Most of the buySAFE team is now back from last week’s Internet Retailer Conference. Some of us, like me, just spent the last two
days in NYC for the 18th Annual Bear Stearns
Technology/Communications/Internet Conference. I was a speaker yesterday on the Safety Panel.
I wanted to share a few important insights from the two
conferences. I’ll share a bit more
following the eBay Live conference this week.
Internet Retailer put on a terrific conference. The number, variety and quality of both the
exhibitors and the merchant attendees were exceptional. This was the best eCommerce conference I’ve
attended all year. It’s a great
conference for large, professional, multi-channel online retailers. So that’s you -- you
should try to attend next year. The
depth and quality of the content is much higher than one typically finds at an
eBay conference and the caliber of the attendees there makes it a much more
productive conference for everyone involved.
The Bear Stearns conference provided a
great overview on the key trends across the internet. Internet advertising continues to grow at an
astounding rate and it sounded to me like the trend toward CPA
(Cost-per-action) vs. CPC is really picking up steam. CPA-based advertising is a new form of
advertising which merchants are clamoring for because it takes all the risk out
of marketing (they pay % of sales vs. a
flat fee for impressions or clicks). Given
that advertising is the riskiest, yet most important, spend a merchant makes,
turning this into a truly pay-for-performance model where advertisers are paid
as a % of revenue generated will be a great thing for merchants. On the trust and safety front, our panel
discussed the trust issues all online merchants face. That online shoppers are nervous and that to
avoid missing major sales opportunities, online merchants need to aggressively
address the two primary concerns online buyers have when buying online – 1)
will my information/data/privacy be kept safe and 2) will this merchant be
reliable and trustworthy and deliver as promised (will I have a smooth transaction
and get what I paid for?). Tom Cuthbert
from ClickForensics also provided
some great insights into the click-fraud issues the search engines are facing. All of the engines are taking it seriously and
trying to minimize it as much as possible, but that overall, the search engines
are not making much headway in reducing it. In fact, in many cases click fraud is actually
growing.
Scot Wingo of Channel
Advisor, Rodrigo Sales of Vendio and Jonathan Garriss and Joe Cortese of PeSA
all participated in a panel yesterday afternoon. The focus of the discussion was eBay and the
universal message was that eBay isn’t innovating fast enough and the changes
they are making (like raising listing fees) are net harmful to the marketplace.
According to Jonathan/PeSA, the primary
issue eBay continues to face is buyer confidence. Everyone seemed to agree with this.
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