Ken Cassar Quotes (19 Quotes)

It's clear that this event will shake up the searchportal space.

The growth of search and the role of search in usage of the Internet has been astounding. When you look at search penetration, it's near 80 percent. The number of searches each person generates, it's high. It would be intuitive to say the numbers can't get any bigger than they are, but they've continued nonetheless.

My guess is that Amazon has seen the writing on the wall, ... They think they'll get slammed next week when they release their quarterly report and they're trying to cut their losses by telling the Street they're taking measures to control costs.

In my mind, the overriding story is that the sponsored links business is growing pretty nicely.

What's really interesting is that most online retailers have forward integration, whereas this seems like a backwards integration play. Barnes Noble already has a direct relationship with the customer and now they're trying to get further into the supply chain,

We're seeing an improvement in relevancy and a dramatic improvement in the amount of content online.

I don't think they can do it. In order for Buy.com to make any money off of this, their order size has to be two units per order. There's no incentive in the offer to drive the order that high.

The double-digit increase in online search activity marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Internet consumer behavior. Online search is the primary tool most people rely on to do everyday research.

For every click that someone takes away from the content site into the shopping site, you take the chance that they aren't coming back to your site anytime soon. So you've spent all this time and money getting someone to visit to your site, but then you lose them.

While the numbers are fairly insignificant right now, ... they keep doubling year over yearOnline sales will surpass catalog sales within 10 years.

Hockey could be a fairly solid niche market. In many parts of the country, the selection of products is fairly scarce.

Whether it's out of laziness or ignorance, consumers' starting point is very much search.

Skeptical retailers eyeing fluctuations in the financial market and the increasing failure rates of Internet companies are often blind to the most important issue - specifically, the degree to which their online efforts will affect their off-line business. Online consumers are a very powerful audience and tend to be channel-agnostic. And as consumers increase their use of the Internet, the opportunity for the Web to influence their online and off-line shopping behavior grows. Simply put, businesses must integrate across channels.

This is the opposite of the recent Levi online situation. Levi was seen as cutting out its retail partners to get to their customers directly online,

It means you don't have to hand off each purchase and pray that some other guy is going to deliver it properly.

We've found time and time again that sales taxes did not have a significant impact (on online sales decisions), ... Sales tax is a smaller issue for consumers.

It's not clear-cut if it's really less costly.

There are two types of online searchers that type a Web site's URL into a search engine rather than into the browser's address bar Those inexperienced enough not to appreciate the difference between the two, and those that are so experienced they have become habituated to using the search engine as their portal to the Internet. Whether this behavior is driven by ignorance or savvy, the end result is the same The search engine is the focal point of the online experience for Internet users across the spectrum.

This could be a critical inflection point for online retail. If either company can make its offer work, free shipping could become the industry norm. But if the companies can't divine the sweet spot, and they end up losing money, this could be the last time we'll see any such offers -- except for very limited, one-time deals. I don't think either of them knows if it's going to work out economically or not, ... The only way to know is to try.