Wednesday, July 26, 2006

The Heat Goes On

Have I mentioned that there are Portuguese Man O'War stinging people off the coast of New England? That's how hot it is. Over the weekend, temperatures rose over 110 degrees in parts of California.

The heat's proven too much for our Petits Fours Package Collection to bear. We sent some to Yuma, Arizona. Some of them melted. We sent some more to Yuma, Arizona, (free of charge, because we offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee) and some of those melted. Between the two boxes, the customer had enough for her party, which was good. Temperatures were well over 100 in Yuma at the time, and while that isn't the case everywhere, it's hot enough in enough of the country that we've decided to keep them off the site for a week or so.

If you need petits fours, our Demitasse Party Petits Fours are still available, and they're durable enough to take the heat. They're what we in the business call "shelf stable," which means they can be stored for a time without refrigeration.

The Package Collection is still available, but we're shipping them on a case-by-case basis until things cool down. If you'd like to order some, please call us at 1-800-287-9870 and we'll see if we can get them to you. If you're placing an order for Septemeber 1 and beyond, no problem, just give us a call.

If, like me, you're wondering when this scorching summer will be just an upleasant memory, you'll be happy to know that our Back to School Mini Cookies return on August 1, a sure sign that autumn is coming. That also means that our Spring Mini Cookies will soon be gone, so if you're in need of flowers and ladybugs, be sure to order some soon.

Friday, July 21, 2006

Is Yahoo! Editing Your PPC Campaigns?

I'm beyond frustrated right now as I find myself in Day 2 of undoing the damage that Yahoo! Search Marketing editors have done to my PPC campaign. I wasn't even aware of this until yesterday, when I started modifying our existing PPC ads with new conversion tracking code.

There, among the ads I'd written, were things with titles like, "Affordable Gourmet Gift Baskets" and "Buy Great Cookies at Low Prices." If you're at all familiar with this site, which Yahoo's "editors" clearly aren't, then you know that we don't use words like "affordable," "low prices," or "discount" to sell our products.

In fact, we told Yahoo! this when they sent us a proposed list of keywords, which included the above offending terms along with the ever-popular "cheap." Who wants cheap gourmet cookies? Anyone? Anyone?

Compounding the problem was a series of ads I don't recall creating with URLs pointing to our home page instead of the appropriate category pages on the site. Here's an example:


Buy Great Cookies at Low Prices
Visit 1-800-Bakery.com for great birthday cakes. We also offer pastries,
chocolates, candies, cookies, desserts, bread and more. Amazing prices. Order
online.
http://www.1-800-bakery.com/?src=overture


That conversion code doesn't work with any of our tracking programs. Every one of the suspect ads featured this URL, so my advice to anyone out there running a PPC campaign is to sort through your ads (good luck with their terrible interface, which sets a new benchmark for lack of usability), look for that URL, and see if they've been playing with your campaigns.

I'm infuriated about this on two levels:

1. Yahoo! has misrepresented our site with claims of "amazing prices" and directed potential customers to the home page instead of appropriate landing pages. We paid money for every click generated by these fradulent ads, so we handed somebody cash to make us look bad.

2. I now have to spend my valuable time undoing the damage caused by this editorial tinkering. The deeper I look into what they've done, the more problems I discover.

Once I saw what was going on, I sent them the following e-mail:



Dear Yahoo! Team,

If you want to continue having us as a customer, I would like answers
to the following questions:

1. Who is editing our ads?
2. Why are they editing our ads?
3.
How do I get them to stop doing this?

When we were first approached by Yahoo!, we made it very clear that
terms such as "low cost," "affordable," and "inexpensive" were, under no
circumstances, to ever appear in any of our advertising. Yet there it is.

I've also noticed a number of ads with incorrect URLs and conversion
tracking code. This is, quite frankly, unacceptable on any level.

If these issues cannot be addressed, immediately, then I will take
actions to suspend our account with Yahoo! We will also be reviewing our recent
bills to determine whether or not we paid for misdirected links provided by your
editorial staff.

Sincerely,
Derek Gerry
Senior Producer
1-800-Bakery.com


I did get a prompt reply, as follows (edited to remove identifying account information):



Hello ,

We have reviewed your account per your e-mail concern about your ads
being edited. Your ads are being edited by members of our editorial staff. They
are being edited in order to help your ad get approved. We can stop your ads
from being edited by notating your account. We do apologize for any
inconvenience this may have caused you. Per your request, we will notate your
account internally, for no changes to be made to your title and description in
your account.

If your URL's and tracking codes are incorrect, we apologize for this
inconvenience as well. We can change any part of your ads to whatever you want
us to change them to. You can submit these changes via spreadsheet in your
account, through the edit listings function in your account or you can call us
or e-mail us to inform one of our Gold specialists, the changes that you want to
make.

Once again, we are truly sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused
in your account. For assistance or questions with your account, please call us
at 1-866-YAHOO-SM (1-866-924-6676). Our hours are Monday - Friday: 5:00
a.m.-8:00 p.m., Saturday: 5:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.,
Pacific Time.

Sincerely,
Mark Taylor
Customer Solutions
Yahoo! Search
Marketing

Gee, thanks, Mark, I'll be sure to put a spreadsheet together for you guys. If I'm putting that much effort into it, I might as well make the edits myself. Here's a better idea for future reference: Don't mess around with my campaigns. I don't have to take this aggravation from Google or MSN, and if an ad agency or PR firm ever did this to me, I'd fire them on the spot and sue for breach of contract.

We're in the process of reviewing our logs to determine how much of this unqualified traffic came to our site, and I'm considering whether or not we'll continue to maintain a relationship with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

To the rest of the marketing folks and Web masters out there, let me again advise you to carefully check your campaigns and make sure you're getting the traffic you're supposed to be paying for.

UPDATE:
I've taken 29 listings offline because the descriptions and/or titles contained "low prices," "affordable prices," or "amazing prices," three phrases I would NEVER use to drive qualified traffic to the site.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Consistency Is All I Ask

Today's daily task: Letting DMOZ off the hook, maybe. I was blessed enough to have an actual editor from The Open Directory Project contact me, thanks to some things I've said in my blog. Said editor told me that 1-800-Bakery.com was not eligible for inclusion, and pointed me toward the Editorial Guidelines.

After a thorough read of the guidelines, I couldn't find a single thing that would exclude us. So I wrote back, asking for further explanation.

It turns out that we're the scourge of the Internet. A filthy, evil, insidious, disgusting dropshipper. You thought we were just a nice baked goods gift site, but no, we're unwashed pagans unworthy of entry into the sacred tower that is DMOZ, lest we sully it with our proscribed partnering ways that provide visibility to small bakeries that couldn't afford the online promotion on their own. Mere parasites feeding off the good fortunes of innocent bakers as we help their businesses grow.

All this time I thought my lack of cocktail party invitations was just an oversight on the part of busy friends. Now I wonder, do they know that I work for a dropshipper? Do they avoid me for fear that I might corrupt their children with promises of outstanding customer service and a 100% money back guarantee? Or do they fear that their own will power isn't enough to keep me from seducing them with unique products and one of the largest varieties of any bakery site on the Web?

And where is all this spelled out? The closest thing I could find to the obviously well-advised decision to exclude verminous dropshippers from DMOZ was this sentence in Editorial Guidelines, filed under the ominous heading, "Sites Not to Include:"

Sites devoted to the sales and distribution of a single product should be avoided if they are affiliate sites or if the site is merely a distributor for a manufacturer already listed in the Directory. The purpose of the ODP is not to replicate the individual listings of an online shopping catalog.

I don't see the word dropshipper in there, I suspect because DMOZ is afraid to write it. What I do see in the directory, however, are several sites that carry the exact same products that we sell, such as:

  • Macy's--they sell the same cookies we carry
  • ProFlowers--they also sell the same cookies
  • Home Shopping Network--they sell the same cakes
  • Cooking.com--let's say you're Delightful Deliveries, and you can't get listed in DMOZ because you're a dropshipper. You can always sell through a site that isn't a dropshipper, right? Right!
  • Future Memories--who would ever think that this site was a dropshipper?
  • Bunn Family Gourmet--we can't expect the Bunn Family to make everything they sell. After all, they need time for sleep and family dinners gathered around heaping plates of USDA Prime steaks
  • efendos--or as I like to call them, "eFiendos." Not just a dropshipper, but a "FREE" shipping liar

My editor friend went on to tell me that carrying unique products isn't enough. So it seems dropshippers need to be segregated from the rest of the online community, for the good of us all. I was told that I could file a complaint at the DMOZ Resource Zone, but I don't want to ruin someone else's DMOZ good time, and I find something unsettling about DMZ and Zone in the same sentence.

DMOZ is a private entity, and they're free to run the directory any way they want. That's their right, and I support it. Getting as much as they have out of a group of volunteer editors is commendable, but a little more vigilance across the enterprise would leave me far more gruntled.

The bigger issue is the decision by search engines to rely on outside sources to do their work for them. I can understand anyone not wanting a bunch of editors and writers hanging around the office--we're a general nuisance, and we take all the free food.

But by outsourcing, what should be a level playing field is skewed in favor of those with the money and the influence to get coverage from DMOZ, CNN, Associated Press, and the other "expert" sources. Small businesses face enough of this oppression in the brick-and-mortar world; we don't need it carried on to the Web.

Monday, July 17, 2006

Place Cake Outside, Bake for 30 Minutes

And now the latest from Accuweather: It's freakin' hot out there. Actually, their current headline reads, "Heat stretches from sea to scorching sea." If I was running the site, I'd take everything down and run the following:

Freaking hot.
Stay indoors.

Plus the ads, of course, because they've got to pay the bills.

Extreme heat is the mortal enemy of many a baked good, in particular the cheesecake, which wilts like the Red Sox pitching when Oakland is in town. Our customer research indicates that our customers prefer a cake-shaped cheesecake to a box containing a puddle of cheesecake goo, so we're suspending shipments of them until things cool down a bit. Once the temperature gets below 85 degrees in Chicago, we're all set.

As for the rest of our products, feel free to order them with confidence. Our tarts and layer cakes ship with dry ice, so they stay nice and cool in transit. Most of our cookies and all of our breads and croissants laugh at these rising temperatures in a way that I wish I could.

You can help our baked friends during this hot spell by having them sent to a daytime address where someone will be available to receive them and take them to a cool place. We're still waiving signature on all of our shipments, but the super-perishable stuff, such as tarts and petits fours, will be happier if its not left outside for a few hours.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Another Loss of Confidence

Seems I'm not the only one wondering about the whereabouts and welfare of the editors over at DMOZ. The nice folks over at MarketPosition included an article in their last e-mail explaining how to get MSN to update your site description in their search engine.

Of note in the article is this lovely quote: "But what if you've been trying unsuccessfully to get the Open Directory to update your listing?" Should you send a search party? Alert the FBI? Perhaps, but if you want some results, there's a new meta tag that works with MSNbot to update that tired old description.

Author Scott Goodyear closes the article by saying, "We can only hope that other engines will follow MSN's lead."
And there it is, a mass-media scourging of the hard-working, overburdened DMOZ editors, who will soon fear to look upon other Web sites in their fleeting nanoseconds of downtime as the tide of mildly disgruntled Web masters continues to rise.


DMOZ now joins the President, Congress, and our legal system in losing the confidence of the American public. What can we belive in anymore, if we can't trust a group of unpaid volunteers to provide free indexing for multibillion-dollar behemoths like Google and MSN? The very core of the Internet is starting to fail, and I can only hope it doesn't cause a cascade like the Y2K virus almost did. Imagine a world where search engines are forced to use the meta descriptions written by biased, manipulative Web masters instead of the fair and balanced descriptions created by Starbucks-fueled volunteers, whose only mission in life is to point people toward what's relevant and genuine.

Let's hope that this slap from MSN encourages the powers that be at DMOZ, assuming there are any that can be found, to break out the whips and demand 26-hour days from their underperforming editors, because I don't think I could live in a world where DMOZ didn't guarantee those lucky enough to have their submissions actually reviewed an extra point or two of PageRank.

A number of people suggested that I become a DMOZ editor after my last post on this subject. "Just post your site and then resign," was heard more than once. I don't approve of those kinds of shenanigans to begin with, and to me, becoming a DMOZ editor because they won't list your site is like going into the kitchen and getting your own food because you can't find your waitress.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Summer Shipping FAQ

In case you haven't noticed, it's wicked freaking hot outside. Hot weather is my natural enemy, as is cold weather, rainy weather, or any weather that isn't 75 degrees and cloudless with nighttime lows in the 50s.

Hot weather is the mortal enemy of baked goods, cakes in particular. That doesn't mean we can't ship them to you, it just means we have to be a little more careful with them, which we are, which is why Overnight is the only shipping option available on some of our products.

We get hit with a lot of questions about that, so I thought I'd take some time to answer them and offer some general tips on shipping that you might find helpful on any site where you shop.

1. Why is Overnight Shipping my only choice?
Because it's wicked freaking hot outside. We've got tropical depressions forming off the coast of Maryland (not actually part of the tropics, the last time I checked) and Portuguese Man O'Wars floating around off the coast of Rhode Island. Maybe they came for the Sweet Bread.

If you're ordering layer cakes, cheesecakes, or petits fours, Overnight shipping is the only way we can get them to you before they melt. If you're in New York City, Chicagoland, or Boston, it only costs $6.95.

All of our other products, including cookies, breads, croissants, and English muffins can still be shipped via Second-Day Air, and they'll arrive fresh and tasty. We guarantee that. Second-Day Air shipping will return on our cakes, cheesecakes, and petits fours by October 15, maybe sooner if it decides to cool off out there.

2. Is it safe to ship bakery foods in the summertime?
Yes it is. We've been doing it for a few years now. We use ice packs and dry ice as needed to keep things cool.

3. Do you deliver to (insert city and state here)?
We deliver throughout the continental United States, or the Lower 48 as some folks call them, even though Hawaii is just off to the left. We cannot deliver to U.S. territories or protectorates because of the extra time it takes to get our products there.

Our Saturday delivery range is very limited. We can reach the major cities in the continental United States and some suburbs. Where we can't go is sometimes surprising, so I recommend checking with us at 1-800-287-9870 before placing an order for Saturday delivery.

4. Can you deliver to military bases/universities/my kid's summer camp?
We can, but we'll need complete information to get the package there, which includes a physical mailing address where the package will be delivered, usually a front gate for a military base or a mail center for a school or summer camp. UPS and FedEx, our two primary shipping partners, won't deliver to P.O. Boxes and can't deliver to internal mailboxes, so all deliveries need to be sent to the mailing facility for the base, school, or camp.

Finding that information can be very tricky. I recommend calling the school or camp directly and asking for the mail services department, which should be able to provide the address. You can also try calling the FedEx or UPS office near the base, camp, or school, and asking them for advice.

When shipping to bases, camps, or schools, always try to allow an extra day for delivery and avoid shipping on Friday. Experience has shown us that not all internal mail services can deliver on the same day. Some of them are great, some of them need a little extra time. In general, summer camps and military bases are great at getting packages to the recipient the day they arrive. Some schools, especially the larger ones, get so much mail that it takes an extra day to process it all. If the package arrives on Friday, it might not get to the recipient until Monday, which can be harmful to our cakes and cheesecakes.

5. Do I need to give my phone number and e-mail?
Please give us at least one, and make it one where we can reach you during the day. Sometimes we have questions about a delivery date, sometimes there's a problem with the address. If we can't figure it out, we can't ship your order. We will only call if we have a question, and we use your e-mail to send out tracking information, so you know the package got there on time.

Summertime doesn't mean you need to go without our delicious bakery treats. Every week, we deliver cakes, breads, confections, and pastries to addresses all across America to rave reviews from our customers. This year, we've even added several Summer Shipping Specials to help take the bite out of those overnight shipping costs.

If you've got any other questions, feel free to call me at 617-331-0929 or e-mail me at derek@1-800-bakery.com.