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.

Using Ebay in a comparison shopping engine

I am one of the very few shopping comparison engines (besides mytriggers.com) which regularly uses Ebay search results. Some people aren't big fans of auctions in comparison engines. I think they have a place and have tried to find that place in my site. For me I deliberately limit the results to Buy It Now results. These results are from vendors that have a Buy it Now price on the item. In other words the price you see at Earlymiser is the price you pay. One thing I dislike about Mytriggers approach to using ebay which lists all the current bids for an item. When you set a trigger at mytriggers - your trigger is activated when the item falls into the price range on the current bid. In other words mytrigger is effectively sending a false buying signal that you can buy the item at that price when all you can actually do is put in a bid. That's why I stay away from auctions without a Buy it Now price. If you wanted to participate in an auction for an item, you would just go to a eBay and participate in an auction. The Buy It Now price represents a real price on an item. This is the first time I have used the Ebay web service program. It takes a little getting used to but frankly it's a very robust API. I need to do the final steps in developer certification (I am self certified right now ~ 10,000 queries a day which even with JPCache on the front end I regularly hit the limit late at night 11:00 PM or so). Remarkably we are having a great deal of success with the eBay program as well. It seems to bring back some great results in some things I wouldn't have guessed such categories as eye makeup

Continued Development on earlymiser.com

With the recent 60 GB PS3 giveawat I found myself too busy with the actual promotion to actually do anything on the site for January. That's gonna change in February as I am going to get back to working on the site. So look for additional content and additional features in Feb/March. If you have any requested features for earlymiser.com, set up a forum account and post. Due to the high volume of spam postings, I am currently approving all new forum members. So if you join the forum and I haven't approved you - send me an email (brian (at) earlymiser.net).

And we have a winner!

Henry Rivas of Las Vegas, Neveda. I will be shipping out the PS3 today so look for it Monday Henry.

Today's it. Less than 8 hours left for the free Playstation 3.

In less than 8 hours a winner will be selected. That winner will receive a free 60 GB Playstation 3. But you can't win if you don't enter. So register at earlymiser and set up a link to earlymiser.com and let me know. There's not a lot of time left

1.5 Days left on the free Playstation 3 promotion

The PS3 giveaway deadline is nearly here. It's a Playstation 3. You have till tomorrow midnight to register an account at EarlyMiser. If you want a free Playstation 3 you need to get signed up and then link to the Early Miser from your blog, MySpace or other website. Remember just 1.5 days until we give away the Playstation 3. It's getting exciting.. I mean who will win?

Only 4 days left to sign up for the free ps3

Ok the deadline for getting a chance to win a free PS3 is fast approaching. It's a Playstation 3. You have till midnight on January 25, 2007 to register an account at EarlyMiser. We have gotten a few entrants in the last few days but time is definitely running out. If you want a free Playstation 3 you need to get signed up and then link to the Early Miser from your blog, MySpace or other website. Remember just 4 days until we give away the Playstation 3. Yes I know this post is the same as the last post almost.

6 days remain to get signed up for a free PS3!

Ok the deadline for getting a chance to win a free PS3 is fast approaching. It's a Playstation 3. You have till midnight on January 25, 2007 to register an account at EarlyMiser. We have gotten a few entrants in the last few days but time is definitely running out. If you want a free Playstation 3 you need to get signed up and then link to the Early Miser from your blog, MySpace or other website. Remember just 6 days until we give away the Playstation 3

10 Days and Counting

Today is January 16, 2007. I will be announcing the winner of the Playstation 3 giveaway in exactly 10 days. So create those feeds or link from your blog or myspace profile to the site. I have gotten a little bit of grief over asking for links. Here on Fat Wallet one poster said, " A word of warning. They require you to provide a link to your MySpace page or your web/blog page so they can get free advertising from your entry. They are certainly asking a lot for only giving away a single PS3!"

Well excuse me. When I got this PS3 for the promotion they were impossible to find. I am not sure how asking for a link on a site like someone's craptastic MySpace profile which looks like Geocities ala 1997 is a big deal. It wouldn't be such a problem if I DIDN'T OFFER AN ALTERNATIVE means of entry by creating a feed at the site. Look. We are a small company - I didn't buy 10 PS3s to give them away. I bought one. I didn't pay a PR firm thousands of dollars to publicize my giveaway. I did it myself. As a result I didn't get local coverage on television and I only got word of mouth (or in this case word of blog). This means relative to a huge promotion your odds of winning are pretty good. Right now if you entry our Playstation 3 giveaway your odds of winning are currently 1 in 110. We have gotten 110 sign ups during the promotion so far. So your odds of winning are pretty fracking good. Anyway discuss it in the Playstation 3 giveaway forum.

Apologies

I recently used loudlaunch.com as a supplementary marketing effort for my recent Playstation 3 console giveaway. It seemed a great way to potentially announce your campaign to the blogosphere. There are serious problems in the way Loudlaunch.com operates and any advertiser thinking about using the service should be beware. First off you cannot specify what blogs or category of blog that will post on your subject. As a result while the individual posts are solid, the blogs target audience might not be a match for what you are looking for. As you cannot control who may or may not post on your subject. Worse yet your money may go to support terrorism! This has happened to me and my promotion for Earlymiser. A blog call Israel Watch (I REFUSE to link to them) which openly advocates the destruction of Israel and the Jews chose to blog about my PS3 promotion. I find it astounding that my advertising dollars are being spent supporting anti-semitic rantings. More importantly who knows what group is behind the site Israel Watch. I find the views on the site deeply disturbing and I didn't authorize the post. So the brand of my comparison shopping site is at risk. Can you imagine how I felt about the situation? Worst yet Loudlaunch.com doesn't have a customer service number and their whois is protected by Domains By Proxy. I have fired off several emails but haven't gotten a response. Why does Loudlaunch support terrorists?

If you use Loudlaunch, there's a good chance your brand or site will be featured on a hate site. Don't do it.

I love the Yahoo Buzz log!

Yahoo Buzz log! Here's the buzz log for January 2, 2007!

1. Kids Digital Cameras
2. Digital Voice Recorders
3. Kid Tough Digital Camera
4. Digital Frames
5. Pink Digital Camera
6. Digital Video Recorder
7. Digital Photography
8. Fisher Price Digital Camera
9. Sony Digital Picture Frame
10. Exact Digital Replica

Filed under: Shopping, Electronics

Holiday Updates - Yahoo and more

I haven't posted in a while. Development has been pretty time consuming and I am more or less tracing bugs and trying to make the code more portable and flexible. It has neither now.

Yesterday I got a very apologetic letter from the people at Yahoo Directory Express Submission. I appealed the original decision and on 12/5 I got a notice that my appeal was accepted and the site would be added to the directory in 2-4 days. Well those days came and went and the site wasn't added. I sent an email about once a week inquring about the addition to the directory. Then on January 4 I got an email from Anna Moyles apologizing for the mixup. Apparently it a simple clerical type error and my site would be added to the directory and would be visible in the next 48 hours. Sure enough it was visible today in the Virtual Malls category at Yahoo directory. So kudos for Yahoo Directory for fixing the problem.

Currently our official giveaway is for a Playstation 3. You can find the official announcement at PR Web announcement for Earlymiser.com. We plan on holding giveaways pretty frequently on the site. They will be announced here and at the news section of earlymiser.com So check back frequently - I am hoping to have one giveaway a month on the site.