Let's play a game. Pretend you're one of the (estimated for 2013) 190 million people shopping online, but what you want is not a pretty bauble or an addition to your Farmville plantation - you need a piece for your lock, and you want it to have, say...over 50,000 possible combinations.

So, you’re a manufacturer and you opened a little retail site just to entertain a little traffic? Internet Retailer reports that brand manufacturers lead other merchants in monthly visits to their retail website, likely because 52% of the traffic coming to brand manufacturer sites were new visitors. The four different types of merchants detailed in the Internet Retailer story included brand manufacturers, catalogers, retail chains, and retailers that only sell on the web.

Now What?

Google the term "buyer's guide," and you'll find...a whole heck of a lot of buyer's guides. Not a lot about the the history of buyer's guides, or the evolution of buyer's guides...just buyer's guides. For horses, AM radios, and yo-yos...just about anything. 

It looks like no one knows where buyer's guides came from, not even the trusty Wikipedia. All we know is, they're here. And...they need help. A perfunctory look at a few buyers guides will reveal an almost-universal crater of functionality and technology. Why can't the yo-yo guide ask the user if they want a classic, flared gap, or modified shape and let them choose? Or, why can't the guide ask a question like: Are you looking for a yo-yo to perform looping tricks?

We blame unstructured product data.

Structured product data will improve your organic SEO results. So says a recent article at the website "practical ecommerce: Insights for Online Merchants."

The article, written by Jill Kocher, indicates that early decisions regarding site structure and how it uses a product catalog can "have surprising ramifications for SEO." 

The secret is understanding HOW shoppers are searching for your products and organizing your website's navigation and pages to mirror and reveal product data that matches popular searches.

We're not saying anything about this particular brand of Baking Tin. They appear to be very nice baking tins, and they look greyish or maybe a pewter tone. We're going by the picture, because the Baking Tin's product data says they have no color. 

Are they invisible, like Wonder Woman's plane? Or is it just that there were no associated color attributes for these products, because the baking tin's product data wasn't structured well? 

What if you were shopping for a certain color of cookware, for a gift? Think these baking tins would come up in your search?

Can I just have five minutes of your time? 

That used to be the "hook" phrase for most salepeople, back when five minutes was a little bit of time. Today, with the microwave cooking your food while you read and delete emails on your phone while you catch the latest sports headlines on a crawl underneath a sports anchor giving last night's scores...five minutes is an ETERNITY. How many tweets could you tweet in five minutes?

This article agrees. If your elevator pitch isn't tweetable, then your audience just won't hear it. Today's media consumers just don't have the time. 

So...drum roll...introducing Ezeeguides!

Ezeeguides asks shoppers simple questions and then, based on answers received, uses patented technology to guide them to the right products.

As mentioned before, no one structures and parses product data like Edgenet - which explains why no one can do what we do when it comes to guided selling. 

As more consumers turn to mobile devices for everyday activities, some merchants are skipping building a website suited for mobile, and instead working to ensure their products are optimized for mobile devices. So, even if you can't make your website practical and pretty for mobile, you can definitely make your inventory ready for mobile shoppers.

This article from ecommercebytes.com indicates that 65.2% of merchants do not have a mobile website - but mentions that 60% are willing to optimize their online product listings for mobile shoppers.

We at Edgenet continue to hear from manufacturers and suppliers who are certain they know who is shopping for their products, and therefore these manufacturers and suppliers KNOW what product details their shoppers want and need.

You sure about that?

We'd like to present Exhibit A: The Cave People.

The LA Times reports that millions of people in China live in caves. They like it there. Some of the caves have running water, electricity.

What product details are valuable to Chinese cave people?

We'll give you a moment to think about it.

A recent article in the Financial Times of London speaks to just how much the world has changed for retailers. Neiman Marcus, the American luxury retailer, tried to expand into China.

Trouble is - it's really expensive to expand into China. Experts studied China's environment and announced that at an ESTABLISHED retailer in China, it would cost 27,000 to list a new product.

Common misconception: stores that offers a product online (in other words, any store) sell products.

WRONG.

We have proof: go online to your favorite online store. We can wait.

Got it? Now, choose a product you're interested in. And then, reach into the screen and pick it up. If it's shoes, put them on. If it's a chrome-handled jumprope, skip it a few times.

We're certain that unless you're Willy Wonka, none of you could handle the request made above. That's because your favorite store isn't selling a product. It's selling product details. If you like the details, you'll give the stores money, and then they'll mail you a product.

So how are your product details? Are they good enough for sale? Are they as complete and well-tested as your product?

At Edgenet, we routinely encounter businesses that spend more time concerned about their product's packaging than their product data. Even though they're selling their product data every second of every day.

More and more shoppers are naming local search results to be key influencers in their buying decision. Google and Bing see the power of local search, and have begun to align themselves and their data to provide current, relevant local search results.

For retailers, the rise of local search is both a potential gold mine - and a new pain in the neck. The trouble for the retailer is just how much information is required - retailers have to supply search engines with three separate feeds of product information in order to be a true player in local search.

Until now. 50 Below, the massive web and e-commerce solution provider, has joined forces with Edgenet so that all retailers have to do is sign up. Once a client with 50 Below, Edgenet will do what it does with product data: collect, improve, and then deliver it to Google and Bing; and 50 Below will do what it does, make professional, user-driven websites all while delivering their own feeds of information to the world's largest search engines.

Voila. The product feeds are all handled by someone else - and in this case, the someone else is the two best someone elses at what they do in the world.

Now, suppliers can deliver their product data directly to 50 Below websites and solutions and Google and Bing FOR FREE. Ponder that a bit.

Ok, stop pondering and get going. Time to step into the future of retail. With this deal, it's waiting for you.

The mighty, always-informative Internet Retailer reports that more and more e-tailers are improving their websites to accomodate shopper research. A study conducted by the site showed that more retailers are allowing shoppers to use advanced search, as 39% of retailers now have this feature, compared with 21% in 2010.

So, when shoppers search these sites for your products....what will they find?

The shift continues.

Take, for example, this article in the Wall Street Journal, which notes shopper research has moved beyond the most expensive items to the daily shopping lists - even groceries.

Whether its food and beverages, baby items, or pet products, consumers are researching first before they buy.

Retail Touchpoints, the highly influential retail website which attracts tens of thousands of retail executives, is featuring an interview with Edgenet's Vice President Peter Montross on its TouchPoints TV.

We've been telling you for years that consumer behavior has shifted forever. We see it in studies like this one, which explain that impulse buying is dead. Challenging economic times, the rise of mobile devices being used as "data devices", and the increased demand for better images, videos and details have all combined to create a population clamoring for more.

We've recently stumbled across a study which proved our point. The study showed

Intelligent 1:1 marketing has been foretold for decades. It was even featured in Back to the Future II, for goodness sakes. But only now are we getting to the point where technology, the consumer, the retailer, and product data are all capable of supporting it.

In this insightful article at the Forbes website, author Lisa Arthur, the CMO of Aprimo, defines and lays out the case for intelligent 1:1 marketing. By her definition, 1:1 is "Going forward, it won’t be enough to know that a certain customer bought a shirt from your store last month or that they “liked” your brand’s Facebook page last week. Going forward, marketers will need to combine and analyze these data points plus others, from a variety of different resources, in real time.

"Sure, you’ll still want to know about that past purchase, the more recent social media engagement, etc.  –but you’ll also need to integrate that data with even more information. Perhaps most important of all, you’ll want to know when that customer is in your store, considering a purchase. Then, you’ll be able to put all that CRM data to work. (Does your customer want another shirt like the one she bought last month –according to warehouse records, there are plenty more left in stock. Does she know that slacks to match are now on sale? Etc.)

"Think of intelligent 1:1 marketing as a strategy defined by this simple formula: Intelligent 1:1 Marketing = Mobile Devices + Triggers + Social Media + Point of Sale Data."

We couple Arthur's comments with Google's "How to GoMo" promotion - where the tech giant gives you insights and resources on taking your site mobile, and you can see the world changing.

The assumption in Arthur's column is that product data is going to be rich, complete and plentiful. Unfortunately, today's web can only attest to one of those three. There's a lot of data out there. Whether it's good, bad, complete or not is another issue entirely. That's the reason the two largest search engines in the world, and more and more retailers and shopping sites, are flocking to Edgenet to receive an optimized product data feed. The 1:1 model doesn't work without the best product data possible. And no one delivers better product data than Edgenet.

Remember the old days? Like 2008? Back then foot traffic was one of the biggest desirables in retail. Retailers wanted nothing more than shoppers to walk into their store, shop the specials, stay to peruse the inventory, and be upsold by the staff.

In his latest article, Ad Age’s Antony Young has announced the new old days.

Meet a blogger who is as enthusiastic about the effectiveness of product data feed optimization as we are - Lisa Williams. She explains that data feed optimization can increase revenues 5% - 20% - consistent with Steve Tucker's success - and says that she thinks search is "sexy."