Internet Marketing and Web Site Design News for Small Business

Internet Marketing and Web Design News - Florida & Beyond

Wednesday, December 10, 2003 10:57 PM

Selling online is not going away!!! Look below at some astonishing statistics for online business merchants:

Online retail sales clicking

E-tailers benefiting from mall malaise, broadband growth

By Garrett Glaser
CNBC

Dec. 10 — It’s shaping up to be very happy holiday season for online merchants this year. U.S. consumers went online and spent $8.5 billion last month, 55 percent more than last November, according to an e-spending survey from Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen Netratings.

THE SURVEY LOOKED at all the major shopping sites including Amazon, eBay, QVC, Target, Wal-Mart and, many more.
The biggest category was apparel at $1.6 billion, up 33 percent. After that, it was video/DVD, up 133 percent, then books, up 61 percent, and Music/toys/games, up 32 percent.
What’s it all mean? “We believe that people have become more comfortable shopping online, they’re able to find products easily, and search engines are a great help to find products,” said Nielsen Netratings senior analyst Abha Bhagat. “Search and comparisons, these are some of the things that are standing out.”
Forrester Research has already predicted that when it’s all over, online sales will have jumped 42 percent this year over last. In fact, right now, most categories are up 40-50 percent.
Forrester senior analyst Carrie Johnson says there are many reasons for that.
“Last year, the reason retailers online did not sell so well during Thanksgiving and Christmas was that the offline sales were too good for consumers to pass up,” Johnson said. “This year the load that online retailers saw on Black Friday, and even immediately after that weekend tell me that they are not losing sales to offline retailers anymore, because they were very aggressive about getting consumers to shop online instead of going into stores. They did it with 1-day promotions, saying ‘Hey were open, avoid the crowds’ and they did it much more aggressively than last year.”
Other factors include the fact that broadband is now in 20 percent of American homes, and women have grown more comfortable with shopping online — now surpassing men 52 to 48 percent.
Combine that with the sheer depth of selection you now see online. Bizrate.com, which ranks online sites, says the kind of items you can buy online has jumped from 5 million this time last year to 31 million products right now.

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Tuesday, December 09, 2003 5:58 PM

Search Engine Advertising Blocker Debuts

Search Engine Advertising Blocker Debuts - December 9, 2003

Search Engine Advertising Blocker Hits the Market

First we had spam filters, then pop-up blockers, and recently spyware removal tools have become popular. Time to add one more to the list which has the potential to hurt the search engine marketing industry even more than a Google update, search engine sponsored listing blocking.

The InterMute, Inc. company announced today the latest version of its best selling Internet ad blocking software which gives users the option to block paid or sponsored Search Engine results, the fastest growing segment of the online advertising industry.

Accoding to InterMute’s CEO Ed English "Search Engines have lost their way and tarnished their credibility. Instead of first displaying the most relevant search results, most Search Engines now show the highest paying ad-sponsored results."

There may be some credence behind the need for more regulation of the search advertising industry, according to a recent study, nearly half of those surveyed among the business community state that they do not recognize the difference between paid search listings and unpaid.

While some search engines, Google for example, make an effort to differentiate its ads from its organic search results. Other search engines like MSN search do not do so good of a job, cloaking paid results with organic.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau recently announced that online ads increased 14% in Q2 of 2003, and US online advertising revenue is up 10.5% for the first six months of 2003, totaling $3.29 billion.

Paid search has been hailed as the savior for the Internet advertising economy. Jupiter Research has said paid search would grow nearly 50 percent to bring in $1.6 billion in revenues in 2003. By 2008, the research firm believes paid search will account for $4.3 billion, or nearly one-third of all online ad revenue.

Intermute’s AdSubtract Pro with search engine advertising blocker has the potential to start a worrisome trend which could put a large dent in the search advertising industry.

Their new feature, dubbed New Search Sanity, lets the user block paid or "sponsored" listings from showing up on the most popular search engines including, Google, Yahoo, Overture, MSN, AOL, AltaVista, AllTheWeb and LookSmart. The tool even has the power to block contextual advertising, such as Google’s AdSense.

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