ETD: 964 Just-In-Time Payment System; What's e-mail?; SEO gone
bad: BMW delisted from Google
E-Tailer's Digest
etd_post at gapent.com
Mon Mar 20 20:45:47 GMT 2006
E-Tailer's Digest --- Everything for the Retailer
Issue #0964 March 21, 2006
George Matyjewicz, Moderator mailto:georgem at gapent.com
Published by: GAP Enterprises, Ltd. http://www.etailersdigest.com
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CONTENTS
[1] Greetings
[2] Just-In-Time Payment System
[3] What's e-mail?
[4] SEO gone bad: BMW delisted from Google
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[1] Greetings.
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Hi All:
Alan Zell has updated information on the difficulties of a
"Just-In-Time Payment System." He also talks about the rate of sale
and the difficulties POS apps have in calculating that important
piece of management information.
I assume everybody has heard of search engine optimization
(SEO). BMW and Ricoh both used SEO tactics, and were caught and
delisted by Google in Germany. BMW used the ancient tactic of a
doorway page whereby the page contained the term "gebrauchtwagen"
(which means used car) 40 times. The user is then redirected to a
different page which contains the same term only twice. This was done
so that users searching for the term "used car" would be redirected
to BMW's website instead of other car sales websites. How on earth
a big company like BMW (and Ricoh) could stoop so low is beyond me.
We have some more information from Jules Kaplan on "What's email?"
from our last digest. Interesting stats.
Gifts and Decorative Accessories is asking you to take part in their
7th annual Retailer Comparison Survey. The results of this survey
will be published in our June issue. All responses are combined; no
individual responses will be identified or published. The survey is here...
http://www.researchtodayonline.com/data/GDARetComp06.htm
Now, let's get to everything for the retailer.
Sincerely
George Matyjewicz, PhD
Chief Global Strategist, GAP Enterprises, LLC
mailto:georgem at gapent.com
http://www.etailersdigest.com
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[2] Just-In-Time Payment System
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George, there are two aspects to the post about payment by POS systems.
1) The ratio of markup between "first-cost"and retail when
importing. Your calculations are a 16::1 ratio. I believe that is
higher than what is happening when bringing in goods to the US. I
see the guideline for determining US Suggested Retail Price (SRP) to
be between 8 and 12 X first-cost. Sure, if something can take a
higher ratio, all the better. From my experience it has been that an
item lands in the US and 1.5 X first-cost. If that is keystoned, it
wholesales for 3X first-cost and a retailer would keystone that for
6X first cost. If a distributor is put in between, then the retail
goes to either 10X or 12 X depending on whether the distributor just
warehouses and sells the goods or buys and resells the
goods. Remember, these are just guidelines, but I have found they
are pretty close to what is being done. In some instances, where
items are "blind" the markups my be keystone plus (2.25 to
2.5) instead of keystone which would increase the ratio between
first-cost and SRP.
2) The trouble with POS systems, is not in the payment routing, it is
in the tracking of "rate of sale" i.e that it shows sales per month
and to-date but one does not see a "horizontal" picture of what is
selling when. For this reason, items are reordered when they do not
or should not be reordered.
I am always fascinated with the comments on your newsletter.
Alan
Alan J. Zell, Ambassador Of Selling
Winner of the Murray Award for Marketing Excellence
Member, PNW Sales & Marketing Group
Member, Institute of Management Consultants
You are invited to learn about programs and services and
article on business topics that affect selling at www.sellingselling .com
+++ [Moderator's Comments] +++
Your ratios are more accurate. The numbers I used were for example
only. I didn't want to confuse people with exact numbers.
My doctoral dissertation used the concept of a Just-In-Time Payment
System which I based on a direct debit system, which had to use a
standard currency that everybody will accept. Contrary to what
people may believe, the banking systems in a major part of the world
is primitive. Debit cards as we (and Europe and Australia) know them
do not exist in other countries/continents. So, a Just-In-Time
Payment System would need a standard, readily-accepted payment
type. I chose gold.
You are correct about the rate of sale. Too many retailers get in
trouble ordering the way they do. Yet, there are simple concepts
that one can use to make life easier.
George
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[3] What's e-mail?
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Here are some facts we have observed over the last 3 years.
B2B - The number of email address for business is only about 50%
B2C - The number of email address for consumers about 70%
and if they are in the age group under 30 years the % if
higher.
Our Online payment system www.inovium.com that we offer to business
does relay heavily on email notification.
Our observation: Many businesses do not want to give out email
addresses for fear of spam. Consumers are not as fearful as businesses.
Many businesses who have been around say for more than 10 years the
database structure of their customers normally will not include an
email address, but they will contain a fax number. We have found
that the number of B2B customers, the number of fax telephone numbers
available is in the very high 90's %. When it comes to consumers B2C
the fax numbers are low, which is not surprising.
So how did we overcome the problem of sending invoice and payment
data to our payees customers. Easy - we have a procedure if an email
address is not present, we send the data by fax. If no email or fax
information available on the payer, we send it to the senders fax or
as an attachment to the senders email address, so the payee can send
the data out by good old snail mail. Now we have 100% of
communication with all customers of the payee.
Yours truly,
Jules Kaplan
Chairman / Founder
Inovium Corporation
702-254-6385 / FAX 702-926-9629
http://www.inovium.com
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[4] SEO gone bad: BMW delisted from Google
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BMW (and Ricoh) have had their German web pages removed from Google
because they have been using deceptive means to boost ranking,
according to the search engine.
The delisting was announced on a blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog)
by Google employee Matt Cutts, who warns that Google's team will
continue ramping up its anti-spam efforts.
It its quality guidelines, Google says it won't accept 'cloaking'(or
doorway pages), a technique webmasters use to hide code from a user
or bot. "To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results,
Google may temporarily or permanently ban from our index any sites or
site authors that engage in tactics to distort their search
rankings," say Google's guidelines.
A doorway page is full of keywords the site wants to be optimized for
- however, as opposed to real pages, the doorway is only displayed to
the search bot. Normal visitors are redirected to another page upon
visit. In BMW's case, their doorway page contained the term
"gebrauchtwagen" (which means used car) 40 times. The user is then
redirected to a different page which contains the same term only
twice. This was done so that users searching for the term "used car"
would be redirected to BMW's website instead of other car sales
websites. Google specifically denounces doorway pages like this,
because they contain misleading and deceptive content.
And that's what happened at BMW.de
As punishment, searching for terms like "BMW Germany" on Google will,
for at least 30 days, no longer return a direct link to the car
manufacturer's German website. And PageRank has set them to zero.
BMW refused to comment.
Cutts said Google will be paying a lot more attention to spam in
other languages, whether it be German, French, Italian, Spanish or Chinese.
Details...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/06/bmw_removed/
http://www.seoinsideout.com/blogs/34/bmw-site-delisted.html
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/02/05/235218.shtml
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