One Positive Day: April

Keeping my promise to write positive things on the first day of the month, every month, here's what I've found.

One Way Furniture has an RSS feed that customers and prospects can subscribe to. The latest article talks about "baby furniture on a budget".

eHobbies also has a series of RSS feeds, check them out.

Rokenbok CEO John Brady started his own blog. Here's a quote from his first post: What I’d like to do in the future is address issues that we've heard from our customers, ask questions of people like you, share ideas, invite response and suggestions, criticism or pats on the back, whatever. I want to begin a dialogue and ask that you join me, if you’re interested. I look forward to a good on-going conversation. The toy company also allows you to embed their videos into your own blog --- here's how.

Calendars.com shares the best selling calendars with their audience, on the right side of the page. For a first time visitor, it's a neat way to potentially buy something, feeling confident the item is reasonably popular.

Lids.com merchandises the home page in a topical manner, featuring baseball hats for opening day, and features NCAA Mens Basketball merchandise related to the Final Four. Nice job of merchandising, nice job of capturing demand.

Scentiments.com promotes a "Scratch and Sniff" technology on the homepage. Click on the link on the homepage to learn about the technology. I promise you'll be rewarded for your efforts if you do this today, April 1, 2007.

Nordstrom Integrates RSS Feeds And Search Results

Nordstrom recently implemented use of RSS feeds, as part of the search process within their multichannel retail website.

Give this a try: Visit the Nordstrom website. Search for a shoe brand, like Donald J Pliner. You'll notice a little RSS button halfway down the page, on the right side of the screen. Click on the image, and you will be taken to a page that allows you to subscribe to the feed for this brand, using several popular feed readers. You'll receive updates as new styles become available.

This is an interesting take on the implementation of RSS within the multichannel retail community. Did the Nordstrom Marketing folks do this well, or should they have attempted a different strategy? Your thoughts?


P.S.: In the spirit of full disclosure, I worked at Nordstrom from January 2001 to March 2007.

Four Out Of 150 Online Retailers Truly Leverage RSS Feeds

I entered the URLs of the top one hundred and fifty online businesses in the Internet Retailer Top 500 into my Firefox browser. Of these one hundred and fifty leading online retailers, a grand total of four (4) lit up the URL line with the RSS symbol.

Of the four retailers, one really takes advantage of the technology. Apple does a spectacular job of allowing customers to pull a myriad of information about the company into their browser. One of the stories in their feed talks about podcasting. This article is actually a link to a story in the press about Apple and Microsoft's Zune product. In this article, Apple takes you to PC Magazine to read a product review. These are good examples of using RSS technology to link internal information, articles in the press, and product reviews. All of this technology is close to free --- somebody has to identify the material, and get it into the feed. The customer just sits at home or work, using Bloglines or Google Reader to read the information anytime the marketer wishes to make it available.

Three other retailers use RSS feeds to directly sell featured merchandise to the customer.

Newegg features many different products in their feeds. For instance, this article features a ViewSonic monitor. Their feed offers numerous product selections.

Zappos and their marketers continue to outpace their online and multichannel competition. Within their feed, you can see featured merchandise, like this Michael Kors Handbag for $371.

Buy.com also features an assortment of merchandise in their RSS feed. Here is a Crucial 1GB CompactFlash card for $30.

Apple, Newegg, Zappos and Buy.com --- four out of one-hundred and fifty in the Internet Retailer Top 500 who are taking the time to experiment with different ways to market merchandise via RSS feeds. Kudos to each of them for leveraging this inexpensive marketing channel.

An Example Of An E-Commerce Site That Has A Human Feel

Earlier this week, I asked "What Is Wrong With E-Commerce". A nice person named Thomas Holmes (check out his site) had a thoughtful response to my discussion, and better yet, forwarded a site that has more of a "human" feel to it. Check out Little Paper Planes.

This site is neat! Really neat! It isn't a cookie-cutter site. On the top of the page, there's a discussion about holiday orders, with an actual e-mail address that the visitor can contact.

Notice on the left side of the page there's an actual blog-style discussion from an actual human being. The site offers e-mail signup and access to their RSS feed (which I just subscribed to).

In spite of these little innovations that give a human feel to the site, the proprietor still does a lot of selling on the homepage. I would classify this site as a "hybrid website".

Now it's your turn. Let's use this forum to share with each other examples of e-commerce websites that do a great job of balancing selling with offering a "human" feeling to the cold process of online shopping. Are there sites you visit that meet this criteria?