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.

Conversion Rates

I don't write about conversion rates too often because often this data isn't available to me from all of my providers. Shopping.com updated their reporting tool to give me conversion rates so I can moniter changes we are making on the site (and indeed my whole collection of comparison shopping sites such as Best Buys Zone. I hit the shopping API between 50,000 and 150,000 times a day. I also cache the results (cache is updated when prices are updated at shopping.com) so this represent roughly 1/3 of my actual traffic. Naturally December provides the highest conversion rates (my conversion rates are well above the contracted target with Shopping.com in any case and I consider that information a trade secret). I am going to mention one day in particular when I saw something so rare it simply must be mentioned. My traffic peaked on 12/11, 12/12, and 12/13 - 12/11 was the highest. This might isn't surprising since 12/13 is roughly the limit people feel comfortable ordering for delivery before Christmas. That's been the case for the last 6 years I have been running shopping comparison sites.

The day I am talking about is different day. This day was 12/21 - not a huge traffic day for me (54,580 queries) but one feature stands out - on that day my conversion was 100%!! On that day every single lead I generated converted to a sale. This is very rare and indeed it's the first time I have seen it in 6 years. I have had other days that were high (40% or so) but this is the first time I have seen a 100% conversion. I think this is outstanding for several reason. Firstly it's because my volume of traffic to the shopping.com api is pretty high. Achieving a 100% conversion rate on 10 customers is pretty doable - doing so when the numbers are higher is much much harder.

Busy working

I have been busy working on improvements to the system and new features. This latest feature is a Flash based version of TagOuts. This now allows you to feature your products and embed them in a myspace profile or a blog. Below is a my PS3 feed in a flash based feed. I need to work on usability a little bit but it works pretty good I think. Naturally clicking on the product takes you to the page with the product.

PS3

Hosting Slowdown

As often happens with new projects of mine I have already outgrown the friggin' budgeted resources on my cluster. This means a new server. Instead of buying one and installing it in the Los Angeles data center I plan on leasing one from Hostway. I really don't want to go through the hassle of shipping/installing linux/installing load balancing/hardening the kernel and then spending a few days installing it on the cluster. UGH. Quick solution here is to get one big enough and revisit it in one year. I am on the phone with the hosting provider to see if there are any other issues that might be gumming up the works (maybe they are undergoing a distributed DOS).

Are people really comparing products via shopping comparison?

One of the core assumptions that shopping comparison engines have made is that people are using the engine to actually compare products before making making a purchase decision. It's one of the reason that Yahoo shopping API home page allows you to reconstruct the compare grid for comparing the various products. The V2 of their API passes the GridImage etc if so requested. (Indeed the shopping grid can be completely recreated, allowing you to compare prices and specifications). Yet a thought a occurred to me - these sorts of comparison grids have been around for a while now since they seem to have been a design decision from early on. Yet I am an avid user of comparison engines such as Shopping.com, Pricewatch and of course my own engine (Early Miser, check out my page at earlymiser.com But I have almost never used the grid features of the various shopping comparison engines and I think no one does except for a few hard core geeks. The reasons for this are multiple but I would like to go into each of them and see if we cannot improve on the shopping experience.

First off the grid approach is designed to compare various technical specifications. Does this unit have more memory? Does this one have a larger hard drive? Yet my own log files indicate that people typically are searching for a SPECIFIC product. I am not alone in this fact. Furthermore the top terms at Yahoo Shopping have a quite a few specific products in them (you can look at them Buzzlog for Shopping.

The other thing that the buzz list at Yahoo has is the keyword "reviews" attached with a product name which I think is fairly revealing how people search. People are making buying decisions about uses - not the specific information that is presented in the product specifications.

They have a use in mind for a product and want to see a review. Reviews never cover the technical specification but how that product performs in real world situations. An ideal review would cover their exact usage and what the review thinks about the use in that specific context. Take a look at the terms in the Yahoo Shopping Buzz

1. Digital Camera Reviews
2. LCD TV Reviews
3. Cell Phone Reviews
4. PS3 Reviews
5. Camcorder Reviews
6. Wii Reviews
7. Plasma TV Reviews
8. GPS Reviews
9. HDTV Reviews
10. Laptop Reviews
11. Zune Review
12. MP3 Player Reviews
13. Kodak C633 Review
14. Samsung D53 Review
15. Olevia 232V Review
16. Xbox 360 Reviews
17. Nokia N73 Reviews
18. Samsung Blackjack Reviews
19. Canon Digital Camera Reviews
20. Mio C310x Review

Notice what they are not searching for - product specifications. Yet almost every shopping comparison engine builds comparison grids for specifications. How can we take user behaviour and improve upon the shopping comparison experience?

By adding peer to peer mediated reviews to our site. Find someone that owns the product in the site or in your extended network (with our upcoming Own Indicator) and then request a specific review from the owner! The question and the review then become part of the editorial content. Over time significant knowledge about the specific uses in a specific situation will be developed. Furthermore this will represent a natural avenue for growing the social network. Most review models are top down or many to one. This enables a many to many model for reviews.

Yahoo Returns!

After an extended 26 hour outage - Yahoo Shopping's web api is returning results again!. Kalu Kala!

Yahoo - Redux

Apparently the Yahoo Shopping API has fallen down and it can get back up. Hopefully this will be fixed tomorrow. On the other hand I kinda doubt it. Funny thing is I originally approached Yahoo Shopping about developing EarlyMiser.com EXCLUSIVELY on their platform as I thought they might like a success story in the social commerce space. They were apparently to busy to take my request and in the end it turned out to be a good thing for me. Their API (I have hit it about 2,000 times today). I will try emailing the list and contacting them again. I am also trying to reach them via their paid syndication program.