Marketing your e-commerce site

Obviously, the elements of a good marketing program -- like the make-up of a well-designed Web site -- differ from site to site. These may range from the extensive (and expensive), such as TV ads, to cheaper ad trades or advertising on other small sites.

Not every site can afford the costs of network or local TV ads like Excite.com's, but that doesn't mean that there aren't numerous other effective, low-cost ways to market an electronic commerce site. For examples, we looked to the marketing strategies three dissimilar online sites are using to forge success in highly competitive marketplaces.

Is advertising going to the dogs?
Americans love their pets, especially their dogs, spending $10 billion annually on pet-related items, $4 billion alone on dog food. It's a huge market that Keith Ruoff intends to get his share of via his e-commerce site, Rwoof.com, which sells a small, hand-picked variety of quality dog supplies, including flea shampoos and food.

Ruoff is a former retail buyer at major specialty clothing chains such as Banana Republic and The Gap. He's also a dog owner who finally became frustrated with trying to sort through the dozens of choices of flea shampoos and the like for his dog at his local pet superstore.

"One day, I walked into PetSmart looking for a flea shampoo for my dog -- just something nice, natural and wholesome," he says. "There was a wall of about 50 different shampoos, and I just didn't have time to go through them all trying to figure which one was best. I looked for help, but there was no one around, so I just got disgusted and walked out without buying anything."

That prompted him to open Rwoof.com, a site that acts "almost like a personal shopper" for dog owners. "There's a huge group of people without the time or desire to find out which [product] is the best," he explains.

"We test and research all of those [products on the market] and pick the top three of the best brands, and we tell [our buyers] why they're the best, what's good about them," he explains. "What we found out is that the best product is not necessarily the most expensive -- a lot of what's out there is not only overpriced, [it's] not very good..."

Ruoff believes the limitations of the Internet -- primarily, bandwidth -- mean "the whole concept of the pet superstore can't be transferred to the Web," giving him an edge in competing for discriminating buyers. "Nobody would sit at a computer and go through three thousand products, at least not now," he believes.

Providing a specialized shopping service for pets is only one of the elements of Ruoff's marketing program. He also provides dog "horoscopes" as a way of enticing people back to his site when they aren't buying product.

He's also trying other, more standard marketing measures. "We initially bought a banner ad campaign on Yahoo!, on three or four different pages, just a four-inch by one-inch ad on top of a page," he says.

"It was originally priced at $3,500, and the amount of click-throughs meant it cost us at least $5 per customer to get someone to our Web site. For a smaller business, that's prohibitively expensive.

"Another thing we're doing, and with fair success, is getting into [online] shopping malls, where, for free or a small fee, you get your store listed on the mall," he adds. "We're listed on more than 150 malls, and the neat thing is there are some very specific types of malls, probably 20 to 30 of them, where you can specifically target customers, and get a better response."

Ruoff has come to believe that in marketing "the biggest thing is to talk to everybody, just surf, find sites related to your business, send messages, and work with the media." He's even written and sent out press releases, utilizing one of the online press agencies, the Global Information News Agency (GINA), to distribute them.

He's also enjoyed some success in trading banner ads with some of the small vendors of dog supplies. He's stuck with small vendors for two reasons.

"The major manufacturers are harder to deal with," he says. "We've also found we get a better product from the small, entrepreneurial owners, who tend to put more care into their products."

One of Ruoff's major surprises has been "the number of international sales we've been getting -- and they're big orders, $200 to $500. The pet industry is not well-developed in other countries, and [people there] can't get these types of products."

This has "meant more paperwork, but for a decent order, it's worth it." It's also prompted Ruoff to market his site to international buyers, "spending two or three days going through the international and country-specific search engines, so when someone uses a Japanese search engine to find `dog supplies,' for instance, they find us."

"I can honestly say that we have by far the best functioning and best-looking pet site on the Internet -- not another site comes close to what we offer," he says. "We want to make it an experience, not just sell products."

Winning the domain name game
What's in a name? When you're selling online, it can be everything. For instance, type http://www.shades.com in your browser's Location field and you'll be transported to Peter Adler's Cape Cod, Mass., online sunglasses store. Or enter http://www.wine.com and you'll find yourself viewing Dave Harmon's Napa, Calif., virtual wine emporium.

Adler and Harmon are among those who believe name recognition is a paramount marketing virtue. They bought their domain names (the former acquired the rights to shades.com outright, the latter still shares rights to wine.com with a partner) for their recognition factor.

"We did think it important to get a good domain name," Adler acknowledges, "and we bought [shades.com] because we thought it was a good name." Adler is president of the company that also operates a site dedicated to sales of the Swiss Army knife (it's http://www.swissarmydepot.com).

When he initially took Shades.com online in 1991 on CompuServe, it was the first Web site dedicated to sunglasses. Now, he says there are hundreds listed on the major search engines: "Although some are repeats, I know there are more than 20," he says.

In the competitive sunglasses market -- where he battles not only online stores but regular retail outlets -- Adler believes that "[search engine] placement is important. You don't have to pay to be listed, so it's important to develop the expertise and devote time to learning how to rank high on the search engines.

"If you want your site to be a winner, you have to make the effort to learn the rules of that engine and see why other sites keep coming up high," he says. "The search engines themselves often tell you how they operate, and you can look at other [sites'] search code for their Web pages to see why they are ranking well in the search engines."

In addition, Adler generates traffic to Shades.com "by trying to run a contest at all times -- our manufacturers often have promotions" that he can tie his e-commerce site to. For instance, Ray Ban sunglasses offered a trip to Europe in one contest, and staged a promotion in conjunction with the movie "Blues Brothers 2000," which features the company's Wayfarer models, in another.

"We've also spent heavily to become an America Online merchant because of [AOL's] huge membership," Adler explains. This earns his sites links on the AOL department store as well as other special promotions.

Taking a hint from retailers and their "fire specials," Adler says another traffic builder is a Sale page. "We always have special values," he explains, "and it's a good idea to have [these] on your home page, or at least a link from the home page to the special page."

Although he's "bought keyword banners on the search engines, so when people type `sunglasses,' [Shades.com's] banner comes up," Adler isn't sure whether they're a good buy yet. "They're quite expensive at about $1,500 per month."

Tapping into local resources
Unlike Adler, Dave Harmon doesn't try to compete with either the traditional retailers in his market -- liquor stores and supermarkets -- or Virtual Vineyards, probably the best-known online wine purveyor. Instead, he focuses "more on information than sales, except for sales of rare wines.

"That's where we differ from other 'virtual' vineyards," he explains. "We're trying to give tasting notes and the history of a winery, that sort of thing."

Harmon calls wine.com a "million dollar name, and our demographics are higher-educated, higher-income."

Harmon's site also provides links to more than a hundred boutique and "mom and pop" wineries, who then are free to sell their products to customers individually. He charges a small monthly fee for this link, he says, and also generates income by building Web sites for small Napa Valley wineries.

"We don't try to interest the Internet user in buying a bottle of Mondavi wine at $19, then paying $9 for shipment, although we will sell it to someone in Iowa who can't find it locally," he says. "With vintage and old wines, however, [people pay] what the market can bear. It's not like they can always find these wines, so it's a better deal to buy rare wines than current releases on the Internet."

The Internet also offers small wineries, which generally don't have agreements with national distributors, an opportunity to sell their wines to buyers who otherwise wouldn't have access to them. This, of course, benefits both the e-commerce vendor and the buyer, and acts as a natural traffic for Wine.com.

With access to wine from the Napa area, Harmon has the ability to co-host special events, such as wine tastings in conjunction with radio and TV stations and other food- and wine-related events. He participated in one event that "normally...would have cost me $30,000, but I took 30 cases of my own wine instead."

These types of promotions have helped generate not only traffic to his site, he says, but a story about Wine.com in a food-related monthly magazine. That's the kind of publicity that every marketer will agree helps build business.

Harmon, who used to own a helicopter business, also leases a couple of acres of wine grapes, where he plans to place a digital camera that'll be linked to his Web site. Giving consumers an inside look at the daily operation of a vineyard is sure to generate additional traffic and more business to his site, Harmon believes.

He's also using one of the ad-reach networks (Flycast.com) to both place ads on his site and advertise his site on other Web pages.

His marketing, Harmon says, has brought the people to his site "who are serious about wine, and who place serious orders. If they take the time to read our information, they also take the time to order."

About the article
This article is from the March 1998 issue of Netscape Enterprise Developer.
URL: http://www.ne-dev.com/ned-03-1998/ned-03-ecomm.html