With little fanfare or warning, an old-time favorite of affiliate marketers everywhere, PopShops (most recently Rakuten PopShops following their acquisition by Rakuten) has disappeared. As of the end of June, it was officially sunset and its APIs stopped warning, including the venerable v2 API which had been kept functional for 2 years following its announced shutdown. …
The long and short of what’s going on: For influencers, following numbers dictate fees, so many resort to purchasing followers; fake followers, bots, and automated social media accounts. Some of these accounts are sophisticated enough to engage with the content, leave “likes,” and comments. “Trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback, and we could …
Influencer marketing on Instagram seems to be all the rage these days, perhaps because ads on Facebook and Google have become so expensive. The thing about Instagram influencers is that you have to find them, and Instagram doesn’t have much in the way of tools to make that process easier. Here’s a simple tip – …
An awesome video parodying the (sad, arguably) domination of adtech by Google and Facebook came to our attention today…
Tomorrow the Supreme Court starts looking at South Dakota v. Wayfair, a critical case for online businesses (not to mention their shoppers). If you’re a small ecommerce merchant, be well advised that if this court case goes the wrong way, you would be required to collect sales taxes for all 50 states on all your sales, …
If you’re going to go with an online advertising partner, you probably want to make double-sure you’re going a best-of-breed ethical player before handing over your hard-earned dollars. Apparently Progressive (the insurance company which keeps bombarding us with those annoying Flo commercials) failed to do so – they feature prominently as a sucker in this …
Ever wondered what all the fuss about dropshipping was about? Wonder no more. The latest issue of FeedFront magazine has an introduction to the subject by Alex Bugeja. It’s not in print yet, but the digital edition is now out online. You can read it here (turn to page 10 for the good stuff): http://feedfront.com/archives/article0010416 …
From an article on Bloomberg today: In its race to catch Amazon.com Inc. in online retailing, Walmart Inc. issued misleading e-commerce results and fired an executive who complained the company was breaking the law, according to a whistle-blower lawsuit. Walmart shares fell as much as 2 percent. Tri Huynh, a former director of business development at Walmart, claims he was …
The Performance Marketing Association has long been anticipating a federal solution of some kind to the state nexus law problems that have greatly impacted affiliate marketing. We may now finally be meaningfully closer to that point. From a statement by Tricia Meyer, Executive Director of the PMA, today: The possibility of that solution may be one …
There are many out there who would have you believe that ecommerce in the USA is all about Amazon these days. For sure Bezos’ giant has a big piece of the pie, but there’s still lots of life in the niches outside the Amazon mainstream if you know where to look. Evidently Shopify’s customers are …