Are you the wholesale seller or retail buyer who ordered this Holiday Gift Marketing Tips Kit? Please sign here for tips to: Optimize Your eCommerce Store, Increase Sales During Holidays 2008, Source and Stock Hot Gifts That Actually Sell This Year.And, you over there? Take that economic gloom-and-doom paper bag off your head. Scan these tips to boost holiday sales … from wholesale supplier to retail seller; from online e-commerce shop to offline brick-and-mortar stores. Grinches may leave the room. Now.

It was a Really Big Deal for the first wholesale buyers and sellers to meet on the Internet. They said it was only profitable for the biggest wholesalers and manufacturers:

A SizeUSA Survey of 240 body measurements of 10,000 people in 13 cities across the United States recently came across some new math. SizeUSA results appeared in The New York Times, including the finding that the “average” American woman’s size is now 14, the former size cutoff for what was called Plus-Sized Clothing after World War II, when this type of body survey was last done. Size creep also hit men: the former average size of 40 Regular for men has become 44 lately.Of course, reaction to this new math for “average” apparel sizing all depends on who is asked.

Here at Top Ten Wholesale , we talk mostly vertical: To Wholesalers, Manufacturers, Distributors, Importers, Auctioneers, Liquidators and Retailers in the apparel, footwear, accessories and general merchandise marketplace. But we stay tuned to what the broadly consumer-focused search engines like GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) do as they compete for bigger slices of search marketing pie.  

Back in June (From the Search Advertising Trenches: Can Microsoft Kick Google in the Pay-Per? Will Google Feel It?), we noted launch of Microsoft Live Search’s payback-for-purchase search advertising plan. Shorter Version: Stay on the Microsoft search reservation. Click on our search advertisers. If you buy, get discounts and cash back incentives. Back in October 2007, we noted how Tier 1 search engines (GYM) and Tier 2 sites like Ask.com were pacing each other in offering services like Universal Search Results, which pull text listings, relevant videos, geo-maps, local results, product reviews and blog commentary on key words a searcher entered … without making searchers slog through different “channels” at the search engine.  During the first week of October, Yahoo answered the question search marketers have asked for three years: When are Yahoo search advertisers going to get cool tools like Google Analytics? Analytics Defined: Web Analytics let web site owners track and analyze every cyber-step visitors take to and from their site:  

If change is the only constant, then the pioneer of the auction marketplace, eBay, has seen a lot of constants this year. First, was a change in top leadership, the first CEO flip in ten years. Second, came changes to listing fees and commissions that favor Power-Sellers (larger big-volume online dealers) but squeeze out smaller, mom-and-pop entrepreneurs … the customer base on which eBay built its empire. Lately, there are grumbles of defections to competitor auction sites, both “amazonian” and smaller. The latest eBay change is the plan to fire 1,000 employees at the same time the auction leader – which already owns PayPal — will acquire another pay-plan system, which it plans to market off its own auction site. What are online buyers and sellers to do with all this “constancy”? Here are outlines of the changes, of the competitors muscling into eBay terrain and of alternatives in the buyer-seller marketplace. For more input from online auction industry watchers, see the two-part series in E-Commerce Times: Part One – The eBay Earthquake and Part Two — The eBay Disapora (a $2 word for “exile and dispersions”). 

By creating trade and product sourcing opportunities for value-priced merchandise, the people behind Value Price Expo trade shows know they cannot simply walk “inside the lines.” The place and the timing have to work for both value-seeking buyers and right-priced exhibitors. The products have to run both hot (popular Housewares, Consumer Electronics, Toys, Health & Beauty, Gifts, Sporting Goods) and broad across 30 different categories.  Quality, value-priced products that move briskly on the Left Coast may need a new focus to suit wholesalers and retailers in the Mid-Atlantic and East Coast regions. Then, there is the matter of synergy: Using the energy that comes from synchronizing with other trade shows and talking through industry media that talk to different sectors of the value-priced marketplace. 

MSNBC runs a Small Business information-sharing site, a “Your Business” show, and a weekly Top Five list on topics of entrepreneurial interest. Topics run from “Cost-effective Market Research” and “Green Office Tools” to “Travel Gadgets” and “Saving Money on Airfare.”On September 7, MSNBC’s Business > Small Business > Your Business site listed Top Five Alternative Search Engines  as named by Entrepreneur: