Common Sense eCommerce

MonsterCommerce is a long standing, mature provider of shopping cart software. They have been especially popular for home-based businesses using a Drop Ship model. In late 2005, they were acquired by Network Solutions. Now it appears they may be actually winding down their name. In fact, the MonsterCommerce.Com URL redirects to a Networks Solutions page which only mentions MonsterCommerce in footnotes.

This is news that has been bubbling for quite some time. If you have a MonsterCommerce website, you probably already know that Version 4x is being supplanted by Version 7x. As the jump in version numbers indicates, this is not a minor update. In fact, it’s not an update at all but a full migration to a different platform.

I’m a bit unclear on this but it appears that the 7x platform doesn’t carry the MonsterCommerce name any longer and everything will be referred to as Network Solutions. This isn’t surprising considering the big fish / little fish nature of such mergers and acquisitions. I will look into this further and try to get more clarification.

This change is actually long overdue as MonsterCommerce really has an older shopping cart platform with lots of back-end things that need fixing. There are far too many things to discuss here, but most notably is the PCI/CISP compliance for payment processing. If you’re a current MonsterCommerce web store subscriber, you should take some time to read up on the upcoming changes at this forum link (you must log into the forum to read these forum threads).

The migrations will occur sometime in the spring and summer time frame. Network Solutions/MonsterCommerce is giving its current merchants a 30 day window on migration. In other words, the site will be migrated to the new platform in test mode for 30 days before being made live. This will give site owners the opportunity to preview the new site before allowing it to roll over.

If you are considering MonsterCommerce as a shopping cart platform for your home-based business, this would be a good time to wait things out. There are big changes coming with this provider! The times are a changing at MonsterCommerce. New platform for this mature shopping cart provider is in the works.

What is the optimal sized thumbnail? Answer is “it depends”. Don’t you just love that answer? For one thing, it depends on what you’re thumbnailing. If it’s just a caption or something, a small one might do. But if you’re selling products of some kind, larger ones might be in order.

It used to be that online merchants made their thumbnails small to fit as many as possible on a page and while avoiding slowing down the page load process. That was back in the day when a lot of people had dial up internet service. Fewer people have dial-up now and broadband internet is the norm. So page loads aren’t really the issue they once were.

If you’re selling products online, the picture is the one thing that will go a long ways toward making the sale. And the thumbnail view is the visitor’s first glimpse of the product photo. Doesn’t that mean it should show off as much as possible about the product? Shouldn’t it grab the eye? Which looks the best?

Might be hard to tell unless you line them up with other products, but the smallest one doesn’t do much for the product don’t you agree?

Tags: Web Thumbnails, Product Thumbnails, Thumbnail Photos, Thumbnail Sizes

I love audio! I’m not referring to music (although I like that too) but rather audio files that I can listen to providing me with some sort of insight, enlightenment, or otherwise educational information. I like them because I listen to them while I am engaged in activities where I can’t read a book or do anything else (such as waiting in a long line or driving somewhere). It’s a way to have some information of my choosing played to me, rather than a spoon fed, pre-determined mass media audio.

Naturally that brings me to Audible.Com quite often. Audible is THE seller of audio books and they are partnered with various large eCommerce media companies like Amazon and Apple. Recently I bought a copy of Joe Vitale’s “The Key” on Audio and it was a real wrestling match getting it onto my iPod Nano. While Audible supports the Nano, the process of downloading to my iPod is usually fraught with errors and crashes. I have some technical expertise and can usually get the audio file going on my iPod but I feel for a non technical user of Audible. In their fervor to enforce DRM, Audible has created a process that is difficult and problematic - a long ways from seamless.

Audible is the eBay of the spoken audio world and it would be nice if they had some competition. I for one, am growing weary of these ‘wrestling matches’ with Audible downloads!

Tags: Audible.com, Audio Books, Audible Issues, Audible Downloads

I saw this bit on the NY Times blog about Amazon Sales Tax in New York State. As we all know, internet sales tax is about to be levied one way or another. That piece is about New York State sales in general, but it reflects a larger problem with Amazon and sales tax.

Their shopping cart charges me sales tax because I live in Washington State where presumably Amazon has a physical presence. Ok fine, I understand that. When I sell something to someone who is having it shipped in Washington State I have to charge them sales tax.

When I was a merchant on Amazon I had to eat the sales tax because Amazon’s seller account system did not calculate it. It just didn’t have a sales tax feature. This was a recently as November of last year. I asked about this numerous times and each time I got the same answer in various forms: ‘We expect the seller to absorb the sales tax’.

This might work for things like media where the dollar value is less than $20 but I was selling things in the 50, 100 and 200 dollar range. At 8.9%, there wasn’t enough margin to ‘absorb’ the sales tax. So what did I do? I canceled the orders that were going to ship to Washington locations. Bad practice and I was never really comfortable with it, but I simply couldn’t afford to absorb the extra 10 or 15 dollars for sales tax that I couldn’t collect.

The idea with online merchants and sales tax is the merchant collects the tax, then pays it back to the state at certain intervals (sometimes quarterly). Technically that’s a wash although it really isn’t when you consider the administrative work involved in reconciling the state tax (which I outsource to my accountant). But it’s certaintly no a wash if you have to absorb it. Amazon needs to face the sales tax music sooner or later!

Tags: Amazon Sales Tax, Internet Sales Tax, Online Sales Tax, eCommerce Sales Tax

Every year we go through this: eBay announces fee changes, sellers get mad, threaten in the online forums to quit. A week or so later, life returns to normal. But is that the case this time?

This article from CNN Money, discusses a few of the eBay alternatives and it seems they are suddenly picking up new sellers by the droves. Specifically they mention OnlineAuction.Com and eCrater.Com which picked up 7,500 and 1,400 new sellers respectively in the week after eBay made its announcements.

Perhaps the competitors are smelling blood here? Even Overstock.com which had nearly thrown in the towel on their auction business has put it back on their front page and placed it more prominently.

There’s a balance in there somewhere. The big question is: How many sellers will have to leave eBay to affect that balance to the tipping point? That’s the point where the lack of sellers degrades the buying experience and therefore the buyers begin to look elsewhere.

The buyers won’t necessarily follow the sellers off eBay except for those sellers that have established strong bonds with their customers (hint: that’s the way to do it, take your customers with you!). It won’t be until the buyer traffic drops significantly that eBay will begin to notice the pinch in the bottom line. I don’t know what effect those sellers who left in the last two weeks will have on eBay if any. For the 7,500 that went to OnlineAuction.Com, I’m betting 7,500 more sellers will join eBay.

eBay, eBay Sellers, eBay Markeplace

There’s been a lot of hoopla about the huge eBay announcements this week.  It wasn’t just a fee increase this time; rather it was a multi-legged beast.  The eBay forums are ablaze with angry sellers and talks of rebellious eBay boycotts.  There are 3 primary issues which seem to be contentious.

1 - Fee Structure Changing.  This time around, the fee change is on the back end.  They reduced the listing fees, but raised the FV fees.

2 - FeedBack changes.  Sellers will only be able to leave positive feedback about buyers; buyers will still have all the feedback options.

3 - Search Results Changes. The default search results will change from “ending soonest” to “best match”.  Best Match is based on a variety of seller performance criteria.

When you really look at these 3 things in combination, you can see that eBay is merely moving toward a more normalized eCommerce model. Here is why I say that:

1 - Fee Structure Changing.  Most online selling portals charge heavier fees on the sale itself. Amazon and UBid are both examples of that. While there are costs to list, they are minimal compared to the chunk that comes out from the final sale (Amazon’s is 8 to 15 percent depending on the category).

2 - FeedBack changes.  eBay is (or rather was) just about the only place where sellers could leave meaningful feedback for the buyers.  It was an oddity in that regard.  In most eCommerce arrangements, the buyer has the voice and the seller can only respond via follow up comments or something similar.

3 - Search Results Changes.  The real world of online search does not operate on “ending soonest”. It rewards websites that are stable, provide good reliable service/product/content and have a good standing among other sites. Each is a proprietary model where only their engineers know all the details. This eBay change merely reflects that model.

So eBay’s massive shift this year is merely following a cycle of moving toward standard eCommerce.  They toyed with that when they introduced the eBay stores, but this is a much more core, fundamental shift.
Tags: eBay, eBay Fees, eBay FeedBack, eBay Best Match

The big buzz in eCommerce this week is the Microsoft proposed acquisition of Yahoo! If you haven’t read about it, you’ve not been reading the news, but here is the story. 

How to acquire a company that doesn’t want to be acquired? Make them an offer they can’t refuse and wave the money in the front of the investor’s faces so the board can’t say no. In reality, this deal seems to make a lot of sense given the fact that Yahoo’s future is somewhat uncertain as a media company. Microsoft, not happy with their long standing 3rd place status in the search engine media market will benefit. So it looks like a win win.

Here is a MarketWatch article that sounds the alarm about the culture difference between Microsoft and Yahoo! Indeed, Microsoft is not a media company like Yahoo!, rather, they’re a software company with a media division. The article draws up the example of the AOL / Time Warner merger a number of years ago. That turned out to be a culture clash of gargantuous proportions. I’m not sure the MS/Yahoo will be quite that bad, but it’s something to consider.

And then there’s that pesky issue of the Brand. Will Microsoft keep the Yahoo! name? Will they drop that annoying “!” at the end?

Tags: yahoo, microsoft, Yahoo Microsoft, Microsoft Yahoo Acquisition