The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Amazon.com always puts out interesting press releases that makes them smell like roses no matter how bad the economy gets. Today they claim this is its best Christmas ever.

But really, does a record number of orders processed mean it was its best Christmas ever? Or is Amazon spinning its numbers to look like its the e-commerce guru? We don’t know. But we do know that the weight of all GPS devices sold by Amazon from Black Friday through December equals the combined weight of 151 Mini Coopers… And that’s relevant to investors and analysts why? more

I’m sure when a merchant screws a customer over, they never expect that customer to be a retail manager… or for that matter, the wife of someone who writes and blog about catalogers.

Lakeside Collection, meet the angry Ursula Parry… who just happens to be married to a senior writer at Multichannel Merchant. And neither of us are happy that Ursula is left scrambling to find replacement gifts for her 30-or-so employees on Dec. 23. Especially when she ordered the said gifts on Dec. 8, received an e-mail that they had shipped (and a confirmation number by phone from someone in the call center), only to find out tonight that the gifts aren’t even in the mail stream yet! more

Look, your sales figures are down, and I’m sure your company’s overall morale is down, too. You may have put out the best kick-ass site (or kick-app, if it’s an e-commerce specimen), and your catalog redesign may have been the best thing to ever hit your customer’s mailboxes.

So instead of looking at red figures and harping on the negative, who don’t you spend a minor investment that could turn into a major morale booster. Enter your e-commerce site and your catalog - or both - in the 2009 MCM Awards. more

… everywhere you go. If you put your money in those “Going Out of Business” signs, you may be in for a record year in 2009. And you’re probably having a pretty good 2008.

My wife and I were hoping our local National Wholesale Liquidators would stay open despite its recent Chapter 11 filing (and the fact we hadn’t shopped there for quite some time). But… we saw the signs going up Wednesday night. more

Once in a while, spam makes it to my Yahoo inbox. Now in this case, it’s spammers leaving messages within Yahoo Groups I belong to and haven’t removed myself from, even though I haven’t accessed the groups in umpteen years.

Unless the spammers know something that I don’t, like that fans of the Arena Football League dig older chicks. Really old chicks. more

That’s sarcasm, BTW. It’s like a second language to me.

My wife is in Staples’ Business Rewards loyalty program, so any purchase we have made through Staples.com has been with her info. Maybe at one time I used my Yahoo address. And maybe I purchased something at one time from Office Depot - I can’t recall, and we have one Office Depot store within 50 miles of us.

But for Staples to use this kind of reactivation message, in these economic times, is crazy. Here’s the HTML version of the e-mail I received this morning. more