The Tricky Business of Selling Via Amazon

Those of you that are building e-commerce sites are presented with a host of options, from Shopify to Magento to dozens of others. Many businesses also set up shop on eBay or Amazon because of the broad exposure you receive by being part of their marketplaces. You make a little less money on each sale and you have to abide by some fairly complex (and frequently changing) rules, but you have immediate access to a large audience of buyers without having to engage in SEO to build your presence from the ground up.

As some sellers have seen, though, selling through giants like Amazon or eBay can be difficult if you don't meet their standards for feedback or ratings. These marketplaces put such rules in place to weed out fraudulent sellers, but they can also snare legitimate businesses and hold up their payments for months at a time. If you're considering Amazon, check out this article from The Seattle Times detailing complaints from sellers regarding Amazon's payment and account policies. While these are isolated cases out of many happy sellers, it's worth understanding the power a giant like Amazon (and eBay, Google and many others) has in its seller agreements. View the article here.

Pay-per-click alternatives

The New York Times has an interesting piece on pay-per-click alternatives. Advertisers - especially small business - are beginning to search for alternatives to Google's AdWords program as the cost per click creeps up beyond many companies' threshold for a healthy ROI.

As I've pointed out in the SEO classes, many advertisers are also building content to improve organic ranking, and it works well for those who put the time into it. Check out the article here.

Bare-Bones Analytics

Over at the eBlox blog, I discuss the basics of web analytics in a hopefully non-soporific manner. If you want to understand the basic measurements of success (and failure) on the web and don't have a month to learn an analytics package, you might want to check it out for a quick read.

The rapidly diminishing area for organic results

It Really Is a Google World and We Are All Just Living in It | Mihmorandum:

We've talked extensively in the SEO classes about how Google's organic (or "natural") results are being pushed further and further down due to the predominance of paid advertising in the search engine. This article (and the heated discussion below) provides a good overview of what's happened to that supposedly sacrosanct search results page (SERP) over the years.

Email Subject Lines

Mailchimp has a great piece - with some actual data to back up their findings - on best practices for writing subject lines. Since we cover subject line writing in class (and I suggest a few tips of my own, including the cheesy ones), this is a good set of guidelines for those of you wishing to dig a little bit deeper into subject line writing: What are some best practices in writing email subject lines? | MailChimp.com