May 26, 2004
In
This Issue:
1. Setting Your Shipping Costs
2. In the News - Are All Search Engines the Same?
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Finding Related Words in Google
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Setting Your Shipping Costs
One of the hurdles we always seem to face when developing a commerce
site for a client is how to handle shipping costs. When a business
decides to start selling widgets online, orders can come in from
anywhere in the world and the web site has to be able to tell the
shopper what it will cost to ship that widget. (Hiding shipping
costs, you may know, is a great way to make sure customers DON'T
buy from your web site.)
It's easy enough to look at your company's blue widget and determine
what it will cost to ship one to California, or Texas, or New
York. But what about when someone orders three blue widgets? Or
six?
What about when they order three blue widgets and two green widgets?
Suddenly it's not so easy to know what it will cost to ship that
order to California, Texas, or New York. Say, for example, that
your company sells souvenir baseball caps with your company logo
on the front. You decide that it'll cost about $5 to ship one
anywhere in the U.S. But, if someone orders three caps, are you
going to
charge $15 for shipping? You'll lose a lot of customers that
way; we all know caps are light enough that shipping three will
barely
cost more than shipping one.
If you have an unlimited budget, you might consider some of the
automated options available via shipping databases. You can
purchase databases of all the zip codes in the U.S. and tie it
in with
zone-based and weight-based shipping information from UPS,
for example, and
develop an extremely accurate system for estimating shipping
costs on your web site. We're of the opinion that most of our
clients
don't need to go to such extremes, and spend that much money
to solve an issue that can be handled more cost-effectively. What we suggest to our clients -- and what we'd suggest to you,
no matter who hosts and develops your commerce web site -- is
this:
1. Determine what will be your primary shipping method -- USPS,
UPS, FedEx, etc. (I'll use USPS for this example.)
2. Determine a "base shipping rate" based on the minimum
you can expect to spend to ship one item ordered from your web
site. USPS Priority Mail, for example, has a minimum charge of
$3.85. If you use USPS, your base shipping rate might be $4 ...
or $5 if you know most of your items weigh more than is allowed
under that $3.85 rate.
3. Determine a per item shipping charge for each product you
plan to sell. For example, those baseball caps may have a $1
per item
shipping cost.
4. On your web site, when an order is placed, start with the
base shipping charge and then add in the per item price of
every item
ordered. The sum is what you charge for shipping.
So, to continue the example above, if you start with a base
shipping charge of $4 and add in $1 for each cap ordered,
someone who
orders one cap will be charged $5 for shipping, someone
who orders two
caps will be charged $6, etc. It's not a perfect method
for setting shipping costs, but for most types of products, it
should be
the most cost-effective method. In the end, you should
expect to make
money on some orders (when you charge more for shipping
than the actual cost) and lose money on others (when it costs
more than
what you charged). Hopefully, those two instances will
balance out over the long haul.
_________________
In The News
You can imagine how quickly the news spread this past week when
a study of Internet users suggested that Google isn't much different
from other search engines. What?! Google's just another search
engine??!! That was the reaction at a lot of Internet news sites.
The study was conducted by a California company, Vividence Corp.,
and it involved 2,000 adult web users. Based on their study,
Vividence concluded that search engines like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves,
MSN, etc.,
return "correct or useful results" almost as often as
Google. Quoting from CNN/Money's report, "when asked to find
the leading cause of death for 25-34 year olds, Google users found
the correct answer 55 percent of the time, compared with 52-54
percent of the time for its competitors."
That's all fine and good, but here's the problem:
The vast majority of Internet searches are far less specific
than "what's
the leading cause of death for 25-34 year olds". According
to the most recent statistics I've seen, nearly two out of every
three searches are three words or less. People go to search engines
and type things like "digital cameras" or "los angeles
hotels"; they don't type "what's the leading cause of
death for 25-34 year olds". When you use a detailed search
query like that, you limit the amount of possible pages that can
be returned for the search, so it makes sense that Google's SERPs
will be similar to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and the others.
On the other hand, when you do a real world search that's only
a couple words long, you most definitely do get different results.
Remember the Google vs. Yahoo
comparison tool from Newsletter #5? When you use that to compare Google's and Yahoo's SERPs
for the
phrase "digital camera", it's pretty obvious how different
the results are: Only three sites appear in the Top 10 listings
on both search engines. What's more, four of Google's Top 10 don't
appear in Yahoo's Top 100 (and vice versa).
I'm not trying to suggest that Google is necessarily better
than Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, or the others. On some kinds of searches
it
is, and for other kinds of searches, the others may be better.
But this "news" that they're all pretty much the
same just isn't accurate.
News - Survey: Google's power overstated
Yahoo
vs. Google: "digital camera"
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
Search engine user attitudes
May 25, 2004 - Search Engine Watch
Interesting article details recent surveys about how people use
search engines.
E-Commerce sales fell in first quarter
May 21, 2004 - Reuters
U.S. retail sales over the Internet fell 11.4 percent in the
first quarter of 2004, but rose 28.1 percent over the same
period a year
earlier.
'Future of search will make you dizzy'
May 21, 2004 - InternetNews.com
"Think about how the Web has changed your life in the
last 10 years. Now, try to extrapolate 10 years forward and you
should
feel dizzy."
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Hi Matt,
You mentioned a couple weeks ago the need to use related words
on our pages in order to rank well with Google. It was when you
were discussing that GoRank study about Google. [Ed. note: This
was in Newsletter #11.] The example you used was that a web page
about carpeting should also include "rug" and "flooring" because
those are two words that Google considers to be related to "carpeting".
How do we find out what Google thinks the related words are for
our web site and pages?
Chris
Hi Chris -- I probably should've answered this one back in the
original article, huh? Sorry about that. It's not that difficult
to find out -- you just have to know a little bit about how to
use that search box Google offers. Let me start with my previous
carpeting example, which used the following as my search term:
~carpet -carpet
The first part of that, ~carpet, tells Google that you want
to search for "like carpet". The tilde means "similar
to". The second part of that search, -carpet, tells Google
that you want to search for "minus carpet." In other
words, you've just searched for "like carpet, but not including
carpet."
Now type that into Google's search box and look through the
results. You'll start to see a few words in bold here and there
-- "flooring," "rug," and
a couple other similar words. Bingo! Those are the words
Google views as similar to "carpet." You can
do the same thing for the important words and phrases on
your
site. But one important
note: this trick is most effective on single words. It
doesn't work as well for multi-word phrases.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
Those of you who write content for a web site, or for some other
purpose, may want to check out this wonderful article by Pat Holt,
Ten Mistakes
Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do).
You may recognize some of the discussion in your own work; I sure
recognize some in mine. And if you want to know who Pat Holt is
and that she knows what she's talking about, click the "About" link
in the upper left.
See you next week! Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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