Les Jones

E-commerce > Tuesday E-commerce Report #2

If you use the popular Miva Merchant shopping cart, you'll probably like the Miva Merchant add-ons site.

States want to charge taxes for out-of-state and online sales. Again.

About.com is looking for a guide for their e-commerce section.

A February 26th article in The Wall Street Journal looks at the checkered attempts to move large amounts of inventory on eBay. Several firms tried it without success. The more product they tried to move, the lower the prices sank. Firms that tried it either went out of business or moved off of eBay to their own online storefront.

How technology put an end to the encyclopedia business.

Changes at Yahoo! and AltaVista

Yahoo! is switching to paid inclusion, in which paying sites will be indexed every two days, and everyone else will be indexed once a month. Yahoo! says that payment will not affect ranking.

AltaVista went to paid inclusion a year or two ago, but is now abandoning it. (That's news to me - they just sent us a renewal notice a few weeks ago. For what it's worth, paying for inclusion did not increase our AltaVista traffic, which remained moribund. AltaVista is down to a 0.4% share of the search engine market.)

Opportunity Knocks

Here's an example of an unfilled e-commerce niche. Chris (better known in the blogosphere as Spoons) and Laura are getting married this week. They're old enough that both of them have most of the household necessities. What do they really want to register for? Guns.

Now some of you may not like guns. (I do.) But there's an example of a niche: an online wedding registry for gun lovers. Either step in now before Bass Pro Shops or Dick's Sporting Goods does, or do it better than either of them could. And if you hire me as a consultant you can pay me in store credit until my wife finds out.

Self-Promotion via Amazon

This is an older story, but it came a few weeks prior to the first Tuesday E-commerce Report, so I'm calling it fair game.

In the New York Times piece, Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers, we discover through a technical glitch at Amazon that many of the favorable reviews are written by writers and their friends, while the unfavorable reviews are written by their competitors and ideological rivals. Most people in the writing and publishing industry already knew that, but it's nice to be able to prove it.

Here's an example I ran across just the other day. Reading the customer Amazon reviews of Hollywood, Interrupted, what's striking is that most of the reviews are either five stars or one star. So the book is either absolutely terrible or absolutely fantastic, in the partisan opinions of the reviewers. One suspects a campaign at both ends of the ratings.

British Boomers Out-spending Teenagers on Music

For the first time, baby boomers in the UK are outspending teenagers on pre-recorded music.

The cause, of course, is file-sharing and CD-burning. The under-30 set is listening to music. They're just not buying it shrinkwrapped on CDs at Sam Goody's.

I confess to thinking this might be a bad thing. It's possible we're about to see the first generation without its own musical identity. Sure, someone could be a "star" of file sharing, but that doesn't finance videos, tours, and TV appearances that make a cultural splash. This week's top download is unlikely to be Saturday Night Live's musical guest, or entertainment in the Super Bowl half time show. They'll be a critic's darling, but of an industry so squalid that neither they nor the critic will have the power to make waves on the surface. It will be popular culture, but without the popularity.

Steal This Code: Better Web Page Printing

Steal This Code is an occasional feature demonstrating useful Web code that's easy-squeezy.

To control what gets printed, you can do some fancy server-side programming to create a print version, or you can go the easy route and use CSS print stylesheets to determine what gets printed and what doesn't. That's how I created the non-printing sidebar on the front page of LesJones.com. You can see the effects by choosing Print Preview in your browser's File menu.

You may also want an easy way to direct customers to printing. This is amazingly easy JavaScript. Create a button or link. Within the INPUT or A tag, include this attribute:

onClick="window.print()"

That's all it takes. I use a button on our invoice page to remind customers to print their invoice. It works just like choosing the File menu's Print command. Click this button to give it a try:

Les Jones is an e-commerce manager living in Knoxville, Tennessee. He offers consulting in Web design and site promotion, and programming in JavaScript, Web+ Markup Language, and the Web+Shop shopping cart system.
  Posted by lesjones