318 Part II • Applying Information Technology
page where a visitor can provide an e-mail address. About
eight times a year, Candy sends everyone in this file a
promotional e-mail. Candy cites examples:
For the Twelve Days of Christmas (December 26
through January 12) everything in the store is a fixed
percent off. I give our customers a jump on that by
sending out an e-mail that lets them get the discount
a few days before other visitors so that they can get
the most desired stock before it sells out.
These e-mails can be very effective. I sent out
an e-mail around April 25 that said: “Here comes
Mother’s Day, graduation, wedding season and
proms. If you or someone you know doesn’t have
pierced ears we have what you need for these occa-
sions.” That produced a tremendous spike in our
sales over a two-week period.Incidentally, repeat customers provide a lot of
Cliptomania’s business. Through their eclectic product
offerings and outstanding service, the Santos have built a
very loyal customer base, so a sale to a first-time customer
is just the beginning of a very productive relationship for
Cliptomania. They also get a lot of new business by word
of mouth from satisfied customers.
Jim is always seeking ways to increase sales so he
continues to search for and experiment with new marketing
approaches so that Cliptomania doesn’t fall behind.
However, the Internet is such a dynamic environment that
not all Jim’s initiatives work out well. He has spent several
thousand dollars each year on experiments that were fail-
ures, but he realizes that in such a dynamic environment
you must take some calculated risks.
Changing Web Service Providers
In 2006, the Santos began to have problems with the serv-
ice that Yahoo! was providing. Customers were reporting
that they were having trouble placing orders, and
Cliptomania was being charged more than once for some
transactions. They called in their consultant to help them
deal with these problems but were not able to resolve
them all.
To make a long story short, it turned out that the con-
sultant’s company, NetProfits Internet Consulting, had also
become a Web service provider and was serving a number of
former Yahoo! customers. In the fall of 2006, Cliptomania
switched to this new Web service vendor with the URL
Cliptomania.net.The new vendor charged substantially less
than Yahoo! and provided services that in many ways were
better than those Yahoo! offered, so Cliptomania is no
longer a Yahoo! store.
Advantages of the New Store
Jim and Candy’s son, Greg, who joined the family business
in 2006, says that the new vendor’s software offers a
number of somewhat subtle advantages that he is taking
advantage of to improve Cliptomania’s performance. Greg
is particularly concerned with improving Cliptomania’s
performance on the relevance rankings on Web searches.
Greg notes:The new site has two improvements that are helpful.
First, the new store allows for meta-tags for each
product, while the Yahoo! store only allowed a meta-
tag on the main page. A meta-tag is a description that
the customer does not see, but is available to the Web
crawlers. Second, the Yahoo! store severely restricted
the length of product descriptions, but the new store
can have longer descriptions. Both of these allow us
to include more descriptors that can be picked up by
the Web crawlers and thus increase our relevancy
rankings.
For example, the meta-tag gives me the
opportunity to be specific about the type of gem
stone in the earring. In the product description that
the customer sees we may describe the earring as a
gem stone, but in the meta-tag I can be more spe-
cific and describe the gemstone as garnet—the
January birth stone—which allows people to do
more specific searches.
As another example, in our product descrip-
tions we describe our earrings made of beads as
“bead earrings,” while some customers may
search for them as “beaded earrings” and not find
ours. In the meta-tag we can call them beaded
earrings and thus be found by searching on either
term.An Unforeseen Consequence of the Change
When the Santos changed Web service providers from
Yahoo! to NetProfits Internet Consulting, they operated
the two stores in parallel for a while, giving the
new store the URL Cliptomania.netand keeping the
old one as Cliptomania.com.When they switched over
to the new store, its URL remained Cliptomania.net
rather than Cliptomania.com. Although this small
change did not affect Cliptomania’s position on its
sponsored links, it had serious consequences for
Cliptomania’s relevancy rankings. Before this change,
Cliptomania.com was among the top five in the
relevance rankings on most searches for non-pierced
earrings. However, by late December the Santos discov-
ered that neither Cliptomania.comnorCliptomania.net
was in the top 100 of the relevancy rankings on the