Earlymiser.co.uk Auction Deals

After a long time I have decided to launch a UK auction site. I had intended to launch a full blow UK version of Earlymiser but I had some new thoughts about the comparison shopping market. This site like Shop Sort is based on a single web service (Ebay in this case). So the Earlymiser UK is a much simpler service than the US version. As I mentioned in my Christmas post on Thalasar, I have found the meta shopping experiences provide depth at a significant cost of the overall user experience. It's a natural human instinct to want to provide the most comprehensive list of results but at the same time, it's clear that both the performance overhead in hitting so many web services and the overall page size means that I don't get as much Google love. Google loves small footprint pages and that's not likely to change in the near future. While this site doesn't launch in time for Christmas, it certainly will be available next year and for the future. It's a great way to shop and save some cash. It's designed to be complimentary with Best Buys Zone UK and it focuses specifically on Ebay and auctions. It has a far more coverage of office and industrial supplies which is a new area for me. I suspect that my new shopping service, Zestly is going to take more work than I am anticipating so I am going to be spending my spare time working on it.

Halo 3 & PS3

Halo 3 has been burning up the searches and is currently the number 1 product we are seeing activity comparison shopping on it. We are also seeing a huge uptake on Playstation 3 hardware and the PS3. This probably due to the recent announcement of a price drop/feature drop (they are dropping PS2 compatibility) in order to drop the price of the unit.

Programmable Web

We have gotten a write up in programmable web case study of earlymiser.com which is nice but it comes the day after Hostway hosed the site during it's migration process. None of the about pages are working properly which is INCREDIBLY annoying. Thank Hostway!

Ebay Certified!

After a little bit of work Earlymiser passed Ebay certification. The certification isn't particularly difficult but it requires that you make sure you don't mistreat the Ebay logo and that your calls are well formed. Once certified Ebay makes 1.5 million calls per day available to you. That far exceeds my other providers by a factor of 5. In any case this should stop the Ebay errors where I was using limit of 10,000 queries on a daily basis. A couple of times last week, I hit the limit at 8:30 in the morning.

Deep Link Development

I have been getting a lot of deep links into Early Miser from various social networks. This has helps quite a bit with indexing since people are linking to a single product they like. It's not exactly what I had in mind when building earlymiser.com but it's a start. I guess people don't like the TagOuts (or as is the case here - don't know the TagOuts exist). If you take a look at Thalasar you will see a TagOut I did for SEO books. I will be doing more of these sorts of things for my blogs.

Contract Programmer found

After a lot of searching I think I have finally found someone that can work with me on Earlymiser. Not surprisingly, its someone who from the original outsource company who has struck out on his own. I used to call this guy the "fixer" since he was a senior developer who was called in only to fix things. I haven't covered my relationship with my previous outsourcing company yet but it's one of the things I should cover in the near future.

Things that people don't comparison shop for online.

I tend to think that people comparison shop items for online tend to do so for items that are expensive and easily identified products. I don't think soft goods or good that have a high emotional commitment easily lend themselves to comparison shopping. When a item has a high emotional value, there tends to be an emotional commitment to buying that changes the buying process. When a user is buying based on physical criteria, (ie performance) comparison shopping is the ideal mechanism. Despite the attempts of a number of vendors to convey a more emotional shopping experience, without out the tactile experience of buying, I think these attempts are doomed.