Etsy, just sent me an email touting some interesting numbers. Here’s what they had to say:
“Greetings from Etsy, your place to buy and sell all things handmade.We’ve grown to over 150,000 sellers in 171 countries, and we’re just about to reach 1,000,000 members total. This is an exciting milestone for us, and we’ve made some recent changes to help keep things running smoothly.With over 1.7 million products on Etsy, we’re trying to help buyers more easily find what they are looking for.”
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For your weekend reading pleasure:It is difficult to do an Apples-to-Apples comparison of eBay and Amazon, because they are so different, eBay is in 39 countries, has auctions, sells cars and tickets, has a payments business (PayPal) a communications business (Skype) and a classifieds business (Kijiji, et al) while Amazon really is a retailer with a small (30% of units sold) but growing 3P merchant business.
They are also different because they use different terminology. Amazon uses “Revenue” because they actually own the inventory and sell things and they include GMV from 3P merchants in their revenue because they handle the entire payment transaction. eBay uses GMV to discuss the amount of product sold in their marketplace business; eBay’s “Revenue” is really the money they get from fees and other business segments. While these two metrics are different, they are similar enough for my comparison. For this purpose I will call […]
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If you use a “set it and forget it” implementation of Google’s free Analytics tool, your data may be “accurate” but not as useful to you as it could be.
I wrote a tutorial called “8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics” and submitted it to Marketing Pilgrim’s 3rd Annual SEM Scholarship Contest. It explains in detail how you can optimize your Analytics Settings to collect relevant data that will instantly improve your conversion rates and help your web analysts make more meaningful conclusions and decisions.
So you’ll have to check out the entire article over at Marketing Pilgrim to find out the 8 reasons, as per the contest rules, I cannot post the article here.
Being a contest, I really appreciate your help! You can’t “vote” for me in the traditional sense, the contest works like this:
Between May 28th and 30th we’ll publish the qualifying entries and […]
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The folks at Intridea have been coding up a storm!
In time for this week’s Railsconf, they are rolling out a hosted, on-demand version of their popular Scalr tool, a new release of their MediaPlug media server appliance, and the Acts as Community social network.
Scalr gives enterprise IT professionals the ability to quickly and easily set up and run EC2-powered server farms. Once such a farm has been set up, Scalr monitors and maintains it, with automatic scaling, failover, and redundancy. Scaling is based on load averages, with automatic instantiation of new instances of the proper type once the aggregate load average reaches a configurable threshold. If an instance crashes, Scalr replaces it with a new instance of the proper type. The hosted version is available for $50 per month; the open source version can be downloaded here.
MediaPlug is an EC2-powered media server appliance, packaged and sold as an AMI (Amazon […]
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Amazon EC2 users now have access to a pair of new "High-CPU" instance types. The new instance types have proportionally more CPU power than memory, and are suitable for CPU-intensive applications. Here’s what’s now available:
The High-CPU Medium Instance is billed at $0.20 (20 cents) per hour. It features 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units Each), and 350 GB of instance storage, all on a 32-bit platform.
The High-CPU Extra Large Instance is billed at $0.80 (80 cents) per hour. It features 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), and 1,690 GB of instance storage, all on a 64-bit platform.
The AWS Simple Monthly Calculator now supports these new instance types.
We’ve been working with a number of tool vendors to line up early support for this important new feature. I plan to update […]
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When a customer lands on a 404 Not Found page, he or she is caught off guard - confused at best and downright frustrated and ready to shop somewhere else at worst. A 404 page is a customer service touchpoint. It’s an opportunity to be helpful, show a business’ personality and even merchandise. Do you treat your 404 page like a landing page?
When checking out how top online retailers do 404 pages, I found many simply redirect users to the home page, which is a perfectly fine way of handling things. For those of you who do use 404 Not Found pages, here are some examples from fellow retailers — the good, the bad and the funny.
404 Page Examples and Tips
1. Have a page
If you don’t automatically redirect, there’s nothing worse than landing people on a generic screen like this:
When you remove all navigation it’s like teleporting a customer […]
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NewEgg.com is the latest retailer to open their doors to 3P Merchants with the launch of the NewEggMall.com.
Here are a list of Retailers who allow 3P Merchants to sell on their platform:
Amazon.com
Overstock.com
Buy.com
NewEggMarket.com
Play.com in the UK
Who will be next? Will BestBuy.com open its doors? Or will the new Gap Marketplace be the next store to welcome 3P merchants. Perhaps, Zappos will take a shot at this new business model.
As, I have said before, 2008 is the Year of the #P Seller and it looks like 2009 will be just as good.
Notice, I didn’t mention eBay, because they are not a retailer. They are a pure-play marketplace and will get lost in the shuffle.
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Wal Mart has just launched a Classifieds Website in partnership with oodle.com it looks like the 800 lb. Gorilla of the B&M world is now trying to make in-roads in the burgeoning Online Classifieds business.
Ain’t competition grand!
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If you’re among the 5,000 attendees at Internet Retailer 2008 Conference and Exhibition, make sure you stop by booth 431. Elastic Path’s VP of Innovation, Jason Billingsley and yours truly would be thrilled to meet you.
Jason and I are going to be available to answer your ecommerce questions and give you free 1-on-1 ecommerce advice when you visit our booth. You can also see a demo of Elastic Path 6, our rockin’ ecommerce platform. No “bendy girls” this year, but you can catch the amazing elastic potential of the human body if you missed our presence in 2006.
We also hope you join us Tuesday night for some off-exhibit hall socializing. If you’d like to party with us, please send me a quick email at site-review@elasticpath.com and we’ll keep you in the loop on the when-and-where’s.
There’s still time to register for IRCE2008 and enter code EC8183 to […]
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Dennis Altman refused to spend $3000 and wait nine weeks to get the electronic air suspension on his Range Rover fixed at the dealership. “I hung up still laughing, when I settled down I hit Google and started learning. I’ve worked on cars since I was 14, my 7 years in the US Navy I […]
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