EBay has the “honor” of being in the Wall Street Journal headlines twice today. So what do you want to read about regarding eBay today; trademark infringement or merchants leaving eBay for other smaller niche auction sites ? Looks like eBay may want a little ORM in place to handle this current flood of “news”.

For this post’s purposes we will look at the trademark story. On the heels of a July victory stemming from a 2004 suit brought against them by Tiffany & Co. regarding the sales of fake goods on the auction site, eBay will have to suffer through the appeals process before victory is theirs. Apparently Tiffany’s doesn’t agree with the ruling handed down by US District Court Judge Richard Sullivan. It was Tiffany’s contention that eBay was not doing enough to prevent counterfeit goods from being sold on their site. The ruling stated that trademark holders like Tiffany’s, not eBay, “bore the main responsibility for monitoring eBay’s auction site for fake goods.” Tiffany’s response was “that the court’s ruling failed to apply established principles of trademark law.”

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This should be interesting eCommerce heavyweights have banded together to form the Alliance Against Bait & Click (AABC) to raise awareness about predatory (and possibly illegal) tactics by unscrupulous PPC advertisers. You know the ones - their ads offer something for free (e.g. Firefox), but the clicker arrives at a site that demands payment.

But it’s clear the agenda is much broader - the organizers don’t like the common - and (so far) legal practice of one advertiser bidding on another advertiser’s brand names.

This is a hot potato - if AABC is succesful, they may put a chill on a practice that is in widespread use. We’ll be looking into this more closely and reporting back in this blog. But for now: where do YOU stand?

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Back in 2006, when Google announced the “Quality Score” initiative, Google’s advertising revenue growth seemed unstoppable. Penalizing a few rogue advertisers (’rogue’ being mainly defined as affiliates, made for AdSense sites, or incentivized marketers) might lose Google a few dollars in the short term, but those dollars would quickly be replaced by the hordes of new advertisers rushing to give their marketing budgets to the Google juggernaut.

Since the initial Quality Score launch, Google has expanded the program further, adding comparison shopping engines and travel aggregators to the “most wanted” list in 2007 and factoring in page load time earlier this year (which some have suggested creates an incentive for publishers to run text-based AdSense ads at the expense of non-Google display advertising). Along the way, Google’s revenues have continued to explode. Now that even the most traditional mainstream marketers understand that Internet marketing is no longer just ‘experimental’ budget, advertising competition and CPCs have continued to increase on Google.

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Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ:OMTR), Bazaarvoice and Mercado today announced that Overstock.com is using integrated solutions from the three companies through Omniture Genesis to employ a strategy called “searchandising”—the utilizing of on-site search terms, user-generated product reviews and analytics to optimize product merchandising and relevance.

“Overstock’s ability to deliver relevant search results has a material impact on conversion success,” said Geoff Atkinson, vice president of tactical marketing at Overstock. “The integrated Omniture, Bazaarvoice and Mercado ‘searchandising’ solution provides Overstock with the ability to improve conversion by automatically optimizing search relevance and product merchandising based upon a number of factors, including customer ratings and reviews.”

Overstock uses “searchandising” by feeding data from Omniture SiteCatalyst into Mercado via Omniture Genesis, where Mercado uses the information to optimize Overstock’s search results and site navigation. Overstock displays Mercado search and refinement results that include Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews, which customers can use as a sorting or refinement preference when selecting products to purchase.

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Shopping cart abandonment is a huge challenge for online merchants. eTailers are constantly struggling to understand how they compare to other eTailers and the reasons of cart abandonment so that they can improve their conversions.

Yesterday I came across some interesting survey data that will help shed some light on the average abandonment rates, conversion rate and the main reasons for cart abandonment.

Industry averages

The following charts are from MarketLive Performance Index Volume 4

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Embracing blogs to connect with a company’s network of customers is fait accompli for the tech industry, but what about the rest of the planet that doesn’t put its every movement up on Twitter?

Here are four retailers that are using blogs and social media in an attempt to better connect with customers.

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According to the National Retail Organization, online retail should grow to $204 billion this year, which represents a 17% increase over last year. (Many experts predicted a 20% increase in 2008.) Considering the economy is in a slump, this is very welcome news to online retailers. I personally am not surprised. At Vitabase, our first quarter was up very dramatically over the same period last year.

As is normally the case, the top categories for online retail include apparel, electronics, and cars.

I am especially interested in some other data in the report. For example, 53% of online retailers are spending their marketing budget on customer acquisition while 21% are more focused on customer retention.

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