Les Jones

E-commerce > Tuesday E-commerce Report #6

Spreadsheets: 25 Years in a Cell discusses some of the limitations of spreadsheets. There's also a lively Slashdot thread. One limitation is that mainstream products like Microsoft Excel take fixed inputs, with no accounting for uncertainty or probability.

PanIP has dropped their patent lawsuits involving e-commerce.

Blog Business World has advice for getting your blog into Yahoo!'s directory. For commercial sites, you have to use Yahoo! Express. The Express editorial review service guarantees a timely review and thumbs up or thumbs down for your entry. Cost is $299 per year. Ouch! A few years ago it was a one-time fee of $150. Oh, well. It's still a small price for an e-commerce site and I've spent marketing money in worse places.

Two Things You Need to Know About E-commerce

Economic blog Marginal Revolutions has an entertaining post about Two Things: the theory that there are two things you need to know about any subject. Of economics they write:

The Two Things about Economics:
1. Incentives matter.
2. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

One of their readers contributes this dandy crash course in marketing:

The Two Things about Marketing:
1. Find out who is buying your product.
2. Find more buyers like them.
-Racehorse

Herewith my humble contribution:

The Two Things about E-commerce:
1. You can sell anything online that you can sell by mail order.
2. The great fortunes and failures will be in things you can't sell by mail order.

1. This is the conventional wisdom. A Web site can do anything a catalog can do, so if you can sell it from a catalog you can sell it from a Web site.

2. People will try to sell lots of things that don't pass step 1. Some of them, like the company that tried to sell carpet online, will fail. But amid the likely failures a few winners will emerge.

Buying Domains

My latest domain renewal from Network Solutions included a note that they're now offering domain registration terms up to 100 years. They have a new site, 100YearDomainService.com, with details. I'd have preferred perpetual domains. If it's yours, you should be able to register it forever. Even big companies can forget their renewals: in the most famous case, Microsoft forgot to renew Hotmail.com. Luckily, a computer consultant in Nashville helped them out.

According to a recent NetCraft survey, the number of registered domains has decreased slightly.

Selling Domains

I've only sold two domains, but that appears to be two more than most people, so I'll share what I know. The domains, FWIW, were Backpages.com and 56K.COM. I bought the 56K.COMdomain in 1996 and developed it into a popular Web site. At one time, 56K.COM was one of the top 2,000 Web sites for traffic, with 1 million page views per month. I bought the Backpages.com domain with the intention of writing a backpacking Web site, but never got around to it, so instead I sold it to a Rock and Roll historian.

In the spirit of Two Things:

The Two Things about Selling a Domain:
1. Only transfer domains from your current domain registrar to the same registrar.
2. Broker.com has an excellent service for brokering the sale of domain names.

The details:

1. I've always used Network Solutions for domain registration, because they were the only game in town when I started buying domains. When the new domain registrars appeared, the horror stories started. It wasn't that the new registrars were any worse, but with more parties involved in transferring domains, there was more potential for problems. If there's a mix-up in moving a domain between registrars, the finger pointing begins, and it may be impossible to place blame, much less resolve the problem. As a result of these horror stories, I make transfer to the same registrar (Network Solutions in my case) a condition of the Bill of Sale.

2. For Backpages, the sale amount wasn't that big, and the buyer trusted me. For 56K, the amount was enough to give the company pause. By mutual agreement we used Broker.com. Broker.com is a general-purpose broker, but they have a specific provision for domain transfers. The buyer sends money to Broker.com. Once Broker.com sees that the domain has been transferred to the buyer, they release the funds to the seller. The system worked perfectly, and I'd use it again.

Some people haven't been net-savvy long enough to remember when you could register a domain for free. That lasted until 1995. I've lost track of the most expensive domain transfer. Business.com sold for $8 million, but that's been a long time ago in Internet years. If anyone knows of a bigger sale, post it in comments.

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.

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