Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: May 1 -10 2005

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May 10 2005

Yahoo Search Marketing offers 10 million free ads!

A bit late in reporting this one, but there's still time for you to enter if you're quick! Yahoo Search Marketing has teamed up with Sir Richard Branson to offer one business 10 million free online ads (and your very own Yahoo! account team) as the prize in their 'Think Big' contest. Entry is free. You just need to tell Yahoo! and Sir Richard Branson why you think your business will benefit the most from the 10 million ads. 

Yahoo Search Marketing Think Big Contest.

The *big* player in ecommerce

Which company provides the infrastructure that translates .com and .net names into IP's over 14 billion times a day? Which company processes 30% of all ecommerce transactions totaling over one hundred million dollars every 24 hours? And which company processes the vast majority of all bill payments made via cell phones and delivers billions of text messages each month? Verisign. I always knew they were big, but didn't realize just *how* big. After suffering losses of over thirteen billion dollars in 2001, Verisign has reported a net income of $186 million in 2004. For a fascinating insight into this ecommerce giant, read this article on Internet Week. 

Learn more about drop shipping Dropshipping - an effective & simpler way to make more from ecommerce!

May 7 2005

Small business making the move to VoIP

A survey released by the National Federation of Independent Business shows an increasing number of USA SMB's (small-to-midsize business) turning to Voice over Internet Protocol for telephony services.

It's interesting to note that smaller firms are quicker on the uptake than larger SMB's. 

Aside from micro business tending to be more cost conscious than their larger counterparts, my guess is that making the switch is a lot easier for very small business. These organizations don't have more complex processes for decision making in terms of technology changes and also they would usually have a much lower level of existing investment in traditional telephony technologies.

Learn more about VoIP and benefits to ecommerce.

US online advertising and marketing forecast

According to Forrester research, nearly 50% of marketers are planning on decreasing spending on traditional advertising and increasing spending on online ads. Forrester predicts that online marketing will reach over 14.5 billion dollars in 2005. This represents an increase of 23 percent over 2004.

Other key findings of the the Forrester report:

• Search engine marketing to increase 33% in 2005
• Display advertisingto grow an average of 11% over the next 5 years.
• 64% of marketers are interested in blog advertising.
• 52% of marketers are interested in advertising via mobile devices.
• 78% of those surveyed believe that search engine marketing will be more effective than offline marketing.

Read more of the online advertising and marketing forecast

May 5 2005

The online survivors 

Nobody who was around to witness the online bubble burst in 2001 will forget it; it was a unique moment in online business history. It weeded out many high flyers and taught valuable lessons to the rest of us involved in ecommerce - small and large businesses. 

Internet Week has published an interesting article on the survivors of those torrid times, how they kept afloat, the change in mindset and business models. It's well worth a read, especially if you are new to ecommerce and have any illusions of getting rich quick. My motto - get rich slow and keep it :)

Shopping cart software Learn more about shopping carts or read our reviews of some the best shopping cart software around! Need to learn more about merchant accounts or payment processors? Try our ecommerce guides

May 3 2005

Online consumers take their time in purchasing

Internet Week has published some interesting results from a survey that show the overall average time of consumers first visiting a site to purchasing is 19 hours. Also:

• a third of online shoppers take more than 12 hours to purchase

• 21 percent of shoppers take more than three days

• 14 percent take more than a week

The long duration of the decision process is attributed to the online equivalent of window shopping and price comparison between various vendors.

Read more

Related: Minimizing shopping cart abandonment

May 2 2005

130 billion emails sent a day

According to study released by the technology marketing research firm, Radacati Group, there are approximately 683 million email users worldwide and 1.2 billion active email accounts. Daily email traffic is around 130 billion messages a day, but spam comprises over 60% of that total. 

ISP/Webmail accounts constitute 61% of all email accounts, with HotMail and Yahoo! Mail being the leaders, but it is predicted that Gmail will gain on the leaders in the coming year.

Autoresponder software  & mailing list managers Get more from your email marketing - tips, reviews  & free trial software/services.

May 1 2005

New article - MLM (Multi Level Marketing)

I'm sure you've seen the words "downline" and "matrix" in get-rich-quick and be-your-own-boss type emails. These are all a part of MLM, aka Network Marketing. Some of these programs are legitimate, many are nothing more than a pyramid scheme. Learn more about Multi-Level Marketing and how it works.

1024x768 sites missing the mark with advertising?

Just a personal observation - I've noticed an increasing number of sites being designed specifically for 1024x768. This is understandable given the numbers of people using this resolution as their default. A quick glance over the statistics for Taming the Beast.net in the past week, which is approximately 75,000 unique visitors to the primary domain, shows that the number of users running this resolution or higher at just over 66%.

The problem with designing your site specifically for this resolution is that there are still around 30% of users running 800x600 or lower. This becomes an issue if much of your advertising is placed in left or right menus.

I run 800x600 on my notebook and when visiting 1024x768 oriented sites, I'm more interested in the content - as most people would be. That means that any advertising in the right and/or left hand menus usually goes totally unnoticed.

This is something to consider if building a new site where advertising/affiliate programs will form a considerable amount of your revenue. There's still a lot to be said for design pages to grow and shrink dependent upon the resolution that the user is running.

Online news a growing preference

JupiterResearch has reported that 26% of adults prefer the Internet as their main source of news. This preference has grown over 35% in the last 4 years. Young adults are driving the trend towards online news with 33% of 18-24 year olds stating the Internet is their primary source of news.

Read more

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