getprice
• Myshopping
• Shopbot
• StaticICE

Don’t freak out if your software only generates a feed in one format (e.g. Shopping.com) as most of the other sites can accept each other’s feeds. Just ask the question.

And now too, Google has introduced Product Listing Ads. Google’s Shopping section used to be free, but is now CPC. It is a little more complicated to set up, as you need to submit a feed of products (like the comparison sites mentioned above) to Google WebMaster Central and then link your Webmaster Central account to your Google Adwords account, then set up a Product Listing Ads Campaign. Phew!

Once your items are live on the site though, you should start receiving traffic.

Tips and Tricks

Do some research before selling on eBay or Amazon. You have be great at customer service, and know how each platform works. eBay especially has a lot of variables, including auction stypes, store types, fee structures, ‘bestmatch’ search and feedback to learn about. Buy a book (see mine, or Todd Alexander’s titles) and visit a conference like internetconference.com.au (which has a lot fo eBay specific content, from beginner through to advanced).

For the comparison channels, each site can offer different value, based on the items that you sell. Try the main ones first (Getprice, Myshopping, Shopping.com). Try only submitting items in your feed above a certain value (e.g. $30 – you don’t want to pay 30 cents per click for a $2 item!).

Also, ensure you measure your profitability. Use software like Google Analytics to measure clicks and conversions from the comparison sites. know your margins and cost per sale. And try calling their customer support to see if they can offer some feed improvement advice, or maybe even better pricing.

The post E-Commerce Technology Basics: Part Two – Comparison Shopping Engines and Marketplaces appeared first on Power Retail.

Whatever you’re retailing, it’s important to allow online customers to have all of the comforts of an in store purchase direct from the living room.

But what does the shop visit offer that online retailers need to consider?

1. Try Before You Buy

Allow for sampling.

The physical store has always allowed the perfect opportunity for the customer to try a product first. Sampling business like Lust have it! are built solely around this model – our customers sample and try products that are mailed to them in order to decide if they want to purchase the full sized product in our online store. This however is not the only method of sampling – a returnable and refundable delivery is equally as effective.

ASOS in the UK go so far as providing parcels with a return form enclosed – complete with a checkbox that queries if you’re returning the item because it’s the additional one you purchased only for sizing purposes. This is an impressive way to move towards providing in store benefits.

2. Asking Advice from the Shop Assistant

In the ‘olden days’ shopkeepers were there to educate and gently coerce your customers into a sale.

Online stores are no different and still need to rely on the digital shop assistant. Who is that digital shop assistant?

She exists everywhere – in your FAQs, product pages, blog posts and your key social media channels. Customers still need to learn about your product and a picture does not paint a thousand sales. Online stores need so much more – including active promotion of products through social media.

3. Placing the Lipgloss and Impulse Purchases at the Counter

It’s no secret that websites need to be optimised for sales however a lot of online retail channels are yet to catch up.
This is no different to Sportsgirl putting their lipgloss at the counter for you to consider right at the time you’re ready to pull out the credit card. Where in your online store are you able to ensure this happens?

4. A Carefully Considered Shopping Route

Similar to the above point, a trip to Ikea will make you dizzy with all of the carefully planned ‘S bends’. We all leave exhausted with our trolleys full because we’ve managed to look at and consider every product on offer. This is cleverly done with the perfect use of floorspace. Being an online retailer doesn’t mean you have any excuse to not make use of your ‘digital floorspace’

Where are the ‘S bends’ in your customers online journey?

5. ‘Flagship Store’ is not a Dirty Word

There is a trend which will continue, it’s called ‘clicks and mortar’.

The combination of a physical presence combined with an online outlet can be powerful and incredible from a branding point of view. Just because you’re online doesn’t mean you have no physical presence in the real world.

No matter how you slice it, there’s plenty left for us all to learn from the good old fashioned street-level store.

The post Recreating the In-Store Experience for Online Customers appeared first on Power Retail.

The Right Tools for the Job
Ultimately, the user experience goal is to help speed customers to their selections quickly and intelligently. To that end, optimising search and navigation become critical factors in reducing site abandonment and increasing the propensity to purchase. SLI Systems has recognised this, and has developed premier search and navigation features to improve the quality of search results and streamline the path to finding that special gift. In particular, SLI System’s patented Learning Search tracks and learns from browsing behaviour to continuously improve the quality and relevance of the site search experience. That’s a gift for a site’s users that will literally keep on giving, serving more relevant search results and reducing frustration and cart abandonment. One of the features of Learning Search is that it drives more popular products higher in search results, presenting the most relevant results, and ultimately, increasing conversion rates.

Optimising the Gift Shopping Journey
When you examine best practices in gift retailing online, a Gift Finder is one of the must-have features to offer your customers. This intuitive site search feature can take on many forms, adding a new dimension of personalisation to the user experience.
A Gift Finder helps narrow down a customer’s search by offering choices and refinements to identify the most relevant items through an easy-to-use interface. It saves the customer significant time and energy wading through countless irrelevant items.

The more refinement options you can provide, the better and quicker the user experience. Basic must-have refinements for a user searching for a gift would include:
Price – price sliders are a great option here
Occasion/Event – are you buying a wedding gift, birthday present, etc?
Type – are you looking for an electrical product, a beauty product, hamper, etc?
Component – for hampers and gift bundles, are there products you’d like to have – eg. Champagne or chocolates

Tailoring Temptation Through Merchandising and Analytics
Capitalise on seasonal promotions and the halo effect of traditional gift buying occasions with smart merchandising. SLI offers a powerful merchandising console that allows you to create customised banners and landing pages for seasonal and ad hoc promotions. Integrated reporting provides insight to campaign performance, tracking conversions and purchase results to help retailers make informed decisions.

Reporting and analytics are critical to the continuous profit optimisation of your business, and SLI’s reporting console gives deep and valuable insights into top search phrases, most clicked facets and most profitable search terms. The more you know, the better you’ll be able to tailor your user experience to generate higher conversions and keep customers coming back more often.

Put the Fun into Online Gift Shopping
Put some life into the gift buying experience online to increase engagement. User-generated content, particularly ratings and reviews, add enormous value to the online shopping experience and give customers greater confidence in making purchases. Using multiple product images, original content and helpful videos also serve to heighten the user experience, but be wary of overloading the customer or diverting them to pages away from products. Quick view or mouse-over pop-ups are a great option on site to give richer information and imagery at a glance rather than loading a new page.

Talk to the Hand
With more than a third of users browsing sites via mobile devices, you simply cannot ignore smartphones and tablets. SLI Systems offers mobile solutions to allow a smooth search and navigation experience via mobile. This is critical for avoiding frustrated screen-pinchers abandonments on your mobile site. The aim is to deliver a flawless user experience anytime, anywhere.

The post Finding the Right Present Online – It’s a Gift! appeared first on Power Retail.

A large part of these processes involve the basic considerations for publishing online, as every company continues to have a higher and higher demand for creating, manipulating and distributing digital content. Whether this is imagery, copy or even video, many companies might know how to effectively capture this data, but the efficient publication and distribution of it may remain elusive.

In this three part series, I describe the general concepts, technologies and techniques for publishing your content online, no matter how large your business is, or how you derive revenue. The first item for discussion may also be considered the most basic: Content Management Systems (CMS).

The CMS behind The Mens Shop blog, ‘The Rule Book’, allows the upload of engaging non-product content that can be interwoven with product-based content.

Content is King!

Yes yes, we know. Content is king. Cliché, but true. Any online business, whether selling informational products or Mega Ab Flexer 2000s you will need to have a good content. And to publish that content you need what is called a Content Management System (or a CMS for short).

Ok, so the lingo is out of the way. Now what do we need consider when looking for a CMS, and what are some of the best and most popular products out in the marketplace today? Lets get stuck in.

What does a CMS need to do?

A CMS needs to work within your business framework. And by that we mean it needs to be able to manage and publish content either as your main website, integrated within your website, or as a separate blog.

It needs to have features that you need. Do you publish a lot of video content? Text? Images and galleries? These are just some of the things to consider when evaluating products.

Your CMS also needs to have good SEO and ideally the ability to add extra features as required, without breaking its ability to be upgraded. WordPress is a great example of this.

Consider how you market your content to other content channels too, such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and more. Does the platform you are investigating connect to thee other channels?

Lets have a quick look at some of the options in the market, and what makes them so popular.

WordPress

WordPress is, without a doubt, the most popular blogging/CMS platform in the world. You can use a hosted version on wordpress.com (meaning you don’t have to worry about upgrading it, server maintenance and so on) or you can download and install it on your own webserver.

We use WordPress a lot, and it is our favourite program because it has such a great feature set, and some really good extensions that you can install to improve it. Some quick features:

• Multi user (Author, Publisher, Admin roles etc.)
• Simple and easy to use publishing workflow
• Great SEO extensions, and assist you in getting content to rank!
• Lots of professional themes in the marketplace
• Core platform can be upgraded easily, usually without breaking the site

Drupal

Drupal is another ‘open source’ community product, and can be installed for free. It has it’s own marketplace and community, providing extensions and modules to enhance the product. There are thousands of extensions to choose from.

Perhaps with fewer extensions and themes than WordPress, it counters this with some more flexibility for developers. Drupal as a CMS is a great base framework to develop a full ecommerce site if you wish. It is very flexible and you can turn it into just about anything.

Joomla

Joomla is also very popular, and has been around for years. It has a strong community, like WordPress, and is also a free product like WordPress.

Although it’s underlying code wasn’t as nice as the WordPress framework, it has recently launched a new version which is better to work with (for developers) and should be more ‘upgrade proof’ as well.

It too has a great range of themes and add on modules that can be installed.

In Summary

The Australian Asics website was built and maintained with the Kentico CMS platform.

There are lots of CMS products available, including the good ol’ Blogger platform, Typepad, and newer platforms for slightly larger business such as Kentico or Sitecore.

What is important is that the product you choose suits the content types you publish, works with your other systems that may be installed, and is easy to use. For most smaller businesses, the choice will be WordPress. But don’t stop just there. Use Google to look for Australian CMS products to support local business – and don’t be afraid to test drive a couple products to see what works best for you.

Also, open source products that have community contributed extensions (such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) have some risks. Those risks center around security. Who is ensuring that the extension you just installed on your Joomla installation doesn’t allow a hacker to get access to your server? This has been an issue for quite some time.

So, make sure your development partner has good experience with your chosen platform, and has some great sites in their showcase. Talk to other clients to be more comfortable about your decisions. And if you go ‘open source’, use as few extensions as possible, and stick to well known, highly rated extensions, to improve your site security.

Next week, Nathan covers everything you need to know regarding Comparison Shopping Engines and Virtual Marketplaces in a nutshell.

The post E-Commerce Technology Basics: Part One – Content Management Systems appeared first on Power Retail.

Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), in conjunction with market research firm Capgemini, reports the increase from 15.4 percent in the previous quarter. Mobile traffic to retail websites was also found to have increased from 24 percent of total web traffic to 30 percent in Q1.

The sudden spike may be as a result of sudden influx of tablet owners, following the Christmas 2012 sales period.

Other Mobile Statistics:

• Sales via mobile devices have increased from .9% in 2010 to 4% in 2011, before reaching 12% of total online sales in 2012.
• Visits via mobile have grown from 2.6% in 2010 to 8.2% in 2011, before reaching 21.3% of total online traffic in 2012.

“Mobile is clearly a game-changer for the UK e-retail industry, with m-retail sales increasing at more than double the levels we saw in the early 2000s when IMRG started tracking online sales,” says Tina Spooner, CIO at IMRG. “At the beginning of 2010 mobile sales accounted for just 0.4% of the UK e-retail market – within three years it has surged a staggering 5,000%, with m-retail now accounting for one in every 5 online purchases.

“With the continuing shift away from desktop to mobile internet use, it is inevitable we will see the latter platform outstrip desktop PCs as the preferred device for shopping online, and from the latest figures it is apparent this may be sooner than expected.”

Meanwhile, VP and Head of Retail Consulting and Technology for Capgemini, Chris Webster believes the UK – and perhaps the entire globe – is currently going through a “mobile decade”.

“In 2020 when we look back on the last ten years, we will undoubtedly see it as the ‘mobile decade’. In the first three years alone we have seen sales via mobile devices increase from nearly zero, to over 20% of all e-retail sales. However, we are only scratching the surface and over the next few years we will see the technology reveal its full potential,” Webster says.

Are your hits and conversions from mobile devices on the rise? Australian retailers are well aware of the trend towards these devices, but how many are presenting a ‘best-practice’ mobile experience for these consumers?

The post Mobile Commerce Now 20% of All UK Online Sales appeared first on Power Retail.

Is it possible that something is missing?

A video marketing campaign’s success or failure relies not only on the quality and relevance of the content itself – a comprehensive distribution strategy also needs to be created to ensure that your video content gets seen. The better the distribution strategy, the more chance there is of your video content ‘going viral’.

Whether you have a great network already or not, Bubobox shares some insights into how social can be utilised to benefit your online video content in the following infographic:

You can find both Part One and Part Two of this infographic series right here on Power Retail.

The post Infographic – The Benefits of Video Marketing Online (Part Three) appeared first on Power Retail.

That’s why this second part of our series on AdWords for decision makers covers everything you need to consider when budgeting for implementing AdWords, as well as concerns for partnering with an SEM agency or independent consultant.

How much should you invest in AdWords?

Given the volume of searches and available keywords on Google, it’s possible for a brand to spend a lot of money in a very small amount of time. While there is no precise way for me to indicate what your spend should be, there is a science behind providing an estimate.

Unlike other marketing channels, you’re not locked into AdWords for a set period. You can updated your daily budget at anytime, but your budget directly impacts your coverage and traffic. For this reason, it’s best to begin by assessing your objectives (if you’re unsure about your overall strategic goals for AdWords, read up on Part One of this series).

Brand Exposure vs. Sales

If, for example, you sell designer furniture and you have a brand consideration goal, you would therefore want to appear on all searches for ‘designer furniture’. In this case, you will need to have a sufficient daily budget to ensure you budget does not run out.  You can use the Google Traffic Estimator Tool (found under the Tools & Analysis Tab in the AdWords interface) to estimate the budget required to give you maximum coverage for specific keywords based on an estimated cost per click.

If you are purely focused on online sales and return on investment, the right way to approach it is to have a trial budget that is sufficient enough to indicate whether the campaign will perform or not. If the budget it is too low or spread too thinly over a long period of time it will take a long time to get enough data to learn how well it’s performing. If you’re new to AdWords, you may just want to start by focusing on one or two of your key product categories for a one month campaign. Allocate $100 per day and that should give you enough data after a week or two to be able to optimise the campaign. By the end of the month you should have a good idea for how well its performing and to make budget decisions based on that.

Partnering with a Third Party

As you can start to appreciate, the set up, management and optimisation of AdWords campaigns is a complex task and so requires a reasonable level of expertise. This is why it can be worth making use of a relationship with a third party who provides the experience, saves you a lot of time and gets you better results.

There are many SEM agencies and consultants out there, but the challenge is knowing which ones are going to deliver the expertise and dedicate sufficient time to get you the best results. It is hard to decipher between who’s who in the market place and which will give you the best value for money.

Most will be ‘AdWords Qualified’, which means they have taken an online qualification to ensure their knowledge is up to scratch – but pretty much anyone can get this with enough swotting up. Here are some of the red herrings to look out for and tips for choosing the best agency for your business:

1. Deal with the person who does the work - Often you will get someone senior in the agency who does the slick pitch to win the business, but then they hand the work over to someone more junior to do the work or even outsource it. This could be someone overseas, or in many cases an agency outsources it to yet another agency! Some web developers offer an SEM service to complement their offering, but outsource it and make a cut. You want to speak to the person who is creating the search strategy and building and optimising your account in order to ensure they have the necessary experience. Treat it like an interview; ask for lots of examples of how they how they have delivered results for other clients and the process used. How long have they been managing AdWords campaigns for? If it’s less than one year, I would be concerned.
2. Watch out for over-complication and jargon-stuffing - I have seen agencies who lace their proposals with technical terms and extraneous items in order to make it sound as if they are doing more than they really are, which they then use to justify charging their clients more. Look for an agency that simplifies the process and is able to speak in plain english – they should be completely transparent regarding the actual work they are doing. The reality is once a campaign is set up it will run by itself without any extra work, so an agency could be charging you a monthly fee for not doing much at all! Ideally, a business should partner with someone who is optimising campaigns, demonstrating to you what work they have done and the results achieved.
3. Cheaper is not better! – When comparing agencies, beware of those that are a lot cheaper than the rest. The likelihood is that they will spend less time on your account and probably outsource the bulk overseas anyway, which won’t do you any favours in getting the most out of an AdWords campaign. It’s worth paying more for expertise and an agency which has proven processes to get results.

Advanced Tips for Outsourcing SEM

• Maintain access to your AdWords account - Some Google resellers use their own reporting interface and do not give you transparency to the actual data in the account, for example. While this can simplify things, I feel this does not allow you to get the most of the AdWords features and reporting. Also ensure there is nothing in the contract that prevents you from accessing your account if you change agencies. This is your valuable data.
• Seek out vertical expertise - There is specific expertise and strategies to get the best performance out of AdWords in any one industry, so aim to find someone who has had experience working with similar clients in your industry.
• Deal with an inclusive agency - If your agency is not spending the time up-front to do keyword research, nor appears focused on getting your search strategy right in the first place, be concerned. With millions of keyword variations, multiple devices and ad extensions there is a lot to get right.
• Choose a partner that aligns with your goals - Some agencies specialise in ROI-focused campaigns, which is great if you just sell online, but if you’re a brand with stores then there could be better agencies to create a search strategy that’s integrated with your broader marketing campaigns. Search can drive in-store sales as well as online sales, so you want to ensure the search agency sees the bigger picture.

At the end of the day, the proof of the effectiveness of an agency can be measured by the performance of the campaigns. For this reason, be sure to negotiate an initial contract period that runs for no longer than a trial period of 30 days. That being said, unless the agency is severely under performing, don’t jump the gun in cutting them loose. Reserve judgement in the first few months, as SEM campaigns can sometimes take time to really begin driving traffic.

It’s also important to ensure appropriate metrics are set to measure performance in the first place. AdWords performance is not measured by eyeballs or impressions like with in media, but rather by the click through rate and resulting engagement or conversion achieved.

Paying for AdWords Management

There are different pricing models to choose from, but ideally the service fee should correspond to performance and the size/complexity of the campaign. Many agencies charge a ‘percentage of spend’ model, which seems to make no sense given this incentivises the agency to get you to spend more, rather than focus on performance.

A retainer model for service with agreed-upon bonuses based on performance would work best. Unfortunately, a challenge still remains when it comes to ‘joining the dots’ between mobile search and in-store sales, which can often be impossible to track.   This is an example where other, softer metrics can be used to measure performance. I have seen percentage of revenue models work well as this is a mutually beneficial arrangement.

In the next instalment of this series AdWords for Decision Makers, we’ll cover attributing AdWords ROI across multiple devices, channels and timeframes.

The post Google Adwords for Decision Makers: Partnerships and Budgeting appeared first on Power Retail.

For a number of years now, Australian retailers – whether bricks and mortar, online or both – have fought a war of attrition against these internationals; an impossible war due to the competition’s access to grey market products. Not only is this bad for retailer margins, there have also been several instances where consumers end up purchasing counterfeit products – particularly within the cosmetics and fragrances categories.

For RY, this meant a continual loss of sales to websites like Strawberrynet – but those days now appear numbered, thanks to a sudden shift among suppliers.

Haircare brand Redken is the latest example of a company to undergo international price realignment, bringing their Australian prices (and therefore the resulting recommended retail prices) much closer to that offered by international counterparts. For example, Redken have strategically altered their price points on shampoos and conditioners from RRP $28 down to $22.95.

As shown here, RY is now able to out-compete its major international rival, Strawberrynet, on Redken prices.

In other cases, brands like Dermalogica have reduced cost prices by as much as 20 percent, taking the lead from Estée Lauder and Clinique, signalling their clear intent to put the international grey market on notice and Australian retailers back on the front foot.

The argument for shopping overseas to save money is now beginning to seriously weaken given our newfound ability to offer the same quality brands and prices as many of our international competitors. Better still, we have greater customer service capabilities here in Australia, designed for Australian consumers.

As more suppliers review their international pricing structures and begin to ‘harmonise’ their pricing, more products and categories will begin selling with renewed vigour from local retailers. The era of offshore purchasing may well be facing its demise.

Despite the strength of the Australian dollar and fiercely competed cosmetics marketplace, women were being forced to pay anywhere between 50 to 100 percent more than their US counterparts, until recently. Brand loyalty and quality products were cited as the major reasons why they continued to shop these products in department stores, regardless of these price disparities. Now with these pricing changes, all the boxes are being ticked for shopping with local retail outlets – online or otherwise.

Are you familiar with losing sales to international competitors selling grey market prices? Are you pushing your suppliers for change? Share your story in the comments section below.

The post Are Grey Market Imports a Dying Breed? appeared first on Power Retail.