By Crystal Silvas

Located in the heart of fashionable Los Angeles, California, Apparel Showroom is unsurpassed in its vibrant and varied selection of wholesale women’s and junior missy clothing. One look at Apparel Showroom’s sleek Web site will have you and your buyers wanting more.

All of the wholesale clothing at Apparel Showroom is neatly categorized by collection so that discovering the perfect article of clothing for your shop is as simple as it is exhilarating. Customers may browse pages which showcase some of the sexiest styles available today including sections for wholesale tops, closeout jeans, skirts, dresses, active wear, maternity wear, handbags, sunglasses and even accessories. All of their products are deeply discounted and are of the utmost quality.

Ever since Tim O’Reilly, technology promoter and publisher, coined the term Web 2.0 for next gen web sites that encourage user-generated content, e-commerce site managers have been exhorted to develop tools for user feedback, user reviews, user ratings of content and user collaboration. The Web 2.0 trend toward more user-generated content, which is often tucked under the label of Social Media, just got another strong push.

Trusted Site and Trusted Users X 30

From surveys conducted by the live entertainment, half-price ticket seller Goldstar, which serves multiple audiences (show producers, venue managers, customer/attendees), online customers were more influenced to purchase tickets by positive user reviews at the web site than they were dissuaded by an expert critic’s negative review. Thirty times more influenced!

We left emerging search engine race horses galloping up the inside race track last time we scanned which engines are winning or losing, in Search Engines Duke It Out: Goliath vs. David vs. David’s Brother.

To recap: Yahoo! “knocked Google down a peg” in customer satisfaction – Yahoo! improved 4% in user satisfaction vs. Google’s 3.7% decline. Tier 2 engines showed greatest user satisfaction improvement (Ask.com) and largest customer satisfaction decline (AOL) in that same University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction survey. We also noted the classic Little Guy vs. Goliath in search marketing: The Open Source Search Project called LAMP (or David’s Little Brother) is taking on Tier 1 Market Dominant Goliath, Google.

Not SEM Dark Horses Anymore

Hachette Filipacchi Media’s Elle magazine has partnered with Yahoo! to create a mobile site devoted to Fashion Week.

The site will be accessible through Yahoo! oneSearch, Elle Mobile and text starting with New York Fashion Week September 5th. The service will continue through Fashion Weeks in Milan and Paris.

“It’s a very simple proposition, really,” Olivier Griot, managing director of mobile at Hachette Filipacchi, said of the new site. “We have built mobile Internet sites — Elle Mobile is one of these sites — and our goal is to aggregate an audience on Elle Mobile to generate page views and bring unique users to these destinations. And in the same way as we do on the regular Internet, we want to be able to sell this audience to advertisers.”

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As if search marketers don’t have enough on their e-commerce plates, they have to sort through latest news on which search engine is gaining or lagging; which SEs are winning or losing the race. In fact, different engines have different handicaps and strengths.

Here’s a recap of measures, rankings, ratings and horse race results for name brand search engines.

Light a LAMP in the Tier-One Darkness?

When your corporate name is synonymous with “search” – as in “to Google” used as a verb for “to search” – there are any number of Davids to challenge the perceived Goliath.

Open Source Search has “David” written into its middle name. Greg Sterling, of Sterling
Market Intelligence, noted at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention that, “Some people are uncomfortable with the power of Google and are interested in alternatives.”

By Crystal Silvas

With the important holiday selling season looming just around the proverbial corner and a series of highly publicized toy recalls in the not-so-distant past, several multichannel toy merchants are re-evaluating the product mix, making toy-testing information available on their Websites or adjusting their search marketing strategies with a focus on making consumers feel safer about buying toys.

Some toy retailers generate almost half of their business between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. This year, however, many are nervously waiting to see if the recent deluge of Chinese product recalls will affect their sales.

While not all of the recalls were related to toys, the sheer number of recalls has been unprecedented and the fear is that some consumers may start putting away their wallets as soon as they see the words, “Made in China.” If so, this could hit the toy industry especially hard since approximately 85% of all toys available in the United States are made in China.

For over a decade the Internet has been changing the way we do business, but most critics underestimated how much it was really changing consumers. A stronger, savvier consumer has emerged. This consumer has ever-rising expectations and increasing demands, both online and off. We’re in a tidal wave of change as it relates to marketing and branding. Traditional businesses and brands can no longer say, “That’s a Web thing.” We are approaching a brand new era. Some like to call it Web 2.0. But whatever you call it, it’s a relatively new phenomenon for brands that don’t consider their home base to be on the Web.

Internet behemoth Google Inc. is being sued by American Airlines for the unauthorized use of trademarks and services identifying the airline to Internet users, according to a complaint filed on August 16.

Google’s search engine is allegedly helping third parties to mislead consumers and misappropriate the American Airlines marks by using them as keyword triggers for paid advertisements.

“In working through this business dispute, American is hopeful that it will continue professional, friendly and fruitful relationships with Google, while finding an appropriate resolution to the trademark issues,” said an American Airlines representative in a prepared statement. Google did not return their calls. Google’s trademark policy states, “Google will not disable keywords in response to a trademark complaint.”

Lead counsel for this lawsuit, Terence P. Ross, is no stranger to keyword lawsuits. He worked on similar suits for clients including Wells Fargo and 1-800 Contacts. Ross was not available for comment.

U.S. flag sales are apparently on the rebound according to many retailers. Flag sales hit record levels after the September 11th terrorist attacks of 2001 and again shortly after the Iraq war began in 2003, but sales already started to slump by 2004. Now it seems flag sales are picking up again. Many believe that this year’s steady sales are fueled by regular Memorial Day and Independence Day purchases plus the replacement of worn flags from those peak sale times. Others see sales as a direct result of increased support for U.S. troops. Whatever the reason behind it is, more Americans are buying flags these days.