NEW E-COMMERCE PARTNER TARGETS NEWSPAPERS

By: Karim Mostafa ANG Newspapers Builds Shops With NewsLinQ.com



ANG Newspapers, a group of seven dailies and two weeklies in the San
Francisco area, recently went searching for a new e-commerce partner
for Shop.InsideBayArea.com. The company that ANG chose now says it
wants to work with more newspapers.



GoLinQ.com, a Silicon Valley startup that helps small businesses go
online, signed the ANG deal in May. Since then, 13 retailers have built
sites on Shop.InsideBayArea.com and 20 more are getting ready to
launch their sites, says Jen Griggs, online director of
InsideBayArea.com.



'The technology is fantastic,' Griggs says. 'The back-system is easy for
shops to use, particularly the WYSIWYG feature.'



It's obviously been a good relationship for GoLinQ.com as well. The
company has since decided to pursue more media partnerships, and
recently developed NewsLinQ.com, a newspaper-targeted division
offering e-commerce tools to newspapers' advertising clients.



'Helping small businesses wasn't enough,' says Cathy Tran, marketing
director at GoLinQ.com. 'We decided we wanted to work with
newspapers to tie offline marketing with online businesses.
NewsLinQ.com is planning on just focusing on newspapers.' But she
said radio and TV sites would not be turned away.



NewsLinQ.com currently offers e-commerce and online coupon
features. Other services are in development, the company says.



Griggs says that NewsLinQ.com was particularly hands-on in the
training they offered to ANG's advertisers who wanted to go online.
NewsLinQ.com representatives accompanied print advertising
representatives on sales calls to help explain the online features.



Besides the online shops, NewsLinQ.com and ANG are developing an
online coupon program. ANG previously used BrightStreet.com, another
online-coupon company, but the newspaper group wanted users to be
able to print online coupons for redemption at brick-and-mortar stores.



ANG and NewsLinQ.com have established a revenue-sharing model that
allows ANG to get a percentage from the initial sales deal sold to
advertisers, while NewsLinQ.com gets a percentage every time an item
is sold through the online shop it helped build.



ANG originally partnered with Internet Tradeline Inc. (ITI) for its e-

commerce marketplace, but Griggs says, 'It wasn't working very well.'



ITI's technology to build the e-commerce sites required content to be
sent to them for posting, says Griggs. 'It was taking too long for them to
post things,' Griggs says. 'There was always a backlog of content.'



Tony Wills, vice president of merchant acquisitions and affiliate
relations at ITI, says they've changed the data-collection process in the
last 90 days.



'The print sales people were not collecting the content,' Wills says. 'So
we've created a centralized content collection process.' Previously,
newspapers' print sales representatives were responsible for collecting
content to build the online stores, but that system required the reps to
contact their clients every three to five days.



Now ITI has taken the data-collection process in-house, setting up a
merchant relations representative program that collects content over the
phone. Newspaper sales reps only have to get the clients, and ITI will
handle the rest, Wills says.



He says that seven employees are currently working as merchant reps
and that a shop will work with the same representative throughout the
set-up process. Wills did acknowledge that ITI's newspaper network has
grown quickly - now 285 newspapers - and that it takes time to set-up
every online store site, often made up of 62 Web pages each.





Karim Mostafa (kmostafa@editorandpublisher.com) is assistant editor of E&P Online.





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