Both eCommerce and Advertising have grown fairly rapidly in the last 15 years – that’s the good news. The bad news is that they’ve grown somewhat independently.

Only the larger eCommerce merchants have had the wherewithals to stay on top of both of these trends. And so it goes:

   The rain falls the same/on the rich and the poor fella
   But the rich man’s got the poor man’s umbrella.

Small eCommerce businesses are getting clobbered, but the tools for their survival are all hiding in plain sight! The problem – these tools were built by engineers, for engineers. You need a formidable engineering team just to do the most basic of marketing!

Here’s a quick example from Vurve. It would take 45 minutes to set up a small business with accounts on Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Central and Google Merchant Center. If you know exactly what you’re doing. And if you make zero mistakes. And if none of the Google services is down.

Why would you need to do this? Because all of this setup is required to enable Google Product Extensions. Which is supposed to be a great ‘free’ feature for all users – except only the biggest eCommerce retailers seem to be using it.

Now multiply this for every feature the big eCommerce merchants use, across the many ad platforms – Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, to name a few – and you realize why no small business ecommerce merchant will ever be able to compete in a fair fight with Wal*Mart, say, that can drop $500 million just to hire some engineers!

Well, not without a little help from Vurve, anyway 🙂

Amit