Les Jones

Google Rich Snippets

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

This - Google Rich Snippets - makes all kinds of Googley sense. You can markup your Web page content semantically to help Google index it. Google’s initial push is to index content on review and social media Web sites. The idea is that the additional data will appear in Google search results, like this:

Here’s the inline markup for products:

   <div class="hproduct">
<span class="brand">ACME</span>
   <span class="category">Heavy objects</span>
   <span class="fn">Large all-purpose anvil</span>
   <span class="description">If you need an object to drop from a height, the classic
A23859 anvil from ACME is the way to go.</span>
   <span class="url">http://anvil.example.com</span>
</div>

Marking up our product page template took all of 10 minutes max. Best of all it looks exactly the same as it did before. It only looks different in the source code and to Google.

Once you’ve completed your markup changes run your URL through the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool to make sure your semantic markup is copacetic.

Previously - New “canonical link” element for search engine optimization

Tags: google

Update your Web server clocks for standard time

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

I just noticed my blog’s clock was still on the old time. On WordPress go to Settings -> General and change the timezone.

Do you talk like you Google?

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

I was in a meeting yesterday, talking about a new Web site. The discussion turned to the terminology we were going to use for services. Different people in our industry use slightly different names for the same services.

I had statistics from inbound search engine links showing exactly what terms customers were using to find our site. There was no question which of the competing terms our customers were using. I had gotten agreement from management to use those terms on the new site to improve our search engine ranking.

A particular term surprised one person in the meeting. He said he had always used a different term and so had most of his customers. I believe him.

There’s a simple reason for the disconnect between his experience in talking to people and what I found via analyzing Web logs using software. People don’t talk the same way they Google.

If I ask a friend how to cook a turkey I’d say something like “Do you have any advice you can give me on preparing a turkey in the oven?” On Google I’d grunt out something more like “how cook turkey.”

Google has trained me to know that it ignores words like to, a, and and the, so I’ve dropped them from my Google search syntax. Over the years I’ve learned phrases that score good search results and I’m sure you have, also. We’re dumbing ourselves down to think like a search engine.

People don’t talk like they Google. Everyday intuition is sometimes inadequate for predicting how people search. If you want to know what words people are using to find your site use software like Sitemeter, WebTrends, Google Analytics and Google AdWords that parse referring URLs from search engines and analyze the search keywords inside the URLs.

If you’re using Google Adwords, be sure to visit the Opportunities tab and check for keyword ideas. I continue to find search phrases there I never would have guessed on my own. The latest surprise is that people are using the same search phrases they’ve always used to find our services but adding the word professional to the mix. Apparently some people have learned that without that keyword their searches are returning freebie advice and tools that aren’t doing the job they need.

Tags: google, google adwords, SEO

Google AdWords seminar in Charlotte, NC Nov 16-17

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

Via an email from Google AdWords. I don’t have any experience with these folks, but Google seems to endorse them. I may attend the second day, but looking over the syllabus I’m a little concerned it’s too basic. I may wait and see if the more advanced Adwords seminars or the Google Analytics seminars.

Continue reading the rest of this post right here ›››

Tags: google adwords

Happy New Year to all you Feds

Thursday, October 1st, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

and to all the people who sell to the federal government. Crazy day yesterday with everyone in the government spending their money before the end of the federal fiscal year.

Google: we ignore meta keywords tags

Monday, September 21st, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

Google makes it official.

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn’t use) the “keywords” meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?

At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.

Tags: google

Rex Hammock’s four rules for creating a successful media franchise

Saturday, September 19th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

1. Choose a topic about which people love to argue — the more passionately they like to argue over the topic, the better. Make sure there are two distinct camps in this topic — a clear “us” and a clear “them.”

2. Pick a side.

Collect all four here.

Amazon Reviews You Can Use: Bizarro Comics

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | Comic Books, E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

Amazon:

By Bob S. (New York, United States)
This am bad book. It am full of stories about Bizarro World, home of Bizarro, the handsome duplicate of Superman. Every story start with Bizarro Code: “Us do opposite of all earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!” Me cry every time me read this book. Me hate it so much, me give it to all my friends. Since book is so bad, you should buy lots of copies.

By Heath Hanlin (North Syracuse, NY USA)
This book am so awful. Sometime me read and feel very mad at universe. Me read to me 4 year old son. Most comics am not violent enough for he. This am ’cause made long time ago when comics having more blood. Now we talk bizarro all over house. Make us sad sad sad.

Previously - Amazon Reviews You Can Use: Fresh Whole Rabbit

Tags: amazon, reviews you can use

Amazon Reviews You Can Use: Fresh Whole Rabbit

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Amazon - Fresh Whole Rabbit:

By P. Breakfield IV “Tom” (Greenville, SC United States)
I’ll keep this short and sweet. We ordered one of these rabbits for our children this Easter and boy what a surprise. It is NOT a living rabbit. Someone has killed this rabbit and skinned it, I suppose for eating. Anyway, our children were traumatized and Easter is not the same holiday that it used to be for us. On the upside, we don’t have to fill their Easter baskets anymore as we told them the Easter bunny was killed by Amazon.

P.S. The rabbit tasted very good.

By Brad Ramirez (Denver, CO)
This goes great with the pelt, whiskers, and bunny eyeballs that I purchased on eBay. Now I have a whole rabbit! Thanks!

By V. Zhirinovsky “Vlad the Mad” (Virginia, USA)
I am Director of Unholy Sacrifices for a prominent pagan bloodcult. Since our traditional sacrifical practices have been banned in 189 countries and the moon, we are now allowed only to use animal carcasses purchased on the internet. Let me warn you, Baal-Hammon will NOT be appeased by this offering. The Dark One will only accept sacrifices of mammals larger than a badger.

By Bill “Bill” (Maryville, TN USA)
While I’m sure the rabbit tastes fine, I have to wonder… why does the part where Amazon shows what people who bought this item also bought display four enema devices and one teeny tiny thong? I’m kind of horrified.

By Elvis_Nixon (Oil Trough, Arkansas)
How many weekends have I spent, in the loincloth, knife clenched in my teeth, running through the fields trying to find a rabbit? (A bunch, trust me on this, a bunch.) All so I can have something to sacrifice on the altar once I get to the cave.

Now, with this, home, fix a cocktail, go through the day’s mail, finish my drink and drive over to the cave, yank this carcass out of the box and offer this at the feet of my dark lord and master, boom, done. I’m happy, my dark lord and master is happy, everybody wins.

Bonus! Zubaz Pants

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Tags: amazon, reviews you can use

My quick advice on getting the most from Google Adwords

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Doug is asking for Google Adwords advice, so I’ve typed up a bit of what I know.

Some basic considerations

How many Adwords accounts should you have? My company has multiple Web sites. I have each in its own Adwords account with its own login. That makes it easier to keep track of the marketing costs for each site. Right now I’m managing the marketing for all of the sites, but by having their Adwords account I’ve made it easier to delegate the work in the future.

Campaigns
How many campaigns? Each Adwords account can have multiple campaigns. Inside those campaigns you can have subgroups, each with their own set of keywords, their own ad text, daily limits, geography limits, etc. That makes it easy to see how much money is being spent on a group of ads and keywords.

Here’s one way to use campaigns. Say you offer products from 10 manufacturers. Create a campaign for each one. Then you can track how much you’re spending to advertise each manufacturer. The next step beyond that is to compare your ad costs for each manufacturer versus your profit. I’ve had to drop product lines because the advertising costs began eating up too much of the profit. That typically happened when there were too many competitors advertising the same product on Adwords - the cost of the ads got bid up on the advertising side while good old fashioned competition ate up the profits side.

Landing pages
When you create your ads Google will ask for a URL. That may or may not be the front page of your Web site. The more pages on your site the less likely the front page should be the landing page. Search engine visitors are often impatient. You want them to find what they want immediately without making them decipher your site’s navigation structure. Use the most relevant landing page for each campaign.

Conserving your marketing money

At first everyone wants as many clicks as possible. Sooner or later reality will intrude and you’ll start asking yourself how you can get more bang for your buck.

You have the option of showing your ads on Google, their search partners (such as Amazon), their content network (such as sites showing Adsense ads, including my blog). For our products and services I only show our ads on Google itself, for reasons I’ve mentioned before. If what you’re selling is more consumer-oriented you might experiment with the other options. By default your ads will display on both regular computers and iPhones and other mobile devices. Our site isn’t designed for display on mobile devices, so I disable that option on all of our ad campaigns.

Geographic locations
Part of the setup process for every campaign is selecting geographic locations, such as countries and states. Adwords will only display your ads to people in those locations. Limit your ads to the parts of the world where you think you can realistically makes sales. For instance, if you only sell products and services in Tennessee there’s no point paying to advertise in the other 49 states, much less the rest of the world. We limit our ads to the U.S. and Canada because most of our reseller contracts limit us to the North American market.

As a variation on that idea, you could create one ad to display in Tennessee and another ad to display in all other states. The Tennessee ad might include the state’s name right in the ad. You might also bid more on the Tennessee ad because you feel you’re more likely to makes sales in Tennessee.

Ad variations
When you create your campaign you can have multiple ads for the same keywords. Some ads do dramatically better than others so it’s worth experimenting with different ad text. Google will rotate the ads and keep track of the click-through rates. The better-performing ads will be shown more frequently. (Make sure that under Settings tab for the campaign that “Optimize: Show better performing ads more often” is selected.)

Words like “sale” and “free shipping” never hurt. Pay attention to your competitors’ ideas. Borrow the good ones.

Scheduling
By default Adwords displays your ads 24×7. If your sales approach depends on someone picking up the phone and calling you, and you only work 8×5, that’s wasteful. Also consider your time zone vs. that of customers on the other side of the country. Do you want people seeing your ad, visiting your Web site, and calling you before your office has opened or after it’s closed? You can schedule the hours and days of the week your campaign appears under the campaign settings.

Negative keywords
Use negative keywords to keep your ad spending in check. When someone’s search phrases matches your keywords, but the search phrase includes one of your negative keywords, your ad won’t show. That means the person won’t see it, can’t click on it, and you can’t be charged for the click.

Why use negative keywords? To avoid clicks from people who won’t buy anything. Example. For our products Web site some of the negative keywords I use include free, demo, download, driver, manual, open source, FAQ, review, shareware, cracked, warez, and some others. People searching for any of those words along with the products we sell isn’t interested in buying anything. You can create negative keywords at the bottom of the keywords page.

Use Sitemeter or similar Web analytics programs to monitor the keywords people are using to come to your site. That will help you refine your keywords and negative keywords. In Sitemeter, pay attention to the Search Words screen. For instance, we sell Juniper Networks firewalls, switches, and routers. I noticed people searching for “juniper bush” and specific juniper cultivars were clicking on our ads, so I used negative keywords to eliminate those wasted clicks.

Web traffic analysis - Sitemeter and Google Analytics

While you’re signing up for Sitemeter you should also sign up for Google Analytics. Both have different strengths.

Sitemeter is better for taking the immediate pulse of your site and seeing what individual visitors are doing. I also like the fact that Sitemeter will email a weekly traffic summary. I have that email sent to our sales team so they can get a feel for our Web traffic.

Analytics is better for broad analysis and long-term trends. Google is adding more and more integration between Adwords and Analytics.

Tracking inbound clicks and conversions

Always include a tracking code in the URL you provide for each ad. It can be as simple as adding “?Adwords” to the end of the URL. (The Web server ignores anything after the question mark.) The tracking code makes it easy to tell by looking at the entry page URL if someone came to your site as a result of your Google Adwords campaign, as opposed to a natural, unpaid Google search engine ranking.

I wound up writing some code on our Web site that looks for the tracking code, then stores the code, the visitor’s IP address, the referring URL (which contains the search keywords) and a datetimestamp to a cookie on the customer’s computer and to an SQL database on our server. Whenever someone makes a purchase or uses a Web contact form I query the cookie and the SQL database to see how they originally found us (the tracking code), when they first found us (the datetimestamp), and what they originally wanted (the referring URL). I include that information in the email we receive so it’s clear which of our advertising campaigns drove the sale.

Use email contact forms, not email addresses
Speaking of tracking, don’t provide an email address for contact. You can get more information if you provide an email contact form instead. Typical forms can capture the person’s IP address. You can then find that IP address in Sitemeter’s Details screen. Once you find it click on the Detail number to get more information about how the person came to your site. You’ll also see what pages they visited and how much time they spent on each page.

At a minimum every page on your site should have a prominent link to your contact form. Better still is a compact email contact form right on the page.

Conversion tracking
Along the same lines take advantage of Adwords own conversion tracking. A conversion is a customer interaction such as a purchase, quote request, newsletter signup, etc. Get the conversion code from Google Adwords and add it to a results page. For instance, if your goal is to get customer quote requests add the conversion code to the page where people are directed after they submit their request. Google will keep track of which ads and keywords produced conversions.

If your site has a shopping cart add the code to the final page people see after their credit card payment is accepted. You can then modify Google’s conversion code to report the dollar amount of the sale back to Google. Google will track your sales versus your ad spend so you can see how much money each conversion costs in terms of actual sales.

You call that “quick advice”?

That was longer than I had intended, but it really just covers the basics. There’s much more in terms of keyword selection and writing ad copy. Those are topics for another day.

Tags: google

Network Solutions breach exposed 500K credit card transactions

Monday, August 10th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

Story here. Via Bill Dean. The breach was in Network Solutions’ e-commerce service, not their DNS registry.

They took their own sweet time acknowledging the breach. “While the company discovered the software in early June, it waited until the close of business Friday [July 24th - LLJ] to disclose the breach. Wade said it took until July 13 for forensics investigators to crack the code and understand how it worked.”

Search Engine Optimization FAIL

Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

I had lunch last week with someone who wanted to pick my brain about online marketing. One of the things I told him was to beware of solicitations from search engine optimization companies. I had dealt with a few and found that most were sleazy fly-by-night operations that promised the world in writing and then got out of their contracts by the expediency of shutting their doors.

Worse, some unscrupulous SEO companies use techniques that can get you banned from Google. And then I see this…

SEO Fails Bigger In Texas:

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) is running for governor, but her website has suffered Google and Yahoo’s death penalty and has been removed from the search index. The reason: Hutchison’s webmaster embedded thousands of invisible search-terms in the site in a bid to game search-engines; among them was the phrase “rick perry gay” (Rick Perry is Hutchison’s Democrat Republican opponent). The campaign claims the terms were generated automatically by “search engine optimization” software (SEO is a form of Google-Kremlinology in which firms attempt to figure out how to game search engines’ ranking algorithms, rather than trying to create the best, most interesting website they can and assuming that the engines will figure out how to highly rank their material).

ABC News also covered the story and highlighted some other examples of Google delisting Web sites for banned SEO practices. One such Web site was for BMW Germany. They were using doorway pages which showed one Web site to human visitors and a different Web site to Google’s spider.

LATER: Speaking of sleazy SEO marketing, overnight this post was trackback-spammed by two SEO sites (that were both operated by the same company) that seem to scan the Web for SEO-related content and send auto-trackbacks. Like I said, it’s an industry with a lot of sleazy people.

New PCI compliance standards go into effect July 1, 2010

Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

From VISA:

First, the bad news: if you visit www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/vpa and select Application Type: Shopping Cart & Store Front there are only three shopping cart programs on the entire planet that are certified for the PA-DSS standard, and the certification for one of those expires in December.

Now the good news: that’s two more shopping carts than were certified when I checked a couple of months ago. By the time the July 1, 2010 deadline rolls around I expect many more shopping carts will be certified. Just be wary of any small or startup companies with tiny installed bases that might decide to cash in their chips before then. And of course it doesn’t hurt to get something in writing. And if you’re certified PCI compliant by a QSA you meet the Phase 1 qualification regardless of whether your software application meets the PA-DSS certification.

Physical oil vs. paper oil markets

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 | E-commerce, Economics | Permalink | No Comments |

From iTulip.com:

See also paper gold vs. physical gold.

This seems to a symptom of the monetization, securitization, and trade in everything. The artificial financial market is overpowering the natural market forces for the physical entity.

It’s as if there were a desert island with one coconut that somehow was supporting a hundred firms trading coconut shares, coconut futures, and coconut derivatives. That sort of trade can’t go on forever.

Tags: oil

The “Disarmed” label on Gmail means the tracking Web bug was removed

Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | E-commerce, Tech | Permalink | 1 Comment |

In June I started noticing that some emails on Gmail had “{Disarmed}” in the subject line. Now I realize what that means. {Disarmed} means the Web bug in the email has been de-activated.

What’s a Web bug?

A Web bug is an image online marketers used to determine if you’ve opened an email.

Say you’ve got 100,000 subscribers to your newsletter. Your newsletter software will include an image in the email for tracking purposes. The file name or pathname for that image will include a unique code tied to each person on the mailing list. In the simplest case, the first person will have a code of 1, the second person 2, etc.

Here’s what happens next. You send the emails. When people open them their email software loads the images from your Web server. When your Web server sees that someone requested the image associated with person number 1, you know that person number 1 opened the email.

This is all assuming that the person’s email software automatically loads images. Some do and some don’t. In some cases they don’t, but the user can choose to load the images. In Microsoft Outlook you can right click and load images. In Gmail you click “Display Images Below.” But now Gmail is even smarter and will load the other images, but not the Web bugs it detects.

P.S. Marketers can also tell if you’ve clicked on a link in the email. Instead of the links going directly to the Web site they go to a redirection script that includes a unique code tied to your identity. When you click on the link your click is recorded and you’re redirected to the Web page you wanted. Most email marketing software software will give reports on open rates and click-through rates.

California: “Dude, where’s 58% of my budget?”

Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | E-commerce, Economics | Permalink | No Comments |

California has the worst budget shortfall of the 50 states, both in dollars and percent of budget:

• California: $53.7 billion shortfall or 58 percent of its budget
• Arizona: $4 billion shortfall or 41 percent of its budget
• Nevada: $1.2 billion or 38 percent of its budget
• Illinois: $9.2 billion or 33 percent of its budget
• New York: $17.9 billion or 32 percent of its budget
• Alaska: $1.35 billion shortfall or 30 percent of its budget
• New Jersey: $8.8 billion or 30 percent of its budget
• Oregon: $4.2 billion or 29 percent of its budget
• Vermont: $278 million or 25 percent of its budget
• Washington: $3.6 billion or 23 percent of its budget
• Connecticut: $4.1 billion or 23 percent of its budget

So in other words California’s budget is (very roughly) $100 billion, but their projected revenue is only $42 billion. If your expenses were $100,000 per year and you only made $42,000 per year you’d realize you were deeply screwed, right?

This is going to be ugly.

Previously - Californians are getting the best government IOUs can buy

Tags: california

Brownell’s new Web site - behind the scenes

Friday, June 19th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Lots of folks have good things to say about Brownell’s new, improved Web site.

I’ve been shopping for new e-commerce systems for work, so when I see a nice site I try to deduce which platform they’re using. In Brownell’s case it didn’t take long. There was a form to quickly add items to the cart by entering the part number. That was a tell. A quick look at the source code revealed a vstate tag that confirmed the ID - Brownell’s is using LogicBlock’s 7Cart e-commerce system.

It’s a good system that’s on my shortlist of candidates for our next site redesign. It’s packed with features, is search engine friendly, and is especially good for sites with large product catalogs.

One reason it’s so good for large catalogs is the filter feature. Imagine you want a new front sight for your Browning Buckmark pistol. (Brownell’s is the largest supplier of gun parts and accessories in the U.S.) From the front page you’d probably click on Handgun Parts.

That leads to a listing of 4038 items, which is too many to sift through manually. To narrow that down you can use the filter in the upper left. Selecting Autoloading Pistol Parts would narrow the choices down to 2750. From there selecting Front Sights would winnow the choices to narrow it down to 137 items, then clicking Browning Buckmark Front Sights would yield just 11 results, which is a browsable number.

Couple of points:

• The example above is hierarchical, but it doesn’t have to be. You can enter specs (hard drive size for computers, screen size for TVs, the number of Ethernet ports for routers) and customers can browse by those attributes.
• 7Cart can also automatically create price bands within the current results. This is ideal for customers who want to shop by price.
• All of the filtering happens automatically, just by entering information into the appropriate fields in the database.
• Another option in the Brownell’s filters is Manufacturer. So in the first step you could choose Browning and you would have only seen Handgun Parts for Brownings.

That last point is one of the biggest reasons I’ve shortlisted 7Cart. Most carts are organized around categories, with little consideration for brand. 7Cart is one of the few e-commerce systems I’ve seen with a strong emphasis on manufacturer/brand.

Because of the nature of what we sell I buy keywords on Google directly related to the manufacturer, their product names, model numbers, and even manufacturer part numbers. Those ads call out the brand and link to pages inside the site devoted to that one brand. 7Cart does that sort of thing better than most.

NC may tax “digital click-throughs”

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

Amazon warns N.C. affiliates about tax issue. Amazon claims that if the legislation becomes law they’ll have to cancel contracts with affiliates in North Carolina. Presumably other affiliate programs and Google Adsense would be affected by the tax.

Tags: amazon, google adsense

Facebook to launch payment system

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

Securosis has the story.

Alexa ranks Facebook as the number 4 most-visited site on the Internet. Netcraft ranks it second after a bunch of Google properties. If your realm is that big why not mint your own coins?

Tags: facebook

Interested in cloud computing/software as a service?

Monday, June 8th, 2009 | E-commerce, Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

The IT industry continues to evolve business models. Software licenses have shifted towards appliances that have the software pre-installed. Permanent licenses have shifted to annual subscriptions that include the software, updates, and support contract.

Now there’s a push for software as a service, in which the software resides on a server on the Internet. You don’t install any software or use up any rack space. You don’t need an administrator for the software (or if you already have an administrator, you’re not adding to his workload). Configuration is often done through a Web interface.

A couple of the manufacturers we sell for have moved in the SaaS direction. I’m keeping tabs on the software as a service model by following the SaaS blog CloudAve.com.

Underhanded advertising

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | 2 Comments |

“Newspaper story” about making money online is really an advertisement. Completely unethical.

Tags: scammers

My Million Dollar Googlezon* Idea

Friday, May 29th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

So you know how you can sign up as an Amazon affiliate? Like I can link to something on Amazon with my affiliate code and if you follow the link and buy it I get a commission.

So just think how many times every day someone searches Google, sees an Amazon link in the search results, then clicks on the Amazon link and buys the product.

Eureka! Google just needs to sign up for the Amazon affiliate program and append their affiliate code to search results links to Amazon. It could work with any company that has an affiliate program. Then the guys at Google could sit back and let the mad affiliate money roll in while they play ping-pong, eat gourmet food, and get chair massages.

If they haven’t already thought of it I hereby patent, trademark, and copyright the idea, call “dibs,” “shotgun,” and “no do-overs,” and if you don’t want those gourmet pickles I’ll eat ‘em.

* The unholy alliance of Google and Amazon.

Tags: million dollar ideas

Amazon reviews you can use

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | No Comments |

Collegehumor.come piece prompts hundreds of tongue-in-cheek Amazon reviews of cheesy t-shirt. Via Ace of Spades:”Anyway, this has become a craze, and the t-shirt is now selling 100 per hour, with the small t-shirt company attempting to crank out 30,000 a day. (Note: I have no idea how 100 per hour becomes 30,000 per day, either. But that’s what the ABC article says. Take it up with the wolves.)”

FWIW, I don’t think the reviews are all that funny on this one, but the t-shirt company has to be thrilled with the orders.

Previously - Amazon reviews you can use

Tags: amazon, reviews you can use

It’s crazy enough that it just might work

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | 2 Comments |

You know how the ATM always asks if you want English or Espanol? Here’s an idea. “Couldn’t the ATM card tell the machine which is your preferred language instead of asking all the time?”

Amazon reviews you can use

Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | E-commerce | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz

“Has anyone else tried pouring this stuff over dry cereal? A-W-E-S-O-M-E!”

“Horrible service, I bought my milk and went with the 7-9 day super saver shipping method and it arrived warm and curdled. What the hell?”

“I was considering buying used milk from a trusted Amazon reseller but decided against it. So you’ll notice the condition of MY milk was “New.” I deserve this luxury.”

“Why go to my local store and pay $2.99 for a galon of milk when I can have it overnight delivered for 10 times that price? I think I’ll get three gallons next time. As a current Pentagon employee, this makes perfect sense to me.”

“Don’t get fooled by the easy-to-use look of this product.”

“This product copiously leaks out of my nose whenever I read these reviews.”

Customer images.

Tags: amazon, reviews you can use