Partner Views Blog

In my last blog, Costco’s 7 Rookie Inbound Marketing Mistakes, I responded to an article by Mellissa Allison in Sunday’s Seattle Times entitled Costco makes plans for boosting its online sales. One of the things I noticed right off was Costco’s “Big Business” approach to their online problem. According to the article, Ginnie Roeglin, senior vice president of Costco's e-commerce and publishing operations, said the chain does not appear in searches partly because "we don't advertise and we don't pay for search.” Costco is also “exploring social media but has not dedicated much money or other resources to it, because it is focused on Costco's core business and keeping costs down.” Costco will also be building mobile apps to help shoppers.

In Sunday’s Seattle Times I saw the headline: Costco makes plans for boosting its online sales, by Melissa Allison. Costco is a giant retail chain whose headquarters are right outside Seattle. Even though it is one of the biggest retail stores with over $ 2 billion in annual on-line sales it lags far behind Amazon and Wal-Mart in online sales. In spite of a huge online eCommerece site with over 1.5 million webpages they get a mere 8.1 million visitors a month compared to Wal-Mart’s 50.7 million visitors. With Amazon as the number 1 online retailer, Wal-Mart is number 4 and Costco is number 17. One of Costco’s excuses for their poor online performance was that "we don't advertise and we don't pay for search.” Inbound marketing experts would counter that you don’t need to advertise or pay for search to get search page rankings. According to the article Dallas SEO expert Chris Silver Smith says Costco is making “rookie” inbound marketing mistakes.

In my last blog we met Chelsea James and Arthur Zetes and their start-up eCommerce site Sperantsa. The site is just getting started and they have a lot of work to do but the combination of a fair trade business, Roma mothers earning a living and trendy knit caps seems like a great space to be in and I am looking forward to their success. When I met with them we brainstormed about possible topics they could cover in their blog and the possibilities for Sperantsa seem almost endless. Other eCommerce websites seem to have a problem with coming up with topics other than “Buy from us!” I recently got some great dos and don’ts about eCommerece blogging from a webinar by HubSpot’s Mike Redbord and Mike Ewing, Blogging for eCommerce.

On Monday I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Zetes and Chelsea James, two-thirds of the start-up company Sperantsa. They are just finishing up their sophomore year at the University of Washington and have already started a business. Chelsea had contacted me to take advantage of our free Social Media Evaluation for Startups so we met at a coffee house near the University to talk about their website. Their business is pretty cool. They work with the Dece, a micro enterprise in Romania run by the nonprofit NetWorks. Dece works with underprivileged Roma mothers who hand-crochet hats that Sperantsa imports and sells on their website. It is a fair trade business that promotes a sustainable income for people who desperately need it while selling some cool looking hats.