Peter Keller

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AmericanExpress recently started allowing holders of their points-generating cards to convert points into Facebook ad credits. It’s not a bad deal for businesses that use an Amex business card.

To compare, here are a few items:

• Maggiano’s gift card- $50, 5,000 points ($0.01 value per point)
• Facebook ad credits- $50, 6,750 points ($0.0074 value per point)
• Amex gift card- $50, 7,000 points ($0.071 value per point)
• ipad2, 16g- $499, 94,400 points ($0.0053 value per point)

So unless you want to dine on mass-market food, the facebook credits are a pretty good deal.

To convert the points, login to Amex rewards and search for “facebook ad credits”. Amex will walk you through the rest.

Do note that a “cash back” card may be a better option than any of the above point-generating amex cards- many business credit cards will give you 1% or 1.5% cash back. 

How can an internet retailer compete in this world- where Amazon is curb-stomping all competitors with their combination of low prices, convenience, and logistics superiority? This article from Wharton offers some clues:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2770

It’s a hugely important topic to internet retailers, as there is a growing gulf between the niche plays that are essentially mom-and-pop-shops, online, and the true players that are trying to grow national or international corporations based on their web retail strengths.

Here are my pull quotes as the most thought-provoking passages:

“Unfortunately, too many small brands don’t view themselves as a specialty,” Fader points out. “They think they can compete with the big guys.” As a result, the company spends too much on broad-based advertising and other attempts to drive scale. Ultimately, Fader says, they “get crushed…. If you admit that you are a small brand, go after the specialty angle and say, ‘People will buy us only occasionally’ — and you keep costs down and keep the message focused — then you can be okay.”

However, Lodish says [Quidsi’s] most important asset is its relationship with new parents, fostered through its own customer service staff, not a remote call center. “Their customers love them,” notes Lodish. “Their reputation with young mothers is better than anybody else by far. People talk about them and refer friends to diapers.com when they have new babies.”

new specialty retailers discover niches and create targeted organizations to meet those customer needs better than the large retailers

The differences between a company like Amazon and a small specialty player illustrate the disparities between a market-share model, designed to serve as many products to as many people as possible, and a customer-focused approach aimed at developing deep loyalty from shoppers

The new breed of Internet specialty retailer is reaching customers by building communities among customers, she adds. In traditional retail, the closest example of this kind of effort is at independent running stores where customers come together to form running clubs and train for races. “In the virtual world you can do that around any interest,” Kahn notes.

Beyond logistics and customer relationships, some of the new web entrepreneurs are focused on creating their own products. Bonobos, a men’s apparel e-tailer, designs, develops, sources and merchandises its own clothing brand. “So unlike Zappos or Quidsi, we are not about offering the deepest selection of brands on the market,” states Bonobos founder Andy Dunn, who started the company in 2007. “Rather, we want to curate brands, and go so far as to actually create and own the very best of those brands.” Dunn calls the strategy “vertical web retailing.”