Migrating Internal IT Apps to Amazon Web Services Webinar Tonight @6PM GMT

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This caught my attention a few days back & I’m looking forward to attending, the details and link is below:

Attend this webinar and learn how Amazon.com, as a customer of AWS, migrated their own internal IT applications to the cloud. Jon Jenkins, Director of Corporate Applications, will talk about best practices for migrating to the AWS cloud, including how his team evaluated the cloud services, how they got started, and where they are today with more than 50 internal applications running on AWS. In addition, JJ will dive into three key application architectures: a video processing engine, BMC Remedy, and SharePoint on AWS.

Jon Jenkins is a Director in the Corporate Applications team at Amazon.com.  He is responsible for assuring that Amazon’s internal users have access to the tools and systems necessary to do their jobs.  Jon’s goal is to drive down the total cost of ownership of Amazon’s internal IT infrastructure while optimizing the productivity of Amazon’s employees.  During his six years at Amazon Jon has held leadership positions on many teams including: personalization, web site content optimization, and web site operations. Jon’s career in IT spans more than 20 years.

Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/699644731

Best Use of the New Facebook Layout?

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facebook-profile-page-Alexandre-Oudin

This has to be the most ingenious use of the new Facebook layout I have seen to date. So much so I might just have to borrow that for my own use!

This shows with a little creativity, that even the dull blue of Facebook can be lifted. Thankfully, Facebook has a far limited set of design options when you consider some of the shocking myspace, twitter and youtube profiles there are.

Google Chrome WebStore – Just Another App Platform?

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App’s are everywhere these days any why not? The majority of applications extend existing platforms beyond the wildest imaginations of the original developers, just take the iPhone App store or the Android market place as examples, so finally there is a App store for Google Chrome.

Now this for me is quite interesting, as we move forwards with technology, there are chasing platforms, one of which is my favourite web browser, Google Chrome. For me it was a pure speed thing, running Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome next to each other, even hitting return on IE, then FF and then Chrome, Chrome would load pages faster, noting this is the person that has 50Mb broadband and anything that takes more than 1 second to load is classed as ‘laggy’.

The Introduction Video

This is from Google themselves:

Getting Users to Pay

Now this is an interesting concept, I have to date never bought an application solely for a web browser. But considering I spend some 75% using one, I suspect the chances are extremely high, especially when you consider the likes of http://www.tweetdeck.com/ have a free app and there is hundreds of them to choose from.

Take a browse today through the Chrome WebStore and see what you can find.

My #1 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design

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Residential Home

Brace yourself, this one drives me utterly nuts and once you realise what it is, it’ll drive you nuts too!

Its so simple, the top left logo on any website should be a link to the homepage.

Is this soooooo god-dam hard to do? No, its not.

eBay listings are prolific offenders at missing this simple navigation aid. The logo in the top left should be a link, is this not common web courtesy? Is this not such common practice that anyone and everyone expects the brand logo to be a link to the home page? Please mentally weld this into your mind:

Top left,
Link to the homepage

Annoyance In Action

Here, see this in action at http://www.camisera.co.uk/ and don’t think its limited to their website, bingo thier eBay listings are the same.

No logo in the Top Left?

Simple, do what I have done and sit a 1 pixel transparent image in the top left that covers the picture of the dead mosquito. Yes it is invisible, but anyone navigating up there will get the hand cursor and naturally click ‘home’ on it.

The Importance of ‘Home’

Home is like a website reset button, if you get lost you can always go ‘home’ and start again. I’ve seen people do this several times on a site until they get where they want to be, its also highly suggested that you have a bread crumb trail in the header somehwere too like:

You are here: Home » Market Places » Amazon » Amazon IS Human – They Make Mistakes Too!

Don’t make your browsers think, they are too scatty to be put off by bad design. Serve them common and easy on a simple well formed plate of website fodder.

Amazon IS Human – They Make Mistakes Too!

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Relish in this one, its the first time I have ever spotted a mistake by Amazon.

While checking to see where one of the books I ordered on the 5th was too, I noticed in my email an email relating to the new Jeans Store they are promoting.

After taking little look around, mainly to see if they were promoting anyone else other than their own stocked products, I spotted the first mistake I have ever seen on Amazon for one of their own products.

You can view the item here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0045OW8TS

Amazon Screen Shot

amazon-is-human

Amazon Makes Mistakes Too!

Spotted it yet? Here it is:

Size: #REF!

A common error in excel when the reference is not found.

Matthew’s Top Tip

You can stop mistakes like this by using the ISERROR() function in excel. Lets assume that we want to verify the source in cell B2 is not #REF! or similar (as this function catches far more than just #REF!).

In A2 we would use this little combination function:

=IF(ISERROR(B2),"An Error is Found","No Error Found")

In English this is:

If B2 has an error in it, do "An Error is Found" otherwise do "No Error Found"

See even Amazon can make mistakes too when it comes to data, although I must admit, from literally the hundreds of thousands of items I have seen on Amazon and help create for sellers on the platform, this is the first time I have seen Amazon make this mistake.

Thinking about it, it would be really easy for them to check the data being imported for common errors such as #N/A, #VALUE!, #REF!, #DIV/0!, #NUM!, #NAME? or #NULL and reject it (although if you take this suggestion, please add a decent error code as the Amazon error codes list are far from useful, saying ‘or another problem’ is not helpful at times *stamps feet*).

Quick Content Creation with MailChimp Webinar @ 9:30 GMT

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Update: If you missed it, you can catch up with Dan’s presentation here http://blip.tv/file/1670781/

For those not aware, I am quite an avid fan of MailChimp, you can see my earlier article on this fab tool Email Marketing, Why & How you Can Set up Your List In Minutes with MailChimp and tonight they have a ‘Quick Content Creation‘ webinar at 9:30 GMT.

It’ll be only 30 minutes, their webinairs are normally really good and they have an array of previous recordings. You can register here for tonight event https://www2.gotomeeting.com/join/497742107/106367259 and you never know, it might provoke you to actually mail out and interact with your email list at such an important time.

See you there!

Cheaper Toys than Large Retailers? eBay UK? I’m Not Buying It

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Have just been reading an interesting article by AuctionBytes called ‘eBay UK Says It Has Cheaper Toys than Large Retailer‘, but I’m not buying it. Not Toys, I have two kids, but the indication that redundant staff maybe behind the trend.

Quote:
eBay cited unnamed retail analysts who believe that redundancy (layoffs) may be behind the trend, “with former employees unable to find jobs setting up their own businesses instead.

animagic-daisyNow the reason why I am not buying it, is because generally the Toy distribution network is based upon distribution rights management, in short you normally have one company distributing in one country and another in another.

I know this because trying to sell toys across multiple countries is a minefield and the toy manufacturers are exceptionally anally-retentive when it comes the Internet. Its only in the past year that some MD’s have opened up to the ‘Internet’ being a viable sales channel.

The other reason why I am not buying this, is because the greatest danger (to price) is not ToysRus or similar going ‘eBay’, its their suppliers, the ones that run the distribution networks you need to be looking at.

As the old blood dies out, new, more open minded figures will move in, when this happens (and it will, given enough time), that’s when the whole toys selling-floor-plan will change.

Two Blatantly Excellent Marketing Ploys, One Really Cheap, One at £10,000

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Morning, firstly a very Happy Friday. I am not entirely sure, but I have in the past few years been in love with Fridays, there is something special about them, I don;t even work in a traditional office environment, so its not the office atmosphere that kicks in, its.. something about Fridays.

McDonalds A Winner

Anyway, in a break away from the cell more commonly known as the office, I darted off to grab a pot of black gold (that’s coffee for those non coffee lovers), while sipping away and I noticed a stack of papers on the bin. Eh? Morning papers? I was reading How to Grow Your Business: For Entrepreneurs book at the time, but two people in front of me were happily reading way.

I ignored it for a bit and carried on reading, on the way out and emptying the tray (yes I was a Mc Muffin eater today) I took a closer look at the papers, they were yesterdays 3 star Evening posts. Amazing, they’re recycling ‘yesterday, yesterdays’ news for todays consumption.

What a stroke brilliance, yesterdays papers, recycled to use today and they’ve done nothing and exploited a product that would been previous;y trashed or put back in for recycling.

Econsultancy A Winner

The second one, is far more expensive, but so blatant, I love it. See the Econsultancy facebook page and take a read of the text down the right hand side:

We believe this’ll work, so Econsultancy CEO and Co-Founder Ashley Friedlein has gambled donated a £10,000 prize fund to keep you interested. The top 20 ‘influencers’ (defined by the amount of revenue generated) will take a share of the winnings as follows:

‘Human’, humorous, marketing, the best yet and its not even lunch time.

Whatever you are doing, be aware of whats going on around you, you never know when you’ll spot a brilliant marketing idea, sometimes they can be free, inexpensive or cost £10,000.

Enjoy your Friday and let it be a Happy one.

Complete Disappointment @ eBay Austin Reed Outlet

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This could be simply compared to paying absolute top-whack money to locate your store in a shopping mall or popular high street location, with its perfect location and an insanely high volume of passers with a 100% chance of walk-in custom. Just like it is being featured as an eBay Outlet in fact, but without the top-whack money outlay.

Giving the physcial store  a fantastic front-of-house display, spending decent money of staff and designer time to create a brilliant display set-up, with this season’s designs, for both her and him, plus the accessories, stands and covering it from all angles of entry (shop displays are very rarely hit straight on, always need to be angled sideways to capture walking custom).

But then forgetting to replicate the style in the inside of the physical store. Tatty shelves, everything boxed up and not on display. Just left in a heap on the floor. Like a Kwik-Save from the 1990’s.

Yep, you’d never do it on the high street so why are you doing it on the net?

austin-read-ebay-shop-front.jpg

Austin Read eBay Shop Front

Yes, the front of house does have issues, but thats minor when you compare it to when you leave the front page and enter a category, try it and you’ll see this:

austin-read-ebay-shop-inners

Austin Read eBay Shop Inners

Its completely lost its style, that fab looking store front, that front of house display, you know the one, the one that can make or break a retail shop… its.. gone.

There is a gaming term, that is most apt for this, its called the *face palm*, you know the action, place your head in the palm of your hand and move you head gently side to side.

As you can see from the two purple links, I was looking for shirts (my shirt spend is almost as bad as my book spending habit on Amazon currently), the inner templates are OK, but are lacking a close up shot of the fabric, that’s a big thing for me when buying a shirt, the fabric.

It would take someone less than 30 minutes to put a nice header together, probably even less then that as you could almost copy the one from the home page.

Look, this took me < 1 minute in Paint, see how much better it looks?

austin-read-ebay-shop-inners-better

Suggested Header

Going from the shop home page, to a category page is such a shock to the browsing buyer. Remember they’re[customers] crazy creatures and do not like being scared, the same if coming from an eBay listing to a shop category page, it would be far less distressing with a header in place.

Do not let your buyers think, buyers thinking is a bad idea, make it easy for them, make it a common experience, make it simple.

eBay: Doing ‘Whatever is Needed’ to Keep the Seller Entertained.

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Following on from eBay Conspiracy Theory Overview : Part 1 I am sure that eBay do what-ever is needed, even if it costs them sales overall to keep sellers entertained on the eBay platform.

Think about it, DSRs, best match, duplication policy being rolled out right before Christmas, numerous other ‘we’ll panic the **** out of sellers’ with these changes right before a holiday season, they have all been released at really awkward times for sellers.

Best match was a monkey last year with it being tweaked into the holiday season, this year, this statement sums it up:

eBay –  eBay continued  to perform well (especially given the softness we saw in the first 10 days of November due to the duplicate listing policy impacts) and came in at 8.1% for November, way above October’s 5.5%.  Like Amazon, eBay has benefited from a strong secular e-commerce holiday selling period in November.
Source: Channel Advisor

Basically US sellers were screwed over (that’s harsh I know, but imagine if you were a US seller and eBay did this to you right before Christmas) just before the busy season started for vast majority sellers. Look at the date, for goodness sake ‘POSTED OCTOBER 26TH, 2010’. The UK had this (although slightly differently) last year, LAST YEAR. Come on, was there any need to do this at the end of October?

Selling on eBay could be a lot simpler, look at Amazon, they have it down pretty well when products exist in their database, barcode or ASIN, quantity and price, what more do you need?

Well you need everything apparently, every single toy and moving goal post to keep sellers entertained on the eBay marketplace and crucially not on other marketplaces, like Amazon for example.

Why else would such stunts be pulled so close to Christmas?

So my point is?

eBay have proven they will do what ever is needed to keep sellers entertained with the eBay market place. I’m not saying this is a bad thing for eBay, its a brilliant coo, but from a sellers perspective, its a minefield, but also a fantastic opportunity for those sellers who can move fast and take these changes on.

I fell into this trap a few years back, stop looking art DSR’s, stop looking at your feedback every 2 seconds, screw it, what counts is sales, profit and converting existing customers into repeat ones. Anything else is peripheral junk.

Be fully aware of the game that is being played. Work the system, rather than bitching about it. As such, I’ll shut up now :)

eBay Its a ‘Trust’ thing : Part 2 – Always Selling

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In my earlier article where eBay and Amazon were being compared directly (you can see the article here eBay V’s Amazon – Its a ‘Trust’ thing).

Today (was a while back now) at the top of the inbox an email from eBay ‘Who says nothing is for free, username?’ OoO another free listing day, nope, just the spam that we had been expecting from the announcement that eBay were trying to reinforce that trust is an issue on eBay.

eBay Shop With Confidence

eBay Shop With Confidence Mail

Let me be constructive here and let me point out a few things that makes this email more than just spam, but a great email:

  • Its branded towards eBay.
    This sounds like a no-brainer, but I have seen some shockingly crap’n’ugly marketing emails lately that have bared little resemblance of the companies brand. So sounds really daft, but 10/10 for making it look like the corporate brand.
  • A clear message
    Again sounds really daft, but having a simple message to convey is much easier and is responded to much more than some long winded paragraph.
    Keep an eye out on the net for reinforcement lines like these:
    You can Shop With Confidence < Header Line
    We’re Here to Help you < Reinforcement
  • Suggestive Icon
    Now this is the bit I love, the mere ‘suggestion’ that you could ring eBay is a brilliant ‘calmer’. Its like displaying your phone number in listing templates and on the website, the customer probably will never ring it, but feels reassured that its there if needed.
  • Clear Call-To-Action
    Now this is genius and needs to be learnt from. eBay appears, that they did not actually want the reader to read the rest of the information, just tell them that it existed.
    Why? Simple, look at the two call-to-action buttons, the much larger one, the real one, is twice the size of the smaller, on-topic one. If you were give two seconds to click which one would you hit? Now where do you think it goes? Brilliant!

I rant about this a lot, but buyers are idiots, its your job to guide the customer where you want them to go, knowing where you want them to go is paramount, eBay in this case knew exactly what they were doing, pulling a PR trust and safety stunt, BUT pulling off a massive coo, by slipping past mask of the email and turning it into a buying experience. Absolutely brilliant. Now, how do we do that with your email marketing?

OK, I’ll Leave ToysRus on eBay Alone. Well May be…

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This is quite an old article now. I have considered removing it and I have edited it slightly since. However I decided that it would be better to leave this and the other articles on the site, as with anything, experience is only learnt through fire, this was one of those times where I could have done better and approached the subject more tactfully.

I’m leaving it, as it shows I’m just a mere mortal, like us all.

Thats right, I’ll definitely not mention any of following:

Listing titles are being heavily wasted

I covered this off previously in the post called SuperDryStore The Wasteful eBay Listings where they were also wasting their most important asset too (besides the unhealthy amount of ‘Daily Deals’, *coff*).

Picking on a random item ‘Playmobil Firefighter’s with Water Pump’ racks in at just 39 chars, that leaves 16 beauties or 29% wasted. Now times this by +10,000 items, thats a lot of potential lost.

Its really easy to deal with adding extra chars in excel, obviously humans with decent product knowledge are best, but as a temporary measure, you can readily create your own formula in excel that combines cells together. If you use the LEN() function, you can work in layers, here is an example from a recent project:

=IF(A2="","",
UPPER(
IF(AD2="something",IF(LEN(E2)<48,"something "&E2,IF(LEN(E2)<48,"UK NEW "&UPPER(E2),IF(LEN(E2)<52,"UK "&UPPER(E2),E2))),
IF(AD2="something else",IF(LEN(E2)<48,"NEW UK " &E2,IF(LEN(E2)<48,"UK NEW "&E2,IF(LEN(E2)<52,"UK "&UPPER(E2),UPPER(E2)))),
IF(LEN(E2)<48,"UK NEW "&E2,IF(LEN(E2)<52,"UK "& UPPER(E2),UPPER(E2)))
)))
)

In many cases, the eBay listing title and its restrictive 55 chars is a benefit to sellers, as it makes them think about the important keywords and can ‘sometimes’ (I say this very loosely) have a positive effect on website titles and Amazon titles. Although for both of those marketplaces, I’d suggest altering them, if you’re using excel or similar to create titles, you can be extremely coy in the titles that are created and make many variations easily from the same source keyword sets.

Wow, Wasted Subtitles

Obviously a eBay freebie, because no normal seller would waste these little gems so extensively. Again using the section called ‘Subtitles, WTF?‘ in the previous post, using the formula:

Seal | The | Deal

Should work quite well, lets face it, its unlikely that each will have their own special subtitle, so a common approach is needed and of course for those daily deals, a hand written one can be employed. But for now, anything is an improvement.

I’m not in a creative mood currently, I’m sure you can use the similar process I used and knock up a winning subtitle.

Think About The Shipping

Using the image to the left, which is the shipping box from one of the eBay categories [4631] and then look at one of the toysrus listings and you quickly spot that as soon as customer selections expedited or free shipping, the listings are gone from the results, that’s BAD.

This is where covering as many bases as possible is really important, to the point, I may have let loose a naughty one to cover 50% more bases in this post by abusing the new and used options.

Sooo with this in mind, if you can load a sensible shipping price into the item and offer a free shipping option by default, then add at least one upgrade option an expedited service too.

I’m not even going to go-there for international deliveries, the feedback is already too hammered to even contemplate suggesting this, plus it would probably not be a wise decision and would be better run from stock held locally in the local countries (plus knowing what toy distribution is like, it would be a damn nightmare) .

For those not aware, the free shipping options does not appear to carry the same kind of weighting to best match as eBay would like to lead you to believe, it helps for sure, but its not a hugely important factor. I’m suggesting a free shipping option purely on the basis that as many item specific options need to be covered (and then some).

Item Specifics

I’m not saying much on this, at least they’re marked as new. A great job of categorisation has been done, so for now, no comment. Categorisation is secondary to the listing titles being correct. I do rant about item specifics quite a lot, they’re important, but I have always classed the order of importance as titles > categorisation > item specifics.

Although saying that, I do suspect I am now wrong, and categorisation and item specifics need to be swapped around in the order of importance.

*coff* the toys categories support custom item specifics, at least setting brand on the majority (most haven’t, I checked) of items would help.

Listing Design

I’ve already gone on a bender on this, you can see the full break down here, if only a single change could be made, add the shipping ( if CA can total prices?[doubt it thinking about it] total order price to the ‘Our Price’ box, so a total cost of ownership can be quickly worked out in ones head.

Please note that buyers are idiots, making them think is a bloody stupid idea, so give it to them on plate.

It is your role as the business to provide clear, informative details so that a buyer can make an informed decision, that this item, really is the right item for them. Never forget this.

eBay Shop

At least it has a header and I do like the extra boxes that have been added to the left navigation, although a custom landing page would be a better idea.

Ask your self this:

If you were to walk into M&S and they piled every item infront of you, what would you do?

Not a lot right? Wood for trees and all that? Exactly, when entering the front of a store, people need to be guided in a decompression area (this ‘decompression area’ is from Why We Buy, brilliant book that, finally gave a name to it) so that they can then navigate themselves to the right area (I am not saying don’t make offers here, just do not overwhelm the idiot, err I mean buyer).

Last one feedback

Yep, you knew that one was coming… Get the wallet out and get on the phone and bribe your way out of this mess.

Negatives, attract negatives.

They always have done and always will do. Anyone remember the Shu screw up a while back? I have never seen sooooooo many negs left in such a short amount of time. At least follow them up with a constructive personalised comment for goodness sake. Admitting you made a mistake is the first step forwards in anything.

Summary

Sooo, use every one of the 55 chars you get for listing on eBay, its the most important asset you have; If you’re using subtitles, ideally they should be personalised to the inventory you are selling, or carry a reinforcement message for the companies USP’s, sorry my bad, ‘Unique Selling Points’.

Break the click-loss battle over that left hand bar in the eBay navigation and work it to your advantage, in some cases being smart is your only advantage, dumb-brute-force also works too as clearly shown above.

The listing template isn’t even worth mentioning in detail, it my frank opinion its been done really poorly and I would have expected better from the companies involved (Channel Advisor, eBay and I suspect GSi had a hand in this somewhere).

Wow and those negs, if you ever get this issue, get the wallet out and start bribing, its Christmas time as well, any seasoned idiot can work out what motivates people this time of the year, use it and abuse it.