It was only one year ago my first Get Elastic post went live, how quickly the year has gone! The post was the Social Shopping Roundup and it showcased many social shopping start-ups from social bookmarking or “wishlisting,” to deals and coupon sharing communities and social comparison engines.
According to Hitwise analyst, Heather Dougherty “The Social Shopping category is still small, receiving less than 1% of the total market share of US visits, but there has been significant growth.” (Source)
Scott Hurff of CSE Strategies puts it into perspective - MySpace receives about 2% of Internet traffic. So for every 2 hits on MySpace (or Facebook), someone’s checking out a social shopping site. Of the social shopping sites, Kaboodle appears to be the Google in terms of market share:
Kaboodle 68%
Buzzillions 8.23% (Ratings and Reviews, Comparison Shopping)
ThisNext 7.23%
ShopWiki 6.89%
Stylehive 5.18%
With the exception of Buzzillions, the top 5 are “social bookmarking” […]
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We’ve all heard about the eBay seller boycott attempts over the past year and the reality is they have each failed — sellers rely too much on the income that comes from eBay to stop listing.
I’ve never been an advocate of boycotts mostly because as John Donahoe says; “With sellers, there’s nowhere else to get this volume.” source eBay Strategies.
Too many sellers are hooked on the “crack” (volume and cash flow) they are addicted and going cold turkey is too painful. eBay management knows this and uses it to their advantage.
Additional reasons boycotts don’t work:
eBay is a competitive environment and too many sellers will list items to replace those removed by the sellers who are boycotting. Until every seller acknowledges they are addicts and they want to change, boycotts will continue to fail.
eBay controls the flow of “crack” and can just “push” a listing promo, so sellers decide they just […]
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Here is the announcement from yesterday: “Offering free shipping is a great way to make your items stand out from your competition. Buyers love it, and it can help improve your Detailed Seller Ratings scores. If you haven’t already tried it, now is a great time to start. From tomorrow, May 23rd through June 1st, you’ll get 15% off your Final Value Fees when you offer Free Shipping on eBay.com and for Parts & Accessories listings on eBay Motors! “Here are the details:
Why should I offer Free Shipping? Try a key business growth strategy. Buyers are becoming used to Free Shipping offers in the general e-Commerce market. See if Free Shipping boosts your sales and learn which pricing makes it work for you. We’ll give you a Final Value Fee discount for 10 days to help.
What is it? From May 23 through June 1, sellers who list item(s) in Auction-style […]
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I had the privilege of being interviewed for the first installment of “Web Analytics Guru Interviews” over at Rich Page’s Blog. Check it out and discover what I think are the ingredients for a killer ecommerce user experience, my favorite web analytics metric, what inspires me as a blogger, what’s so cool about Elastic Path and more!
Get Elastic was also named as one of 36 Blogs That Make Customers Sing by word-of-mouth marketing afficionado Sean Moffitt of Buzz Canuck. Sean recommends you read one branding and customer experience focused blog per day for the entire month of June, plus July 1-4 for good measure. June 8 is Get Elastic day so I’ll aim to write something groovy about branding and customers! Any suggestions for topics that you’d like to see covered? Please drop a comment, you want it, you got it.
All right, on with the links!
Great news, […]
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Derek Gottfrid and his colleagues at the New York Times have obviously been having a lot of fun with Amazon EC2.
Their latest offering is the TimesMachine. Print subscribers can access any issue of the New York Times, dating back to Volume 1, Number 1 in 1851. Non-subscribers can take a peek at 6 different (and historically significant) issues, including the inaugural edition, the end of World War I, and the sinking of the Titanic.
As they explained in their blog post, they used EC2, Hadoop, and some of their own code to convert 405,000 large TIFF images, 3.3 million SGML files, and 405,000 XML files to 810,000 PNG images and 405,000 JavaScript files. This didn’t take all that long:
"By leveraging the power of AWS and Hadoop, we were able to utilize hundreds of machines concurrently and process all the data in less than 36 hours."
The content itself is really interesting, […]
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Just a reminder our friends at Sitebrand are presenting a webinar on pre and post conversion behaviors next Thursday9. Make this a lunch-and-learn, it’s a quick 29 minutes on May 29 (co-incidence?) with a bonus 15 minute Q&A period.
Special guest Jason Burby, Chief Analytics and Optimization Officer for ZAAZ will be joining Carolyn Gardner, Director of Customer Experience at Sitebrand. You may recall Carolyn’s webinars with Jason Billingsley on email marketing and the 4 buying modalities.
You’ll learn strategies for minimizing bounce rates, optimizing micro-conversion points (wishlists, email opt ins etc), building engagement and trust and increasing loyalty.
Date: Thursday, May 29, 2008
Time: 2:00 pm - 2:29 pm EDT plus 15 minutes for questions and answers (optional)
I will be in on the call and will provide a recap of the session here on Get Elastic, but there ain’t nothin’ like the real thing so do sign up for the live […]
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My eBay “habit” began in 1999 and for the first 6 years I was in heaven, but in Dec. of 2005, I had to make a decision. Was I going to try and restructure my business, for the 2nd time in as many years; after all it was still generating nearly $350K a month in cash (no profit mind you). Or, would I quit cold turkey and deal with the inevitable crash and burn when the crack (cashflow) stopped.
I actually had three options:
I could sell my business for whatever I could get. It made sense to put my sales on top of a lower cost structure and my brand was one of the best on eBay. I actually had a buyer, but the deal fell through at the last moment.
I could restructure and try it one more time, hoping I could stop the bleeding and grow my website. The […]
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Gina Geraci knew she had something special to sell online being located in New York. “New York Bagels are famous for their one of a kind taste and texture. It is one of the many things people crave after leaving New York. I knew it would be a hit because New York bagels can not […]
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Since everyone else has already laughed at Microsoft’s attempt to buy search market share, I was going to try to play devil’s advocate. Can’t do it. Sorry.
-Cashback sites like David Lewis’ Cashbaq make money and therefore Microsoft will make money. Unfortunately, I don’t think the point of Live Search cashback is just to make a couple bucks off of running a cashback site. If Microsoft thinks it can buy off consumers with cashback deals and get those consumers to come back to search for everything else they are using Google to search for, I think they are mistaken.
-As I discussed with Om this afternoon, the whole idea sounds more like a gimmick than anything else. People don’t want a gimmick, they want an incredible search engine which returns answers to their questions.
-The Live Search cashback announcement was a great PR stunt. Consumers […]
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I will be participating in a webinar on Thursday, May 22nd at 11 AM PST. Hosted by AWS user Vertica, the webinar will cover Vertica’s cloud-based approach to analytic data management. The webinar is free, but you will have to register in advance if you would like to attend.
The Vertica Analytic Database runs on Amazon EC2 and S3 and is hosted completely within the Amazon cloud. Using this approach, they are able to smoothly scale to meet large and complex workloads, while also supporting automatic replication, failover, and recovery.
Unlike a traditional database install where you would have to pay for a data center, hardware, software, and administrators before you can store a single row, the Vertica solution is priced on a per-month, per-node basis. New nodes are available 30 minutes after receipt of order! In true cloud-based fashion, payment is handled through the Amazon Flexible Payments Service.
A traditional […]
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