Common Sense eCommerce

Effective May 1, Amazon will no longer be showing customer information in their “SOLD SHIP NOW” email notices. This is to protect customer privacy and affects Amazon Marketplace Sellers and Amazon Webstores.

I’ve also noticed that they now mask the email address of the customer in the web based seller panel. If you want to contact the customer via the web panel, you have to go through their web based messaging system. Is Amazon removing access to the customers completely?

Granted, Amazon merchants don’t have the right to send customers unsolicited email. But as an Amazon seller, I do like to use my own templates and email service to notify the customer of the order status.

At Amazon in fact there are at least 3 opportunities to get in touch with the customer. 1 - To acknowledge the order was placed and thank them for the order (plant URL in signature). 2 - To notify the customer the order was shipped and give the tracking number (plant URL in signature again). 3 - Follow-up with the customer about 3 weeks after order to thank them again and ask for feedback (plant URL in signature again). A little soft marketing; now I wonder if I’ll still be able to do that?

The question that I can’t seem to get answered is if there will be any change to the Download Orders file. That is a CSV file that Amazon sellers can download and get their orders into Excel for easier processing. At the present time, the customer email addresses are in there. We’ll see if it’s there on May 1!

Tags: Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Webstore, Amazon Selling, Amazon Customers

Never mind the controversy surrounding Heather Mills and the allegations of being a gold-digger, etc. Throw that out for a minute and look to her bravery.

One leg real, one leg prosthetic, she danced. And danced she did on television in front of millions of viewers. She may not have danced perfectly, she may have stumbled once or twice, but she had the courage to get up in front of the world and give it her best shot.

What does this have to do with eCommerce and Small Business? Nothing and everything really. She’s one of those reminders that no matter what we think we can’t do or what obstacles stand in our way, that we can find ways to overcome them.

She also did this all for a passion of hers - animal welfare. Kudos and I will have to add her to my list of people I’d like to meet.

Heather Mills Voted Off Dancing with the Stars

Last week, the tragic Virginia Tech killing was linked to eBay in reports like this one:

Tech Shooter May Have Used eBay Account

Not that eBay is to held responsible for this tragedy, but it does tend to shine a bad light on eBay at a time when they really need some good “PR” press. They really don’t need links to unfortunate events like this.

Today, eBay came out with a statement acknowledging that Cho Seung-Hui did have an eBay account, but used it to purchase empty ammo clips and a gun holster - things that are unregulated.

Full Story Here

Some of the most hideous web pages can be found on My Space. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps just the informal nature of the social network makes it a ‘who cares about my design’ place.There is a site called ‘Worst of Myspace’ which used to blog about some of the worst offenders on a regular basis, but lately they seem to have stopped posting. It can’t be that they’ve run out of material. Why here’s one right here.

You think this person likes eBay?

Tags: Bad MySpace Profiles, eBay Logo Abuse, Myspace Eyesore, Poor MySpace Design

Simple Math wins! Well mostly.  One of the things I love about the WordPress platform is the wide variety of freeware plug-ins you can use to solve various problems with your blog. There are lots of plug-ins for spam obviously.

I started out by using Akismet which does an awfully good job at identifying comment spam.  However, it simply places comment spam in a queue and lately that queue was getting hundreds of humungous script-created spams per day.  That meant I had to keep going in and cleaning out the queue - not a small task considering the page load time for those huge spams.

So I wanted something that would stop the scripts but I never liked the word verification masks that I see on some blogs. Some of them are so hard to read that I often need two or three attempts to get them right.  And my eyesight is pretty good.

I tried WP-Gatekeeper, which is plug in that poses a simple question for commenters to answer. Very simple like ‘what color is an orange’?  That proved to be buggy at least in this Wordpress blog, so I removed that.

So then I installed the “Did you pass math?” plug in, which presents very simple (yes I mean very simple) math questions for commenters to answer.  Anyone over the age of 7 can answer them don’t worry - single digit addition only not advanced functions or calculus.  Just something to make sure the commenters are really humans not scripts.

So if you see a little ‘3 plus 5′ question, just answer it and know that it really works well toward keeping the blog spam free.

While Amazon has never really mastered the online auction market as eBay has, they have mastered the fixed price market in a way that eBay obviously has not. eBay still does not appear to know exactly what they want to do with their stores even though they have been online since around 2001. Remember the ‘reset the marketplace’ debacle last year? And there is buzz that eBay is getting to ‘reset the marketplace’ yet again.

If you’re looking for an alternative to eBay stores, consider an Amazon Webstore. Like eBay stores, Amazon Webstores are ‘connected’ to Amazon, but you don’t get any traffic from Amazon. The ‘connection’ is a link from your Seller Marketplace store. That will get you indexed by the search engine spiders but not much else. That part is pretty similar to eBay stores where you get a built-in link on your user page to your store. Few people click on it, but the search engines will crawl it.

The big difference in the Amazon Webstores is that you use your own URL and it’s not a sub-domain off the main URL like eBay is. So for example, if your store is “FauxFloralArrangements”, it would look like this on eBay:

http://stores.ebay.com/fauxfloralarrangements

However it would look like this as an Amazon Webstore:

http://www.fauxfloralarrangements.com

(assuming of course, you have secured the domain name).

That’s a huge difference from the perspective of change management. If you decided to move on to another platform, all the links you’ve built with an eBay store will go away. But with the Amazon Webstore, you supply and keep the domain. That means you can take it with you if you decide you don’t want to be an Amazon Webstore any longer and your links will follow (unless you’ve done deep linking).

Some other factoids about Amazon Webstores. Amazon acts as the shopping cart for your transactions just as eBay does. Amazon charges 7% which covers the whole transaction. eBay charges 10% of the first 25 dollars and 7% after that. But then you must also add in the PayPal transaction for another 3 percent. Amazon basic monthly hosting fee is flat: $60.00. So it’s more on the monthly hosting side, but has cost savings on the transaction side.

Another plus side to Amazon Webstores is that you can use your Amazon affiliate account there. In other words, you can setup things in your Amazon Webstore that you are just promoting as an affiliate and they show right along with your other ‘inventory’.

A down side is that there is no apparent way to promote your Amazon Webstore from other Amazon venues like the Seller Marketplace. My rep tells me that may be planned for the future, but for now, you have to get your traffic by other means. But there are indeed other means - like Pay Per Action for example.

You can read about Amazon Webstores at their page (link here).

Tags: Amazon Webstore, eBay Store, Selling on Amazon, Selling on eBay

I have this drop ship site (call it site A) which used to be on the first page on Yahoo for its main keyword. It was in the top 5 sometimes as high as 3. Earlier this year, it took a tumble in the rankings. Not just a little slip, but a major tumble. It’s been fluctuating between the 50 and 65 spots - in other words, they did ‘the Donald’ on my site (for that keyword).I know the reason for the tumble was their January Algo update. But what I don’t know is how to get it back up to page 1. Site A for that keyword ranks #4 on MSN and is currently #12 on Google with an occasional bump to 9 or 10.

I have a theory about Yahoo ranking - completely unfounded, but rumors like this have been floating around for years so I may as well add to them. You have to spend money with Yahoo to rank well with Yahoo.

The competitor for Site A is now in #1 on Yahoo - they are a Yahoo store, my Site A is not hosted on Yahoo. Ahem. Site B (another drop ship site of mine) is not a Yahoo store, but I did plunk down the $300 per year to get it into the Yahoo Directory. It ranks better now than before January for its top keyword - #5 on Yahoo. Cough.

So there you have it folks - the unofficial Frank Ross theory of Yahoo’s Search Algo. Seriously, I suppose I should consider plunking down the $300 for a Yahoo directory listing for Site A. That may bump it up to the first page of Google and may help Yahoo see fit to raise it back to its former prominence.

The other day I did an eBay Kudos, so I guess I’ll have to balance it out with a PFFT. After doing a physical count, I was trying to correct the counts on a few eBay store items.  I get this very helpful error —

This feature is temporarily unavailable
Your selections have caused errors. Please click Continue below to go back and correct your errors.
{ Id : RYI.BIZ.336, Severity : ERROR=3, Parameters : {}, Correlations : {} }

Now, that’s as clear as mud! You click continue and it goes to the start of SELL YOUR ITEM screen. HA! Someone in eBay’s programming department needs a “smackdown” lesson in error trapping and handling.  Aside from that, this seems to be a problem with the new screen only.  A few of our items still retain the old SYI screen I guess due to the fact they’ve been around for awhile in the ‘Good Til Canceled’ mode.  There is no problem with those.

I tried calling it in to Powerseller support, but they blew me off and asked me to email the error message, explaining that technical issues like that should be emailed in (or something like that).  We’ll see what they say. Anyone else seen this?

Saw a clip in the news the other day about a town in New Jersey which has the honor of having the most eBay user of any other town or city in the U.S.(link here).

It was probably pretty easy for eBay to do this: all they had to do was look at the demographics of the zip codes in their user base and compare the figures to population tables - then come with an eBay Per Capita thing. Then plant it in the in press. Then go to the town and have a party!

Maybe eBay is looking for ways to get their name mentioned in the mainstream media alongside something other than a scam or a funny looking cheese sandwich? Kudos eBay for brand tweaking.