E-commerce RSS

Is this the next big application for RSS? Blogosphere in 2004; mainstream media and enterprise (emerging) in 2005; ecommerce RSS for 2006?

Most of the biggest ecommerce sites have launched or are about to launch their first RSS feeds.  All are starting to consider the various ways they can leverage their marketing spend with RSS.

E-commerce sites think of marketing around customer acquisition and retention, and on average spend about 6% of sales on marketing.  Historically, sites spend their acquisition money roughly as follows;

1. 50% search
2. 40% affiliate marketing programs
3. 10% comparison search bots

Note that much of the money spent in the latter two categories is ultimately spent on search, too ... feeding the Google monster...

The leading ecommerce players are starting to experiment with RSS feeds as a way to lock-in affiliates with richer content .... one benefit of which is avoiding the channel conflict inherent in affiliates trying to buy the same paid search terms the ecommerce site wants themselves.

Retention marketing spend is largely (historically) for e-mail and upgrading the basic site experience.  RSS looms for both.  Every major ecomm player is considering how to substitute RSS for email for retention, and most are looking at ways to enrich the site-based user experience around RSS-aggregated content.

The ultimate vision involves enriching the customer relationship around broader and deeper content, available to the customer through whatever device they wish, on a fully synchronized basis.

Stay tuned....