Archive for October, 2009
October 27th, 2009
Postage is a bit of a painful subject at the moment, what with the Royal Mail in turmoil. I recently had a chat with Eric Nash from Stamps.com, a package which allows small business (including eBay sellers) to print postage from their computer.
Tell us a bit about your company
Stamps.com is a software-based program that allows you to print USPS-approved postage right from your computer. You can print postage directly on to an envelope, shipping labels or even plain paper. Stamps.com was the first PC Postage vendor licensed by the US Postal Service back in 1998. We also are the largest with more than 400,000 customers.
How does your service compare with other postage options such as a franking machine?
We feel we that online postage is a much better option than a postage meter for a small business owner. If you are a shipper, Stamps.com offers discounted rates on Priority Mail (up to 10% off) and Express Mail (5% off) that you cannot get from a postage meter or even at the post office. Also, we are a monthly service with no hidden fees and no long term contracts. Postage meters often get you into long term agreements and then require you to purchase many other services (proprietary ink, maintenance agreements, etc.). With Stamps.com, you print postage directly out of your existing PC and printer – no additional hardware is needed. A big advantage you have with Stamps.com is print flexibility (unlike Postage Meters). Stamps.com allows you to print on shipping labels, regular paper, thermal labels, or directly on to envelopes. You also can print the delivery address and postage at the same time.
Has there been a good take up of your service by eBay and amazon sellers?
As we’ve added a lot of new shipping features to the software over the last 18 months, we’ve been able to increase our ecommerce customer base to about 30,000-40,000 subscribers. And now with our free eBay program launching, the response from eBay sellers has been great! This new program allows eBay sellers to use our software for free to print USPS shipping labels for goods sold through an eBay store. Stamps.com has great features that are not available on PayPal’s shipping program such as:
- Ability to print First Class Mail International
- Send all sizes of Priority Mail Flat Rate
- Get 10% off package insurance
- Insure packages up to $2500
- Batch printing up to 1000 labels at a time
To get this special limited time offer, you must go to: http://www.stamps.com/ebayfree1
The program is limited to shipping goods sold through your eBay webstore however — customers wont be able to utilize the other software features such as printing postage on envelopes, importing data from amazon, Yahoo! Stores, shopping carts, etc.
To get access to these other features, customers will need to upgrade to a paid subscription account. Our new Version 8.5 software includes the ability to import data directly from ecommerce platforms such as amazon, Yahoo! Stores, Google Checkout, PayPal or your own shopping cart. As an example, if a seller was selling their product on both eBay and their own site via a shopping cart, they could manage their shipments for both sources from one interface — Stamps.com. The seller could then batch print all of their labels at once using multiple mail classes to ship for more effective time management.
Plans for the future?
We have many more exciting programs in the works such as an option for Mac users and deeper online reporting. Version 8.5 also includes all of our great shipping features such as 10% discounts on package insurance, insurance limits up to $2500 (vs. only $500 from PayPal), the ability to hide the postage amount on shipping labels and free delivery confirmation on Priority Mail.
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October 27th, 2009
First of all, thanks very much for the kind words while I was away. It was a personally rewarding trip and one that needed to be made. I’m back at the office today for the first time in over a week, so I’m easing back into things here on Ink with an eBay Giving Works related post.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness month so the first post I’m getting off my chest upon my return concerns a charity auction currently running on eBay called “Bling my Bra”.
Back in April, I profiled John Lawson of ColderICE and his “Chest for Breast Auction” that ultimately ended up raising over $3,000 for breast cancer research. The winner of that celebrity auction, Galleria Gifts‘ Melinda Jackson, was inspired and partnered with Beth Cherkowsky (her co-host on RRBRadio.com) to take it a step further and, using eBay Giving Works, came up with a concept that sees a number of her friends and peers submitting “blinged out bras” for sale on eBay.
Over 40 bras have been submitted for sale to date and they continue to receive more each week. From the superhero-themed bra above to the “Colorado Boulder Holder”, there are a lot of both funny and fun entries. All proceeds go to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
If you’d like to be a part of an extremely worthwhile cause and have some fun in the process, head over to eBay.com and type “blingmybra” in the search term to see all active listings.
Cheers!
RBH
October 27th, 2009
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Almost all affiliate networks work the same way. First you sign up to create an account. Once you are in the program, you log in and look for advertisers. Most systems allow you to select advertisers by category, while some others are specialized. For example, MarketHealth.com specializes in health and beauty products.
One problem with most networks is that you have to join several of them to find the right products to advertise or to find products in your category. One answer to this is to take a look at Affiliate Scout. Affiliate Scout lists thousands of affiliate advertisers by category. This way you can find the networks with the products you want, before joining them.
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Making extra money with Affiliate marketing is not a shotgun endeavor. You must specialize. Ideally you want to find advertisers who are related to the topic of your blog or website. The best advertising is that which is related to your content and focused on your readers. Affiliates offers for credit cards and mortgages tend to pay the highest commissions, but if you blog is about pet care and training; then those ads would be out of place, whereas ads for Petsmart would work very well.
If you would like to get some training on how to make money with affiliate marketing, check out http://www.affiliatetraining.com/x/affiliate-articles/. This is a site where you can get plenty of free articles and advice for earning extra money with affiliate marketing.
October 24th, 2009
eBay's results are out and the stock is down 5% or so in after hours trade. Q3 looked like a good solid 'meet/beat' Q, so let's dig in and see what's up.
Q3 – the turnaround in marketplaces seems to be working.
The metrics we watch most closely showed continued positive trends in Q3.
- Y/Y GMV (ex-autos) grew 10% compared to a trend that was as low as -16% in Q1
- Fixed price GMV is now 56% of GMV – up from 51% last Q 46% in the year ago period
- Sold items were up 30% y/y
The only concerning marketplace datapoint is the active user data which remains anemic – still topped out around 89m users. This is up only 2% y/y.
Other interesting tidbits:
- eBay is previewing a diamond ring builder at http://diamonds.ebay.com
- Management seemed pretty up-beat during the call
- Donahoe mentioned they are going to launch a substantial Q4 campaign this year which sellers will like to hear.
Q4 – Hmm – storm ahead or conservatism?
So this sounds pretty good, what could be wrong? Analysts were forecasting eBay's Q4 revenue to be $2.26b and eBay's guidance released today suggests a $2.25b mid-point. This is clearly below expectations (albeit slightly) and some expectations were hoping to raise that mid-point which clearly won't happen.
Additionally margins came down due to a change in mix between the core business, BML and other lower-margin lines of business (Skype).
The big question from today's results are: Is eBay being conservative and managing expectations or are they seeing a grinchy holiday ahead?
We'll report the Amazon results via sister-site Amazon Strategies.
SeekingAlpha disclosure: I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.
October 24th, 2009
It's a Friday night and I thought it would be fun to do a lighter post. This one came to me when evaluating some eBay auction data. Auctions are generally very very down y/y, but I noticed an interesting blip -a product that has a crazy amount of bid action on one product in particular. I dug into it and am going to go out on a limb and call the 'hot item of 09' early. Hold on to your seats readers and remember you read it on eBay Strategies first.
Drum roll….. (hint: they are so fun, but without the mess!)
I'm predicting that the HOT toy of 2009 will be Zhu Zhu pets. What, you ask, is a Zhu Zhu pet. Well a YouTube is worth a zillion words so here goes:
There are four main Zhu Zhu pets:
- Mr Squiggles – A light brown hamster
- Num Nums – A grey hamster
- Pip Squeek – A yellow hamster
- Chunk – A white hamster
The above retail for $8 and are going for $20-30 already on eBay. On top of the animals, the genius is they have a huge assortment of add-ons – you can buy a maze of habitrails, a little car, a ball – pretty much all the stuff a real hamster would need, but more expensive, is available for your Zhu Zhu. The accessories range from $10 to $20+ and there are a mind boggling large number of them: (click to enlarge)
This isn't a simple wind up toy…
Many people seem to dismiss Zhu Zhu's as a simple wind-up style toy. They are actually a complex robotic simulation that has three modes of operation and a proprietary 'pet code reader'. Check out this PDF of the instructions on this robotic pet. All that's great, but what I think is really amazing about this toy is the range of age groups attracted to it. I've seen a 3yr old and an 11yr old (boys and girls) freak out about it and immediately want to try to collect all 4 (they 'talk' to each other). We live in a period where toys are becoming more and more fragmented along age lines – for example, Barbie's only appeal to a very small age window now (5-7 maybe?), where they used to appeal to a 5-15yr.
Conclusion
The Zhu Zhu is a cool new product that has a lot of buzz. It appeals to a wide swath of the kid population, has a reasonable price tag, and appears to be already be in crazy short supply. As of this writing (10/0/09) there are a fair number of Zhu Zhu's in some Wal-mart's. I'm hearing they are not easily found in Targets or TRUs, yet they say they are coming. My advice to you is if you have a kid in the 3-10yr range, go ahead and start trying to find a Zhu Zhu or you'll be behind the eight ball and buying them for $100 on eBay (from a seller that read this and gobbled up a bunch of supply 
Reminder – walmart.com has a local search, so if you go to a Zhu Zhu item and do a 'find in store', you should see a list of stores near you that have the little robo-critters in supply.
Now it's entirely possible that several boat loads of these come in and the supply catches up to demand, but based on what we're seeing – there is a LOT of demand, so I think that's unlikely.
For all you Wall St'ers out there, unfortunately Zhu Zhu is made by a private company – Cepia out of of St. Louis of all places so you'll have to play this with the offline/online retailers.
Seeking Alpha disclosure – I am long Google and Amazon. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO. And yes, I have already grabbed a mini stockpile of Zhu Zhu's, so I guess I am long robotic hamsters Wal-mart is a ChannelAdvisor customer.
October 24th, 2009
We just completed collating our September same-store-sales (SSS) data for all of the channels we support at ChannelAdvisor (search, CSE, marketplaces, etc) and there are a couple of interesting data points to discuss as we exit Q3 and head into Q4.
I don't believe comscore has come out with with their data yet on September, so that part of the chart isn't filled in. For overall e-commerce (ChannelAdvisor SSS in the chart) , we saw that dip slightly from 8.7% in August to 7.3% in September. That's a small change and one that we don't think is worrisome.
October 24th, 2009
I've had several inbound 'flame mails' about a change eBay made this week as part of their roll out of the SR2 release. I wanted to show everyone what's going on and get a pulse from readers on where you stand.
- Overall 21.3% of eBay listings are top-rated
- The Camera category is the highest with 28%
- The DVD category is lowest with 13.2% (ouch)
- With eBay's first page of results showing 50 items and with a 21% coverage, if a search term has 240 results or more, it's very likely that the entire first page will be eTRS. That's going to make it really tough for non-eTRS sellers as pretty much every eBay search I ever run comes back with > 2k items unless I get extremely specific.
October 24th, 2009
Q: So is paypal your growth engine going forward?
October 24th, 2009
(continued)
October 24th, 2009
Wrapping up opening comments – proud but humble company. Proud of what we've accomplished, but humble enough to realize that if we don't change we won't succeed.
- Getting clear at what we are good at – and be really good at it. Shopping in a marketplace format and be Best in the World in online payments.
- Embrace disruption don't resist.