Soccer, search engines and sales

The UK has been gripped over the past couple of weeks with the European championships in Ukraine and Poland, and here in the Direct Commerce office, we’ve received plenty of emails from retailers promoting their latest footy-related offers (We particularly liked SportsDirect's effort, below, which landed in our inbox just moments after the final whistle).
 

But in a blog on its website, Heiler, a Germany-based content management system provider, points out many online retailers could be missing a trick by failing to optimise their website for topical searches.

Heiler highlights that during the 2008 European Football Championship, Germany manager Joachim Low wore a special shirt during the tournament in Austria and Switzerland. The piece of clothing received huge attention and became known as the “Shirt of the Nation” with supporters searching on Google using phrases like Jogi Low Shirt because nobody knew where the shirt had come from.

The shirt turned out to be from Strenesse, a German apparel retailer, which then had to work hard to ensure it was getting the conversions from Google searches for Jogi Löw Shirt—as well as ensure it was online and in stock.

While England manager Roy Hodgson may not be as dapper as his German counterpart, retailers will have to keep a close eye on other talking points emerging during the games in order to maximise sales opportunities. The faster retailers set up the right keywords and assign them to their products, the more they will sell online and the more revenue will be generated.--JD

Tempest in a D cup

So the Facebook group Busts 4 Justice has renewed its campaign against Marks & Spencer, claiming that by charging £2 more for bras sized DD cup and larger, the retailer is guilty of "blatant discrimination".

Discrimination is charging a black woman £2 more for the exact same bra as a white woman. Discrimination is allowing Christians but not Muslims into your store to purchase said bra. Discrimination is paying a woman £2 an hour less than a man for designing bras. Charging £2 more for what M&S, in a statement issued last July, said is "the specialist work to ensure the suitable level of support, innovation, and technology that goes into the [larger] bras" is not discrimination.

In the States it's common for retailers to charge a few dollars more for plus-size versions of regular-size apparel, ostensibly to cover the extra materials. I used to think that it was a bit ingenuous not to charge a few bucks less for petite versions (back when I still fitted into petite versions), but hardly discriminatary.

If Busts 4 Justice wants to boycott M&S, that's fine. But to call this "blatant discrimination" makes a mockery of the concept of discrimination and diminishes examples of true, and truly harmful, discrimination.

Lingerie cataloguer Simply Yours has the right idea, however: If you search for Busts 4 Justice in Google, you see a sponsored link on the top right column from Simply Yours with the header "We Love Busts 4 Justice!" The copy underneath reads, "Get 10% Off All Our Great FittingGorgeous Lingerie For Curvy Girls!" What a great way to quickly take advantage of a competitor's weakness.--SC

Live from the Cat X Factor

If you didn't attend the Cat X Factor conference in London today, you'll regret it--especially if your competitors attended. I just slipped out to give my hand a break from jotting down all the ecommerce tips and tactics that Amy Africa and Stephan Spencer are sharing. 

I know I'm not the only one who was both impressed (by the level of detail in the session) and dismayed (by how many things we're doing wrong with our website--alas).  

I'll be writing up the sessions in greater detail for our Insight enewsletter and the Catalogue e-business website. In the meantime, though, here are a few of my favourite quotes:

"You can't just throw money at the web. If you don't involve the right people and you don't think about your user, you'll have a crappy site."--Amy

"Keywords you consider relevant to your business might be keywords that no-one searches for except your CEO."--Stephan, in discussing the need to conduct keyword research for the most effective SEO.

"Navigation is about 60 percent of success."--Amy

"Long URLs are repellent, pushing the user to look at the [search] listing below."--Stephan

"Anything after an ampersand, people do not see."--Amy

I'll let you know when I've put together a more thorough summary of the session, which covered everything from meta tags to trigger emails to Twitter.--SC