Comments for The Last Drop of Ink

Comment on The True Cost of Adding Social Buttons by Stephen Pierzchala (@spierzchala)

Stephen Pierzchala (@spierzchala) — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:03:23 +0000

Great article verifying that social network buttons are performance problems – http://t.co/kd6hDrrh #webperformance #wpo

Comment on The Amazon Buy Box – You know the Secret Formula Right? by Justin M.

Justin M. — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:25:52 +0000

Just thought I’d mention, I don’t mean to complain too much :) We love Amazon Sellers Central! But I think it’s becoming obvious that Price is factor 1A, 1B, & 1C. Whether or not this has to do with heat coming from Walmart’s latest web or ventures, it’s definitely a “ranking metric” that has been turned up a few (all?) notches!

Comment on The Amazon Buy Box – You know the Secret Formula Right? by Justin M.

Justin M. — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:15:56 +0000

Thank you for writing this reply on Matt’s blog, Christina! I was almost willing to take the steps to switch to FBA, but I was really having reservations about whether or not it’d be worth it. I had a gut feeling that price was all that matters (lately?) after some recent experiences I had. It made sense that the big A would favor FBA sellers, but I wasn’t sure how much. After seeing that you have experienced that same thing (having better metrics by every standard, but still losing the buy box just by price) I will continue to just try and compete on price only.

It’s a shame! Because sometimes it’s the customers who are the most negatively effected by these sort of races to the bottom.

I know we’re the smallest of the smallest sample. But I wonder if others are seeing the same thing, but not really noticing?

Comment on The Amazon Buy Box – You know the Secret Formula Right? by Christina

Christina — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:53:43 +0000

FBA doesn’t guarantee the blue box. I just had a problem with being beaten by a competitor by price, but we had better customer rating and were in stock FBA, whereas the other was from the USA and had a worse rating, but better price. I contacted seller support, and their response was blah blah -metrics, and I replied, but our metrics are better than theirs, at which point they said it was because we had our account suspended in the past (their fault, not ours).

They don’t mention this on their website, but do say ‘Since seller-performance metric targets can vary by category and are subject to change, we do not disclose specific targets needed to qualify for Buy Box eligibility. Eligibility requires meeting very high standards, and excelling in the qualifying criteria is the best way to work toward achieving this status.’ Nice.

Anyway, so just being FBA doesn’t always guarantee buy box (but there are loads of benefits to being FBA). I used Matt’s equation today and we won it instantly, though we didn’t really want to compete on price with yanks, as they can undercut us due to exchange rate.

Comment on Facebook Like Button = 84Kb or 1.340 Seconds? by IT Operations News Roundup – May 7th to 13th | Web Performance Monitoring and Optimization

Mon, 14 May 2012 23:21:32 +0000

[...] That Widget Might Cost your Webpage 1.34 Seconds Think twice before adding a widget to you page. The author of this blog article discovers that the Facebook widget on the page is adding 84KB of data and 1.34 seconds to the load time. [...]

Comment on Part 1: WordPress WWW (The What, The Who, The Where To Start) by Prabhat Shah (@day2dayebay)

Prabhat Shah (@day2dayebay) — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:48:40 +0000

Gr8 meet up @CardiffInternet. Just to clarify abt plugins, ref this post which is in plain english http://t.co/2uEOC0Ei frm @lastdropofink

Comment on Looking for BETA Testers – A Couple of eBay Related Widgets by Last Drop Of Ink (@lastdropofink)

Last Drop Of Ink (@lastdropofink) — Sun, 13 May 2012 10:16:50 +0000

Looking for BETA Testers – A Couple of eBay Related Widgets: Hola, I’ve been working on a couple of widgets … http://t.co/s0jTVpWg #in

Comment on The eBay “Best Match” Position Bias Modifier Hypothesis by Matthew Ogborne

Matthew Ogborne — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:29:00 +0000

Howdy,

To add to this article, this makes interesting reading:

http://blog.ecommercebytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2012/5/1336573422.html

Matt

Comment on Have You Received a Price Parity Policy Warning from Amazon? by Dorian

Dorian — Thu, 10 May 2012 10:34:23 +0000

It’s definitely worth pursuing with O.F.T. If it’s illegal they’ll take it seriously whether there’s one complainant or many. Skoosh was the only complainant here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11330463

Comment on Have You Received a Price Parity Policy Warning from Amazon? by Anon

Anon — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:28:13 +0000

Upon receiving our first warning back October 2011 we first contacted Amazon about there anti xompetitive bahaviour and possible illegal activites to which we had a response that totally ignored eveything we said and asked (not really a huge supply).

At this point we made contact with the OFT who said to send them all the information but from what we discussed on the phone didn’t think it would be worth pursuing form one complaint. But about 2 months after first reporting the issue (Jan 2012) we received a letter from the OFT saying that they were actually going to investigate our claim. We have not heard any more since then but I believe these things take months to progress. Watch this space!