Performance Marketing Insights is a two-days inclusive performance marketing conference & exhibition that will be taking place in London on Tuesday-Wednesday, 29-30 October, 2013.

This event hosts more than 100 industries, with high profile speakers willing to share insights on advanced multi-channel strategies. PMI is expecting over 1,200 attendees.

As we speak, all Lengow’s efforts are pushing towards helping you achieve better online marketing performances across any online distribution channels including Price Comparison Sites, Marketplaces, Affiliation, AdExchanges, Retargeting, Sponsored Links and more.

Lengow’s UK Team will be available at Stand 38.

If you have been lucky enough to reach a certain level of success in your business, you may be looking to expand your activity beyond borders. More specifically, you may have already considered selling your products to the French market. But you may be also wondering if you’ll eventually need to learn French (good luck with that), if you’ll need to open a subsidiary in France? Or maybe even pay taxes over there? Relax, the answer is ‘no’. But here are a few hints for you about marketplaces selling in France.

How’s e-commerce doing in France?

France is Europe’s 3rd market in value with around 45 billion € in cumulated online revenue in 2012, just behind Germany (50 billion €) and UK estimated to be a 90 billion € market the same year.

Specialists estimate that France counts 110.000 to 130.000 online shops (source) but professionals and service providers consider that the amount of e-shops that are ‘active’ (meaning ‘the ones who actually make money online‘ basically) is much smaller.

France has a slowly decreasing average basket value of 85€ per transaction (-1% versus year before). But this particular KPI being decreasing year on year is not necessarily a wrong sign. As shoppers integrate more and more online purchase in their consumption patterns, they tend to shop more often for smaller amounts and for a wider range of articles. This is compatible with the increase of number of transactions that went up by 25% in 2012.

Should you sell your products in France ?

Well, depending on the type of products you’re specialized in, the answer can be somehow different. However, French shoppers are sensitive to a wide range of offers including fashion, travel, home furnitures, high-tech and electronics, so there’s a lot of product categories that can appeal to French people.

10 reasons why you should bet on marketplace selling :

1°) Marketplaces are among the fastest growing e-commerce websites worldwide. French versions of Amazon, eBay, Pixmania or Rakuten’s PriceMinister receive millions of visitors each month. So, it’s highly unlikely that you will not reach your target, even abroad.

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Last week, Lengow announced Pipeline, a new tool that will be available on October 15th. Pipeline is Lengow’s new feature that lets you track and analyze buying patterns on your e-commerce website.

Integrated within it’s tracking solution, Lengow Pipeline allows it’s online retailers to track and analyze buying patterns on their online stores.

Thanks to this tool, online retailers can track the source and the journey of both abandoned and completed purchases on their webstore, as well as which channels the user went through before.

Pipeline is very simple and intuitive yet powerful and very rich in data. Lengow’s statistic dashboard gathers multiple information allowing to fine analyze and tune e-tailer’s acquisition strategies. New e-merchants are able to visualize all the channels which participated in the sales, not only the last one !

This tool, with its multiple data sources, allows online retailers to make intelligently informed decisions when building customer acquisition strategies.

Moreover, with its simple, powerful, and intuitive interface, you will be set up and benefiting from pipeline’s data in only a few minutes.

Build the purchase funnel that suits your case :

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Lengow’s Feed-Management Tool allows e-merchants to quickly and easily index their products catalogue on any e-commerce channels in the world : shopbots, marketplaces… As a matter of fact, once our clients’ product feeds are sent through these channels, they just have to optimize the feed daily in order to keep it up to date and improve their products’ SEO.

Marketplaces and Shopbot are the most commonly used e-commerce channels but have a completely different business model.

Some useful reminders:

The source feed is the file which links the merchant’s catalogue to the channels’ database. The feed includes all the required information related to the product sold : name, description, size, color, price, delivery, shipping costs, etc.

Shopbots provide customers with a list of classified offers sorted by ascending prices.  If a visitor clicks on one of the offers on the list he will be redirected to the merchant’s website. With shopbots, the transaction is processed on the merchant’s website. E-retailers pay shopbots on a CPC-basis which means that every time someone clicks on its offer the merchant will pay the shopbot a small commission for bringing in a visitor on its website. The commission depends on the product category and can vary from 0.10 up to 0.50 cts per click.

Note: although some shopbot will take a percentage on the final amount of the sale there are very few shopbots that still work that way.

Marketplaces provide visitors with a list of offers from multiple sellers. As opposed to shopbots, marketplaces take care of the entire buying experience. Thus, visitors are never redirected to the merchant’s website. As a result, marketplaces make money based on their third-party sellers’ performance (CPA) by charging a percentage (usually from 8 to 15%) of the final amount of the sale.

As a matter of fact, marketplaces’ commission rates can be more expensive than shopbots’s CPC ; however marketplaces offers a no-sale no-fee basis where sales are guaranteed. Whereas with shopbots, you will pay a few cents/click to attract new visitors on your website that you will still have to convert into clients. This traffic acquisition technique is much more random and can be even more expensive in the long run if your conversion rate is too low. Remember: take a moment to think about it before!

e.g. If your conversion rate reaches 2% (that means for 100 visitors on your website only 2 of them will actually buy something) your customer acquisition cost (called CAC) will be 50 times your cost per click (CPC) because on average,  you need to acquire 50 visitors to sell once.

Carefully optimizing your product feed is highly recommended for any e-commerce channels you choose.

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When considering marketplace selling, there are a few things that you might want to think about in order to be sure you’re on the path to success and not making a strategic mistake. You got to know what are the caracteristics of the battlefield and Lengow is here to help you with this.

On your way to success, selling on marketplaces is a mandatory step to drive your business forward. Here are some pros and cons about selling through marketplaces.

Pros :

Audience is Massive : Marketplaces are among the fastest growing ecommerce websites in the world. Amazon, eBay, Pixmania or Rakuten’s PriceMinister receive tens of millions of visitors each month. And this is targeted audience that you can’t ignore.

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As you may already know, marketplaces are shopping websites where online buyers choose among thousands of third-party e-tailers in a secure and optimized interface for business. eBay and Amazon are the most famous marketplaces of them all.

Here are the 5 pillars of marketplaces that you should understand and remember at all time when selling through online marketplaces.

During the Lengow Ecommerce Day, we spoke about a new service on the platform which is available to Lengow customers: Lengow Campaign Tracking

Lengow Campaign Tracking is a new tool which can be used by merchants to track all their marketing campaigns.

The advantage of this new tool is that merchants will be able to analyze all the data from their online web-marketing campaigns (affiliation, newsletters, SEM, Tickets, or any clicking actions which can be tracked) and not just the data from their product catalog.

This new system will make it possible to optimize various online marketing activities within the Lengow solution. Providing various performance indicators in real-time across all campaigns: sales, clicks, acquisition costs and profitability of actions…

Lengow will centralize and collect the data, providing a global overview of all the marketing channels the merchant wants within a user friendly interface.

Within the coming weeks, many additional developments will be made to enhance the functionalities of this tracking solution in order to achieve a very sophisticated level of analysis, providing different views such as buying tunnels, conversion tunnels or behavioral transformation.

The business model of this new product will be based on clicks, each merchant will be able to credit their account with packs of clicks to use for their campaigns, every merchant using Lengow will receive a free pack of 10 000 clicks to test this new product!

Lengow Campaign tracking is an additional service which is added to the Lengow platform, it will allow merchants to go further in the global tracking of their web marketing campaigns.

This product will be available in your accounts in the coming days, our account managers are available for you for further explanations, do not hesitate to contact us if you want to know more about the tool!

Today, many e-tailers are analyzing the prices of their competitors and this task can be tedious and time consuming. Currently few suppliers offer an advanced price analysis solution for e-tailers and no solution offers a dual action of both an automatic Price Watch and data feed management.

As of today Lengow offers the Lengow Price Watch, allowing e-tailers to easily and automatically monitor the prices of their competitors!

“Managing your online marketing campaigns in different channels is as important as keeping track of the prices of your competitors. Lengow now offers these two elements into a single SaaS solution. Each e-tailer can now monitor the prices of their competitors and act upon the results by optimizing each campaign accordingly: for instance by only sending the products with a competitive price to CSEs,” says Mickael FROGER in the official press release.

Monitor each competitor

Within the Lengow interface you can monitor as many competitors as you want. Each competitor can be defined as important or less important in order to create different automatic rules (for example, if my product is more expensive than that of an important competitor, then I want to deactivate this product). Once the competitor’s URL is indicated in Lengow, the Price Watch is performed automatically on the URL of each product the e-tailers wishes to monitor.

If you are selling on Amazon or Ebay, we will automatically look for the best price if a seller is better positioned than you on a product.

The monitoring is done through URL matching: you combine the URL of your competitor’s product page with your own product SKU in Lengow. A robot will then automatically crawl this product page for information such as selling price, delivery costs or crossed price.

This matching can be done in several ways:

• Manual matching: For each product SKU you wish to check, you manually enter the corresponding URLs of your competitors in Lengow.-
• Matching by import: You import a file containing your competitors’ URLs matching them with your own product SKUs.
• Automatic matching: Currently under development, this functionality will allow you to automatically scan a competitor’s website in order to match their product URLs with the SKU’s in your product catalog.

A clear overview of the prices

Once the URL matching has been done, on a daily basis, the robot will retrieve the price information for the products you wish to monitor and store this information within the Price Watch interface.

The interface allows you to get a clear and quick overview of all the products monitored for each competitor, with price information, the price variations in time in a graph and a distribution of “good” or “bad” prices.

Adjust your prices automatically

For every competitor you will be able to automatically adjust your price whenever it is higher than that of your competitor.

This functionality is only available for marketplaces and can be activated or deactivated for each competitor in order to better control the pricing and positioning of your products.

Perfectly adapted to the Lengow solution

The advantage of the Lengow Price Watch is the fact that it is integrated into the Lengow solution: You will be able to simultaneously monitor the prices of your competitors and act upon the results by optimizing your data feed, in order to strengthen your price positioning and strategy on different channels.

As the Lengow Price Watch is incorporated directly into the Lengow solution, you will easily retrieve and keep track of all the information concerning each product monitored under the Product Management tab:

Furthermore, with the information collected you will be able to:

Create Segmentations: With the segmentation function, you can create a filter on your products for CSEs, only pushing products for which you have a better price than your competitors.

Create Automatic Rules: For example, using the automatic rules, you can decide to lower your price on marketplaces if your main competitor (or all of your competitors) has a lower price on a specific product.

From now on, you will be able to monitor the prices of your competitors and build a strategy accordingly on all your online marketing channels based on the price positioning in comparison with your competitors.

For more information about Lengow Price Watch, please contact your Account Manager.

 

 

E-retailers save the date: on Thursday, April 11^th will take place the first Lengow Ecommerce Day in Paris!

Lengow is pleased to organize an event fully dedicated to online retailers and to new market trends. The main aim of this show is to connect all the major e-commerce players, to give answers to merchants’ issues and to convey keys to success.

This event will take place on Thursday, April 11^th in the conference centre Tapis Rouge in Paris (67 rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, 75010 Paris, France). The Lengow Ecommerce Day will offer highlights and times for favourable appointments: round-table conferences, workshops…

All the programme’s details (workshops, participants…) and registration are available on a dedicated site (in French): www.lengow.fr/ecommerceday/

Themes approached during the event:

• Retailers vs. pure players
• Marketplaces
• New payment options
• Geolocalisation
• E-logistics
• Social CRM
• Hosting and outsourcing
• E-shops internationalization
• Sales period
• New essential tools for successful campaigns
• Networking

Thanks a lot to all our partners: So Cloz, Oxalide, Paymill, Orium, Paybox, SpreadButton, PriceMinister and Be2Bill.

We are looking forward to meeting you on this e-commerce day! All you have to do is to register!

As part of its participation at the Retail Business Technology Expo show in London, Lengow is pleased to announce that all new clients will enjoy a special offer to discover our data feed management solution and its features.

Every new client will benefit from a special pricing to list their products on marketplaces:

One marketplace feed (with a limit of 10,000 products) within the marketplaces integrated in the Lengow solution for only £25 per month!

Thanks to this welcome offer, new clients will quickly and easily index their products catalogue on marketplaces and discover how Lengow can help them to optimise the management of their online marketing campaigns.

To take advantage of this offer, contact Lengow UK team by phone, +44 203 318 26 31, or by email at .

lengow.co.uk

Terms and conditions: this offer is not available to existing customers of Lengow.  This offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer. If the merchant wants more feeds, he automatically changes for the regular Lengow pricing rates.