Jellyfish, a relative newcomer in the comparison shopping space, has introduced a new user-based voting feature which allows users to pick which item will go live first in their daily “Smack” shopping deal, which works a little bit like a reverse auction where you wait as long as you can before you buy something, but not too long because someone else may be willing to pay a little more than you. Scot had detailed this concept earlier on his CSE Strategies blog.

Anything that gets users more involved on a site is a good thing, and this seems like a neat bit of interactivity on their part. Check out the votes already for today’s. Looks like the iPod Shuffle will go live first.

Check it out and vote for the deal you want…

Share This

Techdirt reports that Amazon has finally launched its product wiki, Amapedia.

Amapedia introduces a new way of organizing product information that we call “collaborative structured tagging”. Articles about products are tagged with a term that describes what the product is (is-a tags) as well as their most important features (facts). We believe that this way of organizing information will make it easy for you to write about the products that you like most. This structured information will also allow other community members to easily discover, filter, and compare related products and product features. Check out Real-time Strategy Games to get a sense of what collaborative structured tagging is about.

As expected with a new site there is little content available so far and the interface is rather poor, but there’s no comprehensive product wiki available today (ProductWiki has a good number of entries with content taken right from other sites).

Here’s an example from Amapedia for a Nikon D50: In addition to a user review it also provides the MPN, ASIN, UPC, Brand and Manufacturer — all essential product descriptors. That combined with user tagging and an API could allow third parties to present the data on other sites (and increase your sales).

Interesting that you can not participate if you’ve never bought anything from Amazon (so they’re probably tracking your contributions) and Amazon is also hinting that it may extend its ClickRiver paid search program to Amapedia to monetize the traffic.

Quick tip: Create objective Amapedia entries for a few of your bestsellers and highlight them to your customers as a means to rate a product. Besides establishing yourself as a category / product expert, who knows, down the road Amazon may tie Amapedia reviews into its search algorithm and/or search results on Amazon and help accelerate your sales. It’s likely to also get you some goodwill with your Amazon category manager.

Share This

eBay UK announced this morning that they will be reducing listing and final value fees in selected categories, effective March 1st. For more details, click here.

This is a very interesting move from eBay and one which we think the seller base in general will welcome. There are four parts to today’s announcement.

1) A reduction in FVFs for technology product categories (including computing, consumer electronics and photography)

2) A reduction in listing fees in the media category (books, CDs, DVDs, etc) but an increase in FVFs in the same categories

3) An increase in listing and FVFs for eBay Motors

4) A change in the Reserve Price fee policy - such fees will no longer be refunded if the item sells.

So, what does this all mean? Well, it seems that eBay is listening to its sellers’ concerns and taking positive steps to address them. Technology products often have high ASPs and low margins and sellers are finding it increasingly hard to make the returns they need to do business through the eBay channel. Therefore the reduction in final value fees in these categories will make a big difference.

As for the media category, this is a very aggressive move. Our media seller clients have told us that, since the changes in store inventory visibility in search results last year, they have had to take a lot of their slower selling inventory off eBay as they simply can’t afford the listing fees. However, by reducing listing fees to 10p in the media categories (or as low as 5p if the starting price is less than 99p), media sellers will be able to put more of their product inventory on eBay and buyers will therefore have more choice. This is a win-win for all concerned.

I’m sure there will be a lot of analysis and comment on these changes over the coming days and months and we’ll keep you abreast of seller reaction as we hear it. But for now, eBay UK sellers have a reason to smile…!

Share This

Nobody is expecting Google to relent on its drive to turn Google Checkout into a major payment system after grabbing a 6% market share in 2006. It’s already free through 2007 and Google is pretty much offering continuous Google Checkout promotions. So what’s left?

Increase conversions (more potential buyers) by calling out Google Checkout in search results and enlarging the AdWords badge.

Google is now experimenting with Google Checkout buttons on AdWords as reported earlier this week by Google System (their image on the right). Now Google has come out on its Google Checkout blog, admitting the experiment.

The first change we’ve made is a limited test of new Google Checkout badges on AdWords advertisements. Google runs experiments all the time to test new ideas and improvements, and Checkout is no exception. The experimental badge we’re testing uses a Checkout button rather than a cart image to identify Checkout merchants. This test will appear on a very small percentage of queries and we look forward to learning from experiments like this so we can ensure Checkout continues to deliver value to everyone — especially our users who are eager to find fast, secure places to shop when they search.

Why does this matter for online retailers? Bigger button = more eye catching = more conversions = more bang for your paid search Google dollars. Not offering Google Checkout? Do a few searches in Google using your top products as keywords and watch your competitors take your buyers by offering this convenient checkout method.

Share This

Welcome back! Today I’m going to keep grinding through the ChannelAdvisor Product Development lifecycle I introduced earlier in my first and second posts on this topic. If you have not already read those posts, I highly recommend you take a moment to read through those as well as this other required reading.

When we last left our heroes, we finished reviewing Software as a Service, the different “environments” we utilize at CA for deploying code, as well as what is a Change Request (CR), and how CRs are classified into defects, enhancements, work orders, and architecture issues. Today I’m going to delve into our actual processes for creating and deploying software.

CRT Release
CRT stands for “Change Request Team” and is a concept originally introduced by Ralph Kasuba, our VP of Engineering ( aka “chief squire” ) way back in mid-2005 (trust me, 1.5 years is “way back” for us). The CRT process was an alternate process created to streamline deployment of “smaller” changes to our production environment in a timeline of weeks rather than months. Prior to these “CRT releases”, we found ourselves continually frustrated because even the smallest most trivial changes to the system (content changes, a new setting here or there, etc.) would sometimes have to wait 2-3 months to deploy out to our production environment since they first had to be synchronized with all of the other large code changes going on in the system for the next release. This was akin to the trap Microsoft frequently found itself in when many of their products had to wait for the new version of Windows to ship.

(more…)

Share This