Archive for the 'ecommerce' category

Competitious Keeps Tabs on Your Competition

Nov 14 2008 Published by under applications, ecommerce

Competitious-Dashboard

I recently started playing around with Competitious, and I think it’s a pretty cool idea.  They’re in beta still, so I expect it will become a bit more robust.  It looks like they raised some angel money about 18 months ago, not sure of any VC infusion or anything since.  But it’s a great tool for the smaller businesses that want to have an organized interface to track their competition.  It’d be a great tool to hand off to an intern and have them update and monitor every day, and then have the key stakeholders (Online Marketing Director, VP of Marketing, etc.) login and check out; or it can send them email updates for certain happenings.

Here’s how it works. First you create an account and then create a project.  You add your URL and name as “My Company” and then you add your competitors’ URLs and names as your competitors.  You can see the project I set up using my old friends at Tactics.com as My Company, and then adding some of their competitors.

Competitious-ComparisonMatrix

Once you have them all setup, you can then build a feature matrix.  You enter categories and features, and then check off features that the sites have or don’t have.  For example, a category might be, Community & Social Media and a feature may be Blog.  You can view the very simple feature matrix I set up.

You also can add “Clippings” you find on yourself and competitors.  This is a good way to track everyones PR and press.  It would be cool if there were some type of Google Alert integration, or something similar, that you could set up to suggest new clippings.  For now, the onus is on you to find them and add them, but they have a bookmarklet you can use to quickly add one, via a popup or redirection to the Competitious project.  Here’s a shot of me adding a great article about Tactics to the Clippings, via the bookmarklet popup window in Firefox:

Competitious-NewClipping


They also have a traffic comparison section, that pulls in the Alexa graph for the sites in your project.  This section is a bit janky, mostly because of Alexa.  But they claim to have a more robust setup for the full product release.

Overall, lots of room for improvement with Competitious, but they are still in beta, and I really like the idea.  It has some great potential, if you have someone to spend 30 minutes or so every day pushing data into the project, then it really can streamline the monitoring part of keeping up with the Joneses.

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Crowdsourcing Site Threadless Gets a Redesign

Nov 11 2008 Published by under communities, ecommerce

I’m a big fan of Threadless, and I consider it the “granddaddy” of crowdsourcing web 2.0 business models.  The site does an awesome job of getting visitors to participate, without necessarily buying a product.  Of course, once that intial participation happens, it is a lot easier to later convince that visitor to purchase.

Threadless T-Shirts - Designer Clothing Submissions - Home Page

Without ever purchasing a shirt, print, or whatever, visitors can submit designs, submit slogans, blog (forum post really), and vote on existing designs and slogans.  These offerings help foster the sense of community and empowerment that is the cornerstone of crowdsourcing.

Another aspect of Threadless that impresses me, is the ability to add your customized information from other networks to your profile.  It enables you to pull in your del.ico.us links, your Flickr photos, Last.fm recently played, MySpace info, and anyother RSS feed you’d like to include.  This personalizes your profile more than the standard info (city, website, avatar, etc.) that most sites include in their profiles.

But the whole point of all of this is to sell t-shirts, so we can pay the developers to write the code that taps into all those APIs, and handles the design uploads, and all that other stuff.  The Threadless Street Team is the participatory aspect of Threadless that has a direct impact on sales.  I refer to these types of programs as the members-as-affiliates programs.  Every Threadless member has a link in their account that is clearly visible in the left navigation; the link contains their Street Team id.  The member can put the link anywhere, and they will get credit for any sales resulting from referals – just like an affiliate program, but every member is an affiliate.  You’ll notice I used it in the initial link to Threadless in this post; go buy a shirt and I’ll get $3 credit that I’ll be able to use for my next purchase.  Unlike an affiliate program, Threadless doesn’t have to pay any cash for these referrals, they just need to discount product.

Threadless.com - Street Team Photo

The other way to earn Street Team points is to upload a picture of yourself (or your kid) in a shirt (onsie) you’ve purchased.  This gives customers a “return” on their purchases, and allows them to have fun putting a face to their username and profile.  Its an excellent way to increase the sense of community, and incent more sales.

Threadless got a facelift recently, the biggest noticable change being a new level of heirarchy in the navigation, that allows visitors to switch between Threadless, Type Tees, and Select.  There are some other minor changes also.  Check it out, especially if you haven’t been on the site for awhile.  Threadless seems to be doing quite well with their sales and growth.  They’re a great site for crowdsourcing based businesses to look at as a model of how to carefully combine participation, community, and merchandising all in one package.

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Fulfillment ‘Wow’ from 1800Contacts.com

Nov 02 2008 Published by under ecommerce

I’m always impressed by ecommerce retailers that deliver orders quicker than their “estimated” length of time. Zappos is certainly the poster child for this, and it is an important aspect of their constant effort to WOW us customers. However, I was pleasantly surprised by my latest order from 1800Contacts.com.

I’ve been ordering from them for over 8 years, and their shipping is always fast, usually within a few days. This comes in handy, because shelling out for shipping eats up any savings there are from using the site, versus ordering from my local eye doctor, and I’m usually only a few days away from running out of lenses by the time I get around to ordering. I’ve never been contact-less while waiting for an order.

This time the estimated ship date was given as 1-2 days, and the estimated shipping time as 5-7 days. So, I could expect my package in 6-9 days. I knew they would likely arrive sooner, but I was surprised to see the FedEx ground truck arrive at my house a mere 50 hours after placing the order.

These orders ship from Orem, Utah, which means that box had to have been on FedEx truck within a few hours of when I submitted the order. That’s solid fast work at the distribution center to process the order, pick, pack, and ship, but the added element that 1800 deals with, that most ecom retailers don’t have to deal with, is the phone call to my eye doctor to validate my prescription and ensure that I’ve had checkup within the last year.

All this happened in hours, and I received my contacts 2 days later, with no shipping charge. I was wow-ed.

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