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Paid Search Tax

During this season of Merry and Sharing, here is a thought I’d like to share… For every eCommerce business that is paying to acquire customers, a portion of that investment must be going to Google to pay for keywords and top positioning within search results. This makes sense to me. Also, it makes sense to me that some consumers are efficient and go to the top of  their browser window and type in the exact URL for branded website they are trying to reach like www.reallycoolstuff.com. But then there are the others, that are lazy, or not quite as efficient or even worse (like me).

Photo by Danard Vincente via Flickr

Rather than typing in the exact URL, we will go to the search box and type in the words Really Cool Stuff, hit Enter and await the magical search results.  Voila! There are the results that I want – all 10,548,101 of them.  I click on the top link and off I go on my merry shopping way. The thing is that I am already a RCS (Really Cool Stuff) customer. Perhaps even a Best Customer but because of the way I navigate the web, like millions of others, I am continually acquired as a “new customer” for which RCS will have to pay each time I appear on their eCommerce site to peruse and purchase. Has Google, or any search site for that matter, trained me to do this? I don’t think that is fair to say, but their company bottom line certainly is not going to stop me and my many, many friends, from continuing to navigate the web like this! RCS owns their business, their name and their customers, but they are getting taxed every time one of their existing customers, like me, returns to buy. This makes as much sense to me as the form the IRS gives me each year to fill out!