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Archive for the ‘eCommerce’ Category
Posted: Friday, January 13, 2012 in eCommerce
There are plenty of great ways to distinguish yourself from your competition. Some are expensive and time-intensive and some are completely affordable and just call for a bit of creativity. Today, we’d like to talk about an idea that falls squarely into the second group.
One of our longtime clients, Hot Dog Collars, has a completely adorable site. Seriously. First of all, it’s pretty much devoted to dog collars, so that’s pretty cute already. Second, its mascot is a delightful, google-eyed cartoon dog that our in-house illustration team created just for them. See? Adorable. So when the time came to build an identity for their brand, Hot Dog collars knew just what they wanted: seasonal headers featuring their official spokesdog. Since that time, we’ve created a whole bunch of seasonal and holiday headers for them, each one featuring that same smiling mutt. On the brandbuilding expense spectrum, this is a pretty affordable option and it offers a lot of bang for your buck, especially if you have a lot of repeat business.
Click through to see a gallery of our Hot Dog Collar headers. They’re delightful!
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Posted: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 in eCommerce
 Louis C.K. is a stand-up comic and the star of Louie, a critically acclaimed comedy series that will soon be entering its third season on FX. He also became a millionaire in under two weeks this past December.
Famously independent, C.K. doesn’t just star in his series, he also writes, directs and edits it. Knowing that, it isn’t all that surprising to hear that he chose to produce his most recent concert film (Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon Theater) by himself. What was surprising was his decision to distribute it himself, exclusively, online – without any digital rights management protection (DRM), and (bolder still) without iTunes.
C.K. released the video through his own custom-built website on December 10. It sells at the rock-bottom price of $5 and as of C.K’s last public statement on December 21, the video had earned $1,006,996.17.
… and that was two weeks ago. It’s pretty likely that he’s doubled that by now.
Of course the success of this endeavor is due largely to C.K’s talent and massive popularity, but it could never have been achieved without the magical power of ecommerce, and he isn’t the only artist who’s exploiting that magic, with and without the assistance of The Man.
More artistic adventures in ecommerce after the jump…
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Posted: Wednesday, December 28, 2011 in eCommerce
 There are circumstances under which it is possible to profit by lying to your customers. It’s not a practice that we endorse as an over-arching strategy, but there’s no way to argue with the success of ThinkGeek.com’s annual April Fools’ Day of Being Big Fat Jerkface Liars by Teasing Us With Amazing Things That We Can Never Actually Have Because They’re Totally Made Up. That’s right. Once a year, the nerdy sadists at ThinkGeek create an entire line of fictional products to tease their clientele with dreams of what might have been. Recent offerings include delicacies like Squeez Bacon® and edible gummy iPhone cases alongside innovations that would definitely simplify our lives if they existed, like the Original Shirt Plate (from the makers of Bowl Pants and Sock Spoon). Each of these enticing lies is worthy of our attention, but today, we’d like to talk to you about the iCADE.
The iCADE (shown here) was featured in 2010′s ThinkGeek April Fools’ product line. As a desktop replica arcade cabinet that acts as a dock for your iPad and also allows you to play retro videogame hits, the iCADE is clearly the most important consumer product in all of recorded human history – the one hitch being that it wasn’t an actual product. It was just a joke (a cruel, cruel joke). Unfortunately, the fact that it didn’t exist didn’t prevent the iCADE from making the internet rounds with lightning speed as salivating geeks across the globe had their hopes raised and dashed like nerdy dominoes when, upon rushing to buy this Holy Grail, they found that there was nothing to buy.
Don’t worry. There’s a happy ending after the jump…
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Posted: Friday, December 16, 2011 in Tips and Tricks
 Image by papartrutzi on flickr. Once the leaves fall of the trees, it’s too late to completely redo your online store in time for the holidays, but you can make a little holiday magic with these three down and dirty tips.
1. Do you have clear calls to action? Be sure that emails and banners tell shoppers exactly what to do. While you’re at it, have fun with calls to action. Selling gift-wrapping? How about “Wrap it up?” Have free shipping? Go for “Send it free!” And of course, there is always the clear and concise (but boring), “Shop Now.”
2. Test your ideas: A/B tests are great ways to discover what’s working with your holiday strategy. Test subject lines, calls to action, buttons – anything, really. Once you have the result, optimize your holiday campaign.
3. Tell customers about shipping: Shipping is very important during the holidays. Make sure your customers know that gifts will arrive on time with shipping calculators or free shipping. And do you have free shipping? Tell them loud and clear. Be borderline obnoxious about this one. People don’t like paying for shipping when they have to send fruitcake to their “favorite” uncle.
Posted: Friday, October 7, 2011 in eCommerce, Volusion
 Our good friends over at Volusion are about to make some lucky emerchant’s dream come true!
One person will walk away with a free Volusion store – for life! (The value of the prize depends entirely on how long you plan to live, so you should plan to live a really long time – that’ll show ‘em!)
There are other prizes, too, but how much do you need to know? You’re an emerchant. You like free stuff. Go enter right now!
Posted: Tuesday, October 4, 2011 in eCommerce
 Amazon has introduced its own “hot brand”, “private sale”, “membership-only” clothing site. The overuse of “quotes” here is kind of important, since this is nothing more than Amazon masquerading as an independent (and exclusive) boutique. On the other hand, this does signal a fairly critical step in Amazon’s evolution, especially if you happen to be an online clothing retailer.
Now… what are you doing here when the iPhone event is going on right now?
 Big week here at Brand Labs… our bosses are out of town! With no one around to tell us what to do, that means we can drink milk right out of the carton, have cake for breakfast and stay up all night adjusting PPC campaigns! WOO-HOO!
Of course our ever-vigilant leaders would never leave us unsupervised without a very good reason – two very good reasons, actually. Brand Labs’ president, Kevin Harman, is exhibiting with Volusion at Shop.org’s annual summit in Boston. We’re sharing booth #1113 in the exhibit hall and Kevin is always eager to network after the show, so you should hit him up. He’s like a business-card-hurling free drink machine.
At the other end of our great nation, you’ll find Dane Downer (Brand Labs’ VP) at the very exclusive Google Analytic Partner Summit. You know why you never heard of it? Because you totally weren’t invited. It’s an invitation-only affair for Google Analytics Partners. It’s our understanding that all attendees will actually be able to get their pictures taken sitting on the Google Bunny’s lap! We’re very, very jealous.
 (from left) Ryan Forrest, Katelyn Stanis, Sal Agrusa, Kevin Harman and Dane Downer at IRCE 2011 Fresh off of our inaugural appearance as exhibitors at the Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition, our traveling sales staff has returned with stories and images from the trip.
Here we see our intrepid team gathered in front of our fancy new display which was recently voted the Greenest Trade Show Display in History. But the show wasn’t just about standing around and looking awesome. We also got to hang out with our Volusion friends, meet up with several of our customers, hear Doug Mack and Ariana Huffington speak and introduce ourselves to hundreds and hundreds of IRCE attendees.
The team supposedly got a lot of business done, but if we were to judge solely by the pictures they came back with, it would be easy to assume that the primary reason for the trip was beachgoing and barhopping. We’ll be going over their expense reports with a fine tooth comb, but in the meantime, why not check out the photo gallery after the jump…
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Posted: Tuesday, April 26, 2011 in Brand Labs, eCommerce, News
 It must be conference season because once again, our intrepid leader is about to hit the road. This time, he’ll be attending the very exclusive LessConf in Atlanta, GA on Friday and Saturday this week (April 29 & 30).
Now, you can call something “exclusive” all you want, but the word is so overused that it’s lost all of its meaning… except in this case. Limited to a mere 225 attendees, LessConf is intended to allow for small groups to engage in real discussions about eCommerce and the Internet in general.
With that in mind, Mr. Harman asked that we put a call out to anyone interested in meeting up with him during the conference (especially fellow Michiganders). Either drop Kevin a line at kevin.harman@brandlabs.us or just look for his happy, smiling face and go on up and introduce yourself. He doesn’t bite and can reliably be expected to buy the first round.
Posted: Thursday, March 24, 2011 in Apps and Plugins, Auto Responder Max, Custom Development, eCommerce, Industry, Tips and Tricks, Tips and Tricks, Volusion, Volusion Apps and Plugins
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