Best Practices for Online Advertising in Retail

Some of today’s most successful online retailers are already using advertising solutions as a means to reach profitability or to fuel growth by subsidizing price reductions. You might ask yourself, "How do retailers have entire categories that run at a negative margin?" This may be part of a loss-leader strategy, but in most cases these categories are actually printing money by matching consumers with ads paid for by the largest brands in the world. Advertising opportunities help them operate these loss-leading categories as profit centers for their business.

Jake Bailey is chief evangelist at RichRelevance, a provider of dynamic e-commerce personalization. Jake can be reached at http://twitter.com/#!/JakeBailey.