October 22, 2008 by estreet
How can woot.com be so dang funny?
WOOT, INC. INTERNAL EMAIL
STAFF EYES ONLY
Attention Woot employees -
We are now entering the final phase of preparations for the Woot-Off planned for midnight tonight. This is when we depart from our usual deal-a-day model and sell one product after another, offering a new deal as soon as the previous one sells out. For some reason, Woot members like meilingw continue to have high expectations for this event. We must make every effort to ensure that they feel disappointed and betrayed.
All workers should be physically and mentally straining to make this Woot-Off a success, like every muscle in a wolf’s body strains to capture and devour its prey. We expect total compliance with the following objectives:
Make sure the stables are thoroughly cleaned and the horses properly groomed and shod. As you know, Commander Rutledge prefers to lead us on horseback during Woot-Offs. Charge!
Customer Service department: all vacation requests for this week and next are approved. If you have not filed a vacation request, take one anyway.
The little green pills in the kitchen are there to keep you alert and working. Take as many as you need. Officially, Woot does not believe in the concept of “overdose”.
Take at least one of our servers offline, just for laughs.
Go to the landfill and dig up some more Sansa media players. If you see any Digipro Graphics Tablets (and you will), grab those, too.
Place crap bags in company latrines so those orders can be “filled”. To this end, the company will provide free lunch today from El Feo, the filthiest burrito joint in Dallas. Do your worst, guys.
Neutralize all negative thinking among our members. We simply cannot tolerate any more posts like “do not want” or “Woot-Off killer”. If electronic means like word filters and IP bans do not work, we must reactivate the rapid-response teams to physically eliminate all threats to our reputation.
Last time, spot checks revealed that approximately 25% of products shipped are broken, incomplete, or excessively dirty. This is unacceptable. For this Woot-Off, defective shipments must make up at least 40%.
Remind SmartPost that there’s no need to hurry on these orders. Prompt delivery makes our customers spoiled and argumentative. Let them learn humility and gratitude while they wait.
Above all, we must strive to make this Woot-Off even more tedious, disappointing, and lucrative than the last one. The employee who achieves the most toward this end will be rewarded with one brown Zune. Second place: two brown Zunes.
Forward into battle! Remember: to give one’s life for Woot is glorious!
Larry Stalin
eCommerce eKommissar
Woot, Inc.
THIS EMAIL WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN 90 SECONDS
Posted in Cool Ecomm sites | Tagged woot | No Comments »
October 20, 2008 by estreet
Check out the new features on WatchedItem.com. There is a new 500 “most watched items” list with neat 24 hour change tracking info. The Hall of Fame banner shows a seller’s listings that made the top 500 most popular listings on eBay.
Here’s the list of eBay.com sellers with the most watched items on the week of 10/21/08:

The most popular seller is shutterblade. They sell used camera equipment.

Posted in eBay pulse | Tagged eBay pulse | No Comments »
October 3, 2008 by estreet
The guy running Statcounter.com runs a great service. He wasn’t successful overnight so I respect him ever more.
Here’s his take on SEO: http://blog.statcounter.com/
It will take me at least an hour to study this post because there is a lot of supporting info.
Posted in Cool Ecomm sites | Tagged seo | No Comments »
October 2, 2008 by estreet
http://www.seobook.com/blog publishes an overwhelming amount of information each day. However, it’s organized in sections so that you can grab a thought or snippet to digest.
One thing I picked up is the use of the rel="nofollow" link attribute. I had thousands of clicks on ePN from MSN’s bot crawling my site the other day.
The linked to page will not get indexed but I still have to verify that the link text itself is indexed. I see contradicting opinions on this.
I guess this is why there are so many blogs on SEO. The tools and techniques constantly change.
Posted in Cool Ecomm sites | Tagged seo | No Comments »
September 25, 2008 by estreet
Fixed price listing insertion fees on eBay were reduced to just $.35 on Sept 16. Also, longer durations were introduced: 30 days and Good Til Canceled.
Take a look at how sellers responded in the charts below. An extra 5 Million listings were added to eBay which is a 33% increase.


This reminds me of when eBay introduced the store listing several years ago. So many sellers flocked to the very cheap store format that eBay became desperate for auction listings. To rebalance the site, eBay made store listings less attractive by pushing store listings down in the search results.
So there is more than a déjà vu feeling here, it’s a like living it all over again. And I estimate that eBay Express will be reincarnated within 2 years.
Posted in eBay | Tagged eBay, ebay fixed price | No Comments »
September 19, 2008 by estreet
Somebody didn’t get the memo.

The eBay Partner Network issued this statement last week.
Any transaction resulting from traffic that has been redirected off of an Advertiser site (e.g. eBay.com) will be disqualified, and you will not receive commissions
Posted in eBay | Tagged eBay, eBay Partner Network | 4 Comments »
September 15, 2008 by estreet
ChannelAdvisor received $30M in May, 2007. Now they just got an additional $20M in funding.
Their cash burn rate is around $2M per month. Wheee! That would be fun.
That makes me think, what’s better: a small lifestyle business or a high risk, high reward funded business?
The decision is a function of the founder’s personality and skills. Do they want to spend their day setting company goals and persuading venture capitalists to invest? Or do they want control and slow growth?
A lot of times, the company starts as a small lifestyle business and becomes successful. Think eBay. Then the founder has to decide on an exit strategy. Think Pierre Omidyar choosing Jeff Skoll, and then Meg Whitman to lead his company.
To answer my own question, I guess there’s no “best” kind of company. They are just success or failure on a different scale.
I have a modestly successful lifestyle business. One day, I hope to grow the business enough so that I can run it rather than work in it. Halloween is the 3rd anniversary of eSeller Street, Inc. That’s my definition of success.
Posted in Quality of Life | Tagged ChannelAdvisor, eBay, startup | No Comments »
September 15, 2008 by estreet
Interesting article on Auction Software Review:
Shooting Star Becomes Black Hole As Developer Disappears
Users of desktop auction management tool Shooting Star have been left in the lurch following the disappearance of developer Kevin Olayan.
The formerly well-regarded tool for eBay sellers has not been updated since August 2007 and the ordering page on the Shooting Star website has been removed. Panicked users discovered that Olayan was arrested on 19 July 2008 for Driving While Intoxicated and other traffic charges in Hawaii, the developer’s home base. Attempts to contact Olayan, including visiting Hawaii to search for him, have failed.
A new eBay group has been set up by Shooting Star user flykitty to support users and search for alternative auction management tools.
Posted in eBay | Tagged eBay | No Comments »
September 14, 2008 by estreet
Scot Wingo comments on the possible eBay layoffs on his blog. The layoff is speculation by investment research firm, Wedge Partners.
But Scot reveals some info details on where the 16,000 eBay employees work in his post. I recall in 2005 at eBay Live! they said there were 10,000 employees. So they grew by 60% even though the eBay platform has be flat for 3 years?
Personally, I think they have some fat to trim. At the eBay Dev Conf, there were numerous eBay and PayPal new employees asking if they could assist me. When I said “yes”, and stated the details of my question, they couldn’t understand my question nor direct me to someone who could answer my question.
I don’t think we would notice a thing should eBay make the cut.
Posted in eBay | Tagged eBay | 3 Comments »
September 13, 2008 by estreet

Now this is a nice looking seller banner!

They have high watcher counts too.
Posted in eBay | Tagged eBay pulse | No Comments »
September 12, 2008 by estreet
There is a new eBay Pulse. The new page seems to come and go. The old page shows about 50% of the time.

It’s got a nice layout but there is not enough meat. I need numbers, pictures and names. It’s so neutral.
The most prominent section called the “internet pulse” makes no sense. You click the top searched terms on the internet and they take you to matching eBay items. People googled “blog”, “iphone”, “google” (google squared?), and “launch”. Only “iphone” is something you would buy on eBay.
Take a look and tell me what do you think.
Posted in eBay pulse | Tagged eBay pulse | No Comments »