Greetings.

In March, our CEO Jeff Katz spoke in NYC with executives from leading brands and companies around the country on the future of retail customer experience.

In the presentation, Jeff noted that e-commerce is growing rapidly… Shoppers in the U.S. alone are predicted to spend $327 billion on e-retail by 2016, and nearly 80% of shoppers either buy online or browse products and services online before purchasing in-store. At the same time, the worlds of e-tail and retail are becoming increasingly intertwined.

We’re building that future now with our merchant customers, via our traffic, site, and in-store optimization services.

Those services keep getting better.

Silhouettes now include Facebook traffic: In Q1, we turned on Facebook traffic for our Silhouette customers. So currently, in addition to our SEM, SEO, Google Shopping and display traffic, Silhouette customers can enjoy highly qualified Facebook visitors. Over the last several years, we have been working hard at making Facebook an important traffic source for Nextag through the refinement of our targeting and bidding algorithms in particular. You can now leverage this expertise through a Silhouette with little to no effort.

Retargeting as a stand-alone service: We’ve also begun offering our retargeting dynamic display service as a stand-alone product. Retargeting dynamic banners are currently included as part of our Silhouette offering. With this new offering, however, a merchant can use our retargeting technology directly to serve highly relevant dynamic banners to users landing on their main site, providing an additional source of revenue while increasing the likelihood that a user completes their purchase on your site, and not with the competition.

Nextag Seller Badges lift conversion 25%: And last, we also recently completed an in-depth research project for our Nextag merchants on our Seller Badge program. Those merchants that display a Nextag Seller Badge on their sites have on average a 25% lift in conversion. Click here for instructions on how to implement this quick conversion-boost.

In other news…

In April, we are excited to complete the launch of a new Silhouette of Modista. This new site is built on the visual search concept and is perfect for shopping clothing items in particular. It allows a shopper to find quickly items of a specific style and color with just a few clicks.

And see our recent blog post on Predictive Modeling for a bit of an inside scoop on how we help marketers add edge to their revenue and traffic optimization strategies.

As always, let us know if there’s anything we can do to help your digital business thrive. Contact us anytime by email or at 1-650-645-4700 x 2.

Best wishes,

The Wize Commerce Team

Hello,

This month brings with it a lot of news in the marketplace, including changes to Google’s important AdWords system, big changes in the agency community, and even some news from us.

We view Google’s enhancements to AdWords as positive. The changes are consistent with our current optimization processes, but they make it even easier for the Wize Commerce platform to capitalize on traffic from smartphones and tablets and from location-based sources or so-called geo-targeting. Overall, we’re confident that the new AdWords capabilities will allow us to boost our already significant capabilities to drive broad traffic from sources that are becoming increasingly important – mobile and local.

Google also announced an agency acquisition, one that appears to have raised a few eyebrows. Can a Google-owned agency be neutral with respect to Google Shopping? They say yes and we hope that is the case. But, in our view, what is happening is consistent with the maturing phase of e-commerce … consolidation and verticalization are only natural. We think we’ll see more of this and we view this as a positive trend for us, as the largest independent shopping network, operating over a dozen high volume e-commerce sites like Nextag and guenstiger.de, in over a dozen countries. Our neutrality and multi-channel traffic generation capabilities allow us to offer merchant customers like you a range of great solutions and the highest ROI for your marketing spend. These solutions include our Shopping Network, as well as Silhouette, a risk-free implementation of our traffic and site optimization technologies.

Announcing Price Machine … the newest site from Wize Commerce. Most of you are familiar with Nextag, our largest site. This month, we are happy to announce the launch of what will be another significant site, Price Machine. Although we generally don’t favor the idea of promoting “lowest price” as a principal differentiator in the marketplace — it’s often not good for merchants, or suppliers — we’re realists in recognizing that most shoppers have a strong urge to understand as much as they can about price before they buy. We can’t ignore this trend any longer, and so Price Machine will be an important information source for strongly price discriminating shoppers. By offering multiple shopping experiences with our Wize Commerce platform, we can ensure that all shoppers have access to experiences that suit their needs, and at the end of the day this should bolster our ability to drive maximum revenue to our merchant customers. Please contact our seller support team if you have any questions about Price Machine. Generation 1 of Price Machine launches later this month.

New from Us … social data ads, and Silhouette enhanced to support social traffic in addition to search and retargeting traffic. Contact us to learn more about these new tools coming soon.

Finally, if you’re a reader of Fast Company online, you may have seen our CEO Jeff Katz’s front page article this month on the “Future of Shopping.” We’re excited to embrace this future with you, and help you wherever we can to maximize conversion and your overall e-commerce business model.

Best wishes,
Nextag

As the year begins, I thought it would be appropriate to share with you what we’re seeing for the year ahead, and what we’re doing to generate as much business for you, at an optimum cost-of-sale, as we can.

Increasing our value to you

Over the last two years, our largest advertising partner, Google, has launched a Shopping product that has emerged as a major competitor. We have certainly felt the impact of this, but according to third party data, we remain the largest independent comparison shopping product in terms of gross merchandise sales. We are also the largest comparison shopping site, according to our estimates, in driving mobile, social banner retargeting, and search traffic to your stores (online and offline). By participating at the highest levels with our various global sites, you’re gaining market share among comparison shoppers in all channels of the e-commerce world.

We have spent the last two years enhancing our technology to improve merchant conversion, to provide you the flexibility to bid on a SKU level for better visibility of your most important products, to optimize your marketing messages on our sites, and to have your pricing and product inventory more quickly updated.

With the launch of our Wize Commerce platform, we’re also now assisting many merchants directly with product ad serving and onsite monetization. Our Silhouette service allows you to boost revenues on a near risk-free basis (in most cases set-up requires less than two weeks). If you’re not familiar with these tools, I hope you’ll inquire so we can show you a few other cost-efficient ways to boost your performance.

For more than ten years, we’ve provided merchants like you with a substantial stream of revenue, always focused on cost-of-sale. If there’s anything we can do better, or any questions we can answer, feel free to contact us anytime, either via email or at 1-650-645-4700 x 3.

Thank you again for working with us. We look forward to discussing how we can help you increase revenue in 2013.

Jeff

On May 31st, Google announced plans to transition their free Google Product Search (GPS) to a purely commercial model based on Product Listing Ads (PLAs). The resulting experience is called Google Shopping, and is expected to be fully implemented by this fall. The ultimate goal is to improve the shopping experience by improving the accuracy and recency of product data. As a part of your partnership with Nextag, we are already navigating this landscape on your behalf. In the meantime, what changes can you expect in the near future?

• PLA usage will increase. An estimated 5-10% of search traffic for retailers comes from GPS (source: IgnitionOne). As GPS is phased out, this traffic will be up for grabs, and PLAs will undoubtedly play a larger role in merchant bidding strategies.
• Results page layout will change. As the transition progresses, expect Google to experiment with the page layout for their search results in order to find the optimal configuration. These new layouts may affect the performance of your other bidding vehicles. For example, these sample layouts show that PLAs may displace AdWords.
• New PLA bidding options will be offered. Google has already announced their plans to allow “the opportunity to market special offers” (i.e. “30% off all refracting telescopes”). As Google Shopping matures, there will likely be other bidding features and options released to help merchants differentiate themselves – for a price.

You can find a complete list of current Google Shopping policies here.
 

As a Nextag merchant, you can rest knowing that we will be keeping a close eye on the progression of Google Shopping and its effect on your business. Regardless of the current or future structure, our strategies are always designed to maximize our merchants’ return on investment. If you would like to opt-out of this value added service, please contact us at sellersupport@nextag.com.

   

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Missed our webinar from last week? Don’t worry, check out our live recording.

   

Would you like to replay the video or share the link to it with your friends?

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Based on your feedback, we’ve enhanced our marketing platform by adding some brand new merchant marketing programs plus 2 new scopes of bidding to make messaging and bidding even more dynamic than ever. This video tutorial will cover how to bid on our new Top Placement program.

   

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Enjoy greater flexibility and precision promoting your products with our brand new “Merchandising and Performance Optimization” tool, located at the top of your seller dashboard. Based on your feedback, we’ve enhanced our marketing platform by adding keyword and brand bidding to make messaging and bidding even more dynamic than ever. Bidding on rank for relevant keywords will improve the positioning for products returned by that keyword search.

   

Would you like to replay the video or share the link to it with your friends?

Description:
Enjoy greater flexibility and precision promoting your products with our brand new “Merchandising and Performance Optimization” tool, located at the top of your seller dashboard. Based on your feedback, we’ve enhanced our marketing platform by adding some brand new merchant marketing programs plus 2 new scopes of bidding to make messaging and bidding even more dynamic than ever. This video tutorial will cover how to bid on Enhanced and Premium Marketing messages.