Common Sense eCommerce

I was interested in researching Memory Foam as I see a lot of Memory Foam mattresses and mattress toppers for sale. But I was a bit confused as to how memory foam is measured for quality and what the “5#, 6#, etc” means.So I decided to check out eBay reviews. eBay lets sellers post reviews and somehow they get into the top 1000 of reviewers. I am not sure how that is tabulated but it must be pretty easy to get to be a Top 1000 reviewer!

Here is a review I found on eBay’s review system on Memory Foam (link here). It appears to be a fairly informative review although not all that well written. It did however, answer some basic questions for me about memory foam so I though I might check out this seller’s listings.

I thought it was odd that the listings shown along with the review were from other eBay sellers so I clicked his feedback. OOPS. Not a registered user — NARU baby. And NARU since about a year ago.

The last of his feedback looks like the seller disappeared or went under. Ok so this kind of raises an issue with eBay reviews. The obvious question here is should eBay have a Top 1000 reviewer that is NARU? In particular, should they have a Top 1000 reviewer that may have ripped people off?

There are some pretty nasty comments at the end of this sellers feedback record and that just doesn’t bode well for being a “Top 1000 Reviewer”. Granted the content of the review is probably still of value, but perhaps eBay should separate the content from the content provider when the content provider goes NARU.

Tags: eBay NARU, eBay Sellers, eBay Memory Foam, eBay Reviewers

Well I keep hearing buzz about this company - StoresOnline - and have some time today so let’s take a look! It’s yet another Internet company that supposedly has a plug and play website waiting for you where you can just fire it up, load with products, and start raking in money. That is after you pay them about 6 grand for training and start-up materials. It’s just an old scam with a different face. Here is their website:

StoresOnline

The first thing you might notice is the lack of pricing information. This is red flag number one. No available usually pricing means ‘look out’ and run the other way.

Furthermore, there is no live chat and no toll free number. 2nd red flag. There is contact information on their Contact page, but it’s all email, and an 801 (Utah) phone and fax number. The number is not answered after hours.

It looks like you must go through some sort of live seminar presentation to even get to the pricing and structure of the so-called ‘opportunity’. Taking a look at their so-called ‘training page’, it looks as they’re taking the “it’s a dog eat dog world and you need training” approach to selling their ’system’.

Another thing to note is the plethora of reports at RipoffReports.Com (link here). 357 when I checked. And oddly enough, Ripoff reports has this disclaimer at the top of each of them:

Rip-Off Report Investigation: shows that StoresOnline & iMergent is fulfilling its commitment to provide excellent customer service. Rip-off Report gives StoresOnline a POSITIVE rating in customer support and quality assurance. StoresOnline pledges to resolve complaints and address any issues from the past, present and in the future - committed to 100% satisfaction - whatever it takes - say company executives.

I suspect Ripoff Report has been sued so many times that they must have to cave in to deep pocketed companies that can pay for waiver comments like that. I’m sorry, but the large amount of negative complaints casts a huge shadow over that ‘thumbs-up’ comment.

Reading through the complaints I see some common threads: high pressure ’seminar style’ sales tactics, an extremely short guarantee window, and a high startup price in the 6 to 7 thousand dollar range.

Now there are some real questions about Ripoff Reports which I won’t go into, but even if we ignore the 357 reports there, that still leaves lots of questions about this company. For example their record at the Better Business Bureau is hardly exemplary and even includes information about government actions against this company (link here).

Back to the StoresOnline page, you can read some testimonials there and of course they sound good. But they are prefaced by this comment:

Testimonial results are not typical and your individual results will vary. Your success depends on having the right price, product, and marketing efforts.

In other words, you will have to work your business and differentiate yourself just like you would in another other business effort. So why do you need to spend $6000 to $7000 with StoresOnline to get that when you can do it yourself for about $800 or less? That’s about how much each of my drop ship websites have cost me to start up (made up of setup fees for the website and merchant accounts, along with money I’ve paid for having someone help me with design).Then of course I have to market them, but you must do that with StoresOnline as their disclaimers says. The places I setup drop ship sites all have built in templates like StoresOnline so why the difference in price?

The difference is: big fat company and lots of marketing overhead to cover! Save yourself the unnecessary expense folks and do your own drop ship site(s); it’s just not that hard. And you will be more satisfied with your efforts and less likely to feel resentful toward a company like this.

Tags: Internet Ripoff Companies, StoresOnline Internet Ripoff, StoresOnline Ripoff, StoresOnline Scam

About once every six weeks or so I get a cold call from a company telling me they’re ‘calling on behalf of eBay’ and asking for me by name. I call this the semi-regular eBay telemarketing call. It comes from a number in area code 801 (Utah) and they usually call to tell me about some lame feature that I already know about. I have yet to have them tell me about anything that I’m not already familiar with.

Today’s call was to tell me about Markdown Manager (which has been out for months now) and once again I told the person I was not interested in their calling me any longer. Today they interrupted me in the middle of lunch with a friend.

So I decided to find out how to stop these calls as they have been getting increasingly annoying and are never of any value to me. I engaged eBay chat and according to the chat rep, they don’t have any such calling system. He said that I can report this issue to the Trust and Safety team. Haha - typical eBay chat blow-off.

I was unable to find anything in my preferences that had to do with telemarketing and of course eBay Help was of no help. So next time they call, I will have to try to pin them down on who they really are and how I get them to stop calling me. It’s apparent they are either eBay agents or eBay has sold my name and phone number to some outside marketing company.

Tags: eBay Calls, eBay Telemarketing, eBay Telemarketing Calls, Annoying eBay Calls

The other day, everyone probably noticed that Google shifted their links line-up to the upper left corner of the screen from the center of the screen. Another not so obvious change is that they eliminated the ‘even more’ choice from the ‘more’ option.

As of this writing, these are the options you get:

The old Google ‘more’ gave you these choices:

Note that you could click ‘even more’ to get to their whole suite of products. Looks like they’ve eliminated the ‘even more’ thing. Needless to say, a lot of things are missing from their new ‘more’ list. But most notably is the Directory (ODP aka The Open Directory Project).

Could it be that Google finally realizes that the ODP is not worthy of front page exposure or linkage? After all, who actually uses directories these days? The ODP has long been criticized for being slow, unwieldy, and not providing the quality that was part of its original goal.

It wasn’t too long ago that Google had the ODP Directory link among their 4 main links below their name. My how times have changed! Now to be fair, there are plenty of other products left off the list from the main page, but for some reason, the ODP/Directory link stands out the most.

You can still get to the entire list of products via some of the product screens (like Blog Search), but I have a feeling Google hasn’t gotten around to changing them yet. The other way to get to the entire list is to log into your Google account and click “My Account”. Under the section “Try something new” is a link to ‘more’ that goes to all their products.

But bottom line, there is no longer an indirect link from the home page to the ODP/Directory and certain other products - although you can certainly ‘Google’ them.

Tags: Google Home Page, Google Products, Google Directory, Google ODP Link

I did a post over on my Home Business blog about Yahoo! and their new Keyword Research Tool which is supposed to replace the old Overture Keyword Tool. Difference is, this one has only relative indicators which puts Yahoo! on par with Google and MSN. Why do these Search Engines not want to reveal the numbers behind each keyword?

I can think of two possible reasons. The first is the fact that such data is considered proprietary and highly secret. So I would ask: if they tell us that 240,000 searches were done for ‘ebay home business’ last month on their network, is that such a big secret? Perhaps it should be something they could charge for. I for one, would be happy to pay for Google’s quantitative search data.

A second reason I can think is that it’s too difficult and perhaps not worth their trouble. Considering all the disparate data centers these Search Engines maintain, it might a big task to aggregate all that data on every possible keyword.  It seems that Yahoo Overture did it, although their data points were sometimes called into question by many SEOs.

So that leaves us with WordTracker which does still give us quantitative search data. Although their quantitative data is also proprietary and has been drawn into question. In the meantime, I guess we have to think in relative terms when doing keyword research.

Tags: Yahoo! Search Marketing, Overture Keyword Tool, Yahoo! Keyword Tool, Yahoo! Keyword Research

Last week I did a brief review of HammerTap Versus TeraPeak on my Home Based Business Blog. Someone from Hammertap contacted me and let me know they’ve actually had a web-based version for quite some time:

I just wanted to clarify that HammerTap now has a web-based version. This PowerWeb version was launched last fall specifically in mind for research on the go. Users can now use any computer or IE based PDA to research their products. While this version is not sold seperately, it is included with the purchase of the complete PowerDesk (desktop) package.

At $19.95 per month, this is a pretty good value. HammerTap (formerly called DeepAnalysis) used to be a whopping $24.95 per month for the Desktop Edition. Now you can get the Desktop version along with the Web version and several other goodies.

I’ve never liked the idea of having to install software on my computer for a couple of reasons.

If it’s possible to get the job done via the web, then that is a big preference for me. In the course of my typical week, I can be on one of 3 computers and I don’t want to have to install HammerTap on all 3. I’ve got 3 computers I’m using (one of which belongs to someone else).

The second is keeping it updated - especially over multiple computers. TurboLister comes to mind. It seems like each time I use TurboLister, I have to wait for 5 minutes while it updates to the latest revision.

But one advantage to a local software product is the abiltity to easier save and retain search data. This is really important in high production researching projects because you might look at something and think, hmm. that looks ok, but I’d like to compare it to something else later in the project.

The HammerTap suite gives me the best of both worlds although I will have to test it to see if the web version is as good as TeraPeak.