eBay (EBAY) reported last week that eBay.com saw 1m transactions on Black Friday and 1.4m transactions on Cyber Monday. I've had a lot of people ask what that means and didn't have time until this weekend to really think about it. It's always a good exercise and mentally stimulating to have a little fun with eBay math so I 'put a proverbial pin in it' and worked on it this weekend.

The questions generally ranged from - Why is eBay saying it this way? What is the GMV? This number sounds good, but is it? Is a million a lot?

The ChannelAdvisor November Same Store Sales (SSS) are in and there are some interesting trends to look at. As a reminder, at ChannelAdvisor our software is used by over 3000 retailers to manage a variety of channels including Search, Comparison Shopping Engines and Marketplaces. These SSS results compare the month of November 2008 to the month of November 2009. It's important to note that this year Cyber Monday fell in November vs. last year Cyber Monday was in December. As one of the top (maybe THE top) selling day in the Holiday period, it's placement can/does skew the monthly numbers.

• ChannelAdvisor over-all - 12% - down versus October's 17%
• Amazon - 70% - Up over October's 61%
• eBay: - 3% - down from October's 4.73%
• Comscore - I believe Comscore has said they recorded a 3% increase y/y.

Here is what the data looks like when trended since January:

At ChannelAdvisor we have over 3000 customers that are all involved in internet retailing. We generally put them into categories that are pre-defined by Forrester research:

• Enterprise - Usually name-brands that are primarily click and mortar companies, but some pure plays. They are usually doing $100m online GMV annually.
• Mid-tier (or midsize) - Some name brands are in here, but mostly these are interesting niche companies and up and comers that are too big to be called small, but too small to be called Enterprise. Their sales are in the $10-100m range.
• SMB (small business, small/medium business) - With sales < $10m this group may seem insignificant, but in our experience a lot of SMBs become mid-tier and many mid-tier become enterprise. So in the world of e-commerce you can't just dismiss someone because of size - they could be the next eBags or CafePress or Zappos. All of those companies started as SMBs and matriculated up the tiers to the top.

Interacting with companies across this broad spectrum is one of the most fun aspects of what we do at ChannelAdvisor. We literally will be on the phone with Wal-mart (WMT) one minute and then talking to a mid-tier retailer about strategies to diversify their channels and then talk to Joe the sporting goods SMB person that wants to hone their eBay-only strategy.

I was reviewing last year's Black Friday and CyberMonday results and trends and noticed some interesting differences in eBay's (EBAY) strategy between 2008 and 2009.

2008 - A Cornucopia of Online Promotions...

The ChannelAdvisor Same Store Sales October results are in and there were a couple of interesting trends that could indicate how the Q4 holiday season is going to shake out.

This figure shows the results for 2009 so far graphically: (click to enlarge)

Last week, eBay (EBAY) previewed one TV ad from its 'Come to think of it' campaign. Seller reaction was negative with an occasional positive of 'at least they are doing something this year' as you can see in the comments of that post.

Tuesday, eBay has a microsite up here, that shows off all of the new holiday ad campaigns. Here's the blurb used to introduce the campaign:

eBay's (EBAY) results are out and the stock is down 5% or so in after hours trade. Q3 looked like a good solid 'meet/beat' Q, so let's dig in and see what's up.

Q3 - the turnaround in marketplaces seems to be working.

Amazon (AMZN) Thursday announced a new delivery option called "Local Express Delivery" (ALED) in seven markets. This service gives buyers same day delivery (with a cut off that varies per city). The brilliant part of the program is that Amazon Prime users get the service for $5.99/item. Other customers pay based on a rate card per category that is in the $15-20 range.

Where is this available and how does it work?

We just completed collating our September same-store-sales (SSS) data for all of the channels we support at ChannelAdvisor (search, CSE, marketplaces, etc) and there are a couple of interesting data points to discuss as we exit Q3 and head into Q4.

I don't believe comscore has come out with with their data yet on September, so that part of the chart isn't filled in. For overall e-commerce (ChannelAdvisor SSS in the chart) , we saw that dip slightly from 8.7% in August to 7.3% in September. That's a small change and one that we don't think is worrisome.

I've had several inbound 'flame mails' about a change eBay (EBAY) made this week as part of their roll out of the SR2 release. I wanted to show everyone what's going on and get a pulse from readers on where you stand.

A retailer we work with for Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) recently emailed as they were really confused about a promotion they were sent by eBay (EBAY) pictured here:

So here we have:

At ChannelAdvisor we have a product, SearchAdvisor, that is used by some of the largest retailers to manage their paid-search campaigns. As part of the product, we take traffic from the big search providers (Google, Y!, Bing, etc.) and allow the retailers to look at the referrals (one click back) for that traffic.
This data is useful as you may see things such as Y! adding a new partner with very weak (or strong) traffic (usually measure by conversion rate) and then you can take an action such as decreasing bids for that traffic or elimintating or increasing bids. Not all engines allow this kind of behavior and some only allow it on their content networks.