Archive for E-commerce
Internet Discount Clubs: A New Way to Save
Posted by: | CommentsIn the current economy, everyone is searching for new ways to save a few dollars wherever they go. From websites like Groupon and Living Social that offer gift-cards to various local merchants at a highly discounted price, to Amazon Subscribe and Save which helps you save money on gas by sending items you use a lot of each month to your home automatically on a subscription service model, every company out there is looking for ways to save you a few dollars and keep your business. With so many options to choose form, which ones will provide the best deals? Will a combination of a few of them make life easier? Let’s take a look at some of the options available.
Groupon
Groupon is one of the first largely publicized savings programs on the net. First launched in 2008 in their home town of Chicago, their first deal was a half price pizza from the pizza place that was on the first floor of their office building. They have come a long way in a short period of time, now being a publicly traded company that is worth well over 6 billion dollars USD at this time. How they work is, Groupon partners with companies to provide a significantly reduced product or service such as a massage that would be valued at 80.00 and sell it on their daily deals for 40.00. This provides the company with brand new customers and hopefully repeat clients from that, and Groupon keeps ½ of the deal price.
Over time, there has been some criticism about how Groupon does business, some going so far as to say that it is “like a Ponzi” scheme. They are losing about 100 million dollars a quarter and have a negative net balance of well over 200 million. They are using later investors’ money to pay the earlier ones, etc. Somehow, though, even though this is known they still remain and even thrive! In fact, they genuinely only have one serious contender, Living Social.
Living Social
Living Social is much the same as Groupon, however, offering a bit more in the way of options. They have family and “escape” options that generate much interest among the cost conscious family community. While Groupon is primarily geared towards women of a higher economic class, Living Social has kept its eyes closer to the ground, for the “everyman” types. They have received much seed money from various large name firms in order to get the company going. While still smaller than Groupon, they have undoubtedly cornered the market in their own way.
Amazon Subscribe and Save
Amazon of course could not be left behind when it came to this juice part of business! They opened their “subscribe and save” service. This service allows you to sign up to receive certain products you use a lot of and have them shipped automatically to your home on a schedule. For example, you use 196 or so diapers in a month for your infant, and you don’t have a car but it’s blessedly expensive to put them in small packages because your local store does not sell cases. You sign up for this service through amazon, you find your brand and a case with the amount you prefer in it, and approve your credit card or debit card to be automatically charged for that item every month renewing on the same day that you originally bought the first product. The better idea is still that by signing up you receive a secondary 15% discount on the cost, bringing the price down to as low as .14 cents a diaper.
Amazon lately has had many generous promotions like this, keeping in mind the working lives of people in the world today and the terrible economy we face. They too, enjoying the idea of the “deal of the day” model, have opened their own program along these lines, although it is still in beta and not yet in all cities around the country. It is called Amazon local; along the same ideas as both programs listed above, just through the Amazon website and servers. With this program, we will have to see how it fares after it comes out of beta and is nationwide. It is rather late in the game to be jumping on this particular bandwagon.
Restaurants.com
Restaurants.com is an entirely different program all together, focusing solely on places to eat out and maybe have a few drinks. It is much the same idea as Groupon, except that the gift certificates are always available, not just for a day or so (or until time runs out or all are purchased). For example, the restaurant up the road from you is perhaps a bit more pricey than you are usually willing to pay, however, the site has a gift certificate for 20.00 except that it is worth 50! Here’s the catch however; in order to get that 50.00 off, you need to spend 75.00 total. So, you will be outlaying some money but not as much as you would be if you went and had not purchased the certificate.
Potential for Scamming
Unfortunately, just as there are those companies who do a legitimate business, there are also those who would take advantage of people. When you choose to use an Internet discount club or a similar service, look out for these warning signs:
After purchasing a gift certificate or deal from a legitimate site, a pop-up comes up asking if you’d like to save 10.00 on your purchase today, if so to enter your email.
- You end up being redirected to a site whose listing in the address bar is different from that which you began at. This is a sign of click-jacking.
- A site asks you after purchase for any identifying information that seems unnecessary for the purchase such as your ID number.
- As always, be safe with your information online and you should be fine.
In conclusion, there are many ways to save on everyday expenses online in this dreary economy. There are even ways to ensure that you have some luxury as well and don’t have to forgo eating out in pleasant places or getting that massage that would unquestionably make your day. By utilizing Internet discount clubs like the ones listed in this article, you can still have the life you had before…just for less cost.
Related posts:
Internet Discount Clubs: A New Way to Save
Posted by: | CommentsIn the current economy, everyone is searching for new ways to save a few dollars wherever they go. From websites like Groupon and Living Social that offer gift-cards to various local merchants at a highly discounted price, to Amazon Subscribe and Save which helps you save money on gas by sending items you use a lot of each month to your home automatically on a subscription service model, every company out there is looking for ways to save you a few dollars and keep your business. With so many options to choose form, which ones will provide the best deals? Will a combination of a few of them make life easier? Let’s take a look at some of the options available.
Groupon
Groupon is one of the first largely publicized savings programs on the net. First launched in 2008 in their home town of Chicago, their first deal was a half price pizza from the pizza place that was on the first floor of their office building. They have come a long way in a short period of time, now being a publicly traded company that is worth well over 6 billion dollars USD at this time. How they work is, Groupon partners with companies to provide a significantly reduced product or service such as a massage that would be valued at 80.00 and sell it on their daily deals for 40.00. This provides the company with brand new customers and hopefully repeat clients from that, and Groupon keeps ½ of the deal price.
Over time, there has been some criticism about how Groupon does business, some going so far as to say that it is “like a Ponzi” scheme. They are losing about 100 million dollars a quarter and have a negative net balance of well over 200 million. They are using later investors’ money to pay the earlier ones, etc. Somehow, though, even though this is known they still remain and even thrive! In fact, they genuinely only have one serious contender, Living Social.
Living Social
Living Social is much the same as Groupon, however, offering a bit more in the way of options. They have family and “escape” options that generate much interest among the cost conscious family community. While Groupon is primarily geared towards women of a higher economic class, Living Social has kept its eyes closer to the ground, for the “everyman” types. They have received much seed money from various large name firms in order to get the company going. While still smaller than Groupon, they have undoubtedly cornered the market in their own way.
Amazon Subscribe and Save
Amazon of course could not be left behind when it came to this juice part of business! They opened their “subscribe and save” service. This service allows you to sign up to receive certain products you use a lot of and have them shipped automatically to your home on a schedule. For example, you use 196 or so diapers in a month for your infant, and you don’t have a car but it’s blessedly expensive to put them in small packages because your local store does not sell cases. You sign up for this service through amazon, you find your brand and a case with the amount you prefer in it, and approve your credit card or debit card to be automatically charged for that item every month renewing on the same day that you originally bought the first product. The better idea is still that by signing up you receive a secondary 15% discount on the cost, bringing the price down to as low as .14 cents a diaper.
Amazon lately has had many generous promotions like this, keeping in mind the working lives of people in the world today and the terrible economy we face. They too, enjoying the idea of the “deal of the day” model, have opened their own program along these lines, although it is still in beta and not yet in all cities around the country. It is called Amazon local; along the same ideas as both programs listed above, just through the Amazon website and servers. With this program, we will have to see how it fares after it comes out of beta and is nationwide. It is rather late in the game to be jumping on this particular bandwagon.
Restaurants.com
Restaurants.com is an entirely different program all together, focusing solely on places to eat out and maybe have a few drinks. It is much the same idea as Groupon, except that the gift certificates are always available, not just for a day or so (or until time runs out or all are purchased). For example, the restaurant up the road from you is perhaps a bit more pricey than you are usually willing to pay, however, the site has a gift certificate for 20.00 except that it is worth 50! Here’s the catch however; in order to get that 50.00 off, you need to spend 75.00 total. So, you will be outlaying some money but not as much as you would be if you went and had not purchased the certificate.
Potential for Scamming
Unfortunately, just as there are those companies who do a legitimate business, there are also those who would take advantage of people. When you choose to use an Internet discount club or a similar service, look out for these warning signs:
After purchasing a gift certificate or deal from a legitimate site, a pop-up comes up asking if you’d like to save 10.00 on your purchase today, if so to enter your email.
- You end up being redirected to a site whose listing in the address bar is different from that which you began at. This is a sign of click-jacking.
- A site asks you after purchase for any identifying information that seems unnecessary for the purchase such as your ID number.
- As always, be safe with your information online and you should be fine.
In conclusion, there are many ways to save on everyday expenses online in this dreary economy. There are even ways to ensure that you have some luxury as well and don’t have to forgo eating out in pleasant places or getting that massage that would unquestionably make your day. By utilizing Internet discount clubs like the ones listed in this article, you can still have the life you had before…just for less cost.
Related posts:
The WePay Surge: Why They May Dethrone PayPal
Posted by: | CommentsWe’ve reminded you here in this column before of one critical and forgotten truth when it comes to online supremacy: all empires crumble. As much as we list the Lycos’s and Compuserve’s of the online world, though, this truth can be hard to remember. That is because it can be hard to see how anyone can make inroads into a well-established internet semi-monopoly.
Oftentimes the reason this is the case is that whoever is #1 is there for a reason. Google offers the most extensive search results; Apache offers the most stable web hosting package, and so forth. Sometimes, though, #1 doesn’t try harder. In those cases, their top ranking is based on little more than momentum, meaning that it’s only a matter of time before a competitor sweeps in, finding that company’s weak spots, and seizes the day.
PayPal: a decadent king
PayPal has been ripe for this seizing for a long time. It is still easily the #1 payment processor online. For years, though, this has been a title rather grudgingly awarded. The complaints about the company have been piling up. Most of these have centered around customer service, which branch out into various subcategories, such as bad decision making on fraud determination and poor customer communication.
These complaints were highlighted by an incident in which PayPal froze the account of the Flux Foundation. The group was planning an historic exhibit at Burning Man, and though PayPal responded to the negative publicity by quickly granting them an exception, the story shined an embarrassing light on the company’s approach to their customer base.
It was from a far smaller incident, though, that a competitor to their services was birthed. In 2008, Rich Aberman, now 25, was attempting to raise money for his brother’s bachelor party. The hassle of trying to get the $4,200 from 14 different people presented the kind of headache that, in the right kind of mind, results in that very special realization otherwise known as, “There has to be a better way”. While PayPal provided, and still does, some small types of group fundraising, it didn’t have a lot of the functionality for this kind of purpose that he required.
WePay steps into the ring
Aberman soon found investors who agreed with both the general complaints about PayPal and the belief regarding that “better way”. They received $17,000 in seed money. That was 2008. Today, their investment capital has hit the 8-figure mark. That’s an amazing increase. What’s even more amazing is the list of people that this comes from, a list which includes PayPal founder Max Levchin. Big names are seeing reasons to bet big on WePay.
It’s not just venture capital that’s increasing. WePay’s revenue, transaction stream, and employee count are all shooting up with the kind of geometric growth that gets a company’s CEO’s grinning picture on the front page of financial magazines. So what is it that makes this company so hot?
The selling points
There are several things that WePay is doing right that could mean PayPal has a serious challenger to contend with here. Some of them are as follows:
- Customer service: Recognizing that this is one of PayPal’s primary weak points, WePay has been putting serious effort into making sure that their customers don’t feel brushed off. 24/7 support by phone, chat or email is available. One subtle sign that they take this seriously is that tech agents and customer service agents are located next to each other. Many in the tech community have experienced the phenomenon wherein a customer service agent wants to communicate an idea to the tech team, and feels like it has to cross a guarded moat to do so.
- WePay Stores: If there’s any idea left in E-Commerce that might make someone smack themselves in the head for not thinking of it first, this could be it. WePay Stores is an E-Commerce solution that handles both the setting up of the storefront and the processing of payments. It’s been so many years that this has been split between different companies that the whole of the internet seems to just have assumed that this must always be the case.
- Having fun: Let’s recognize that this is something that many startups have in the early years, only to lose it in the grumpiness of bloated corporate middle age. We’re interested in the now, though, and right now… well, how can you not at least chuckle a little bit at a company that trolls it’s competitor’s conference with a 600 pound block of ice embedded with money as a symbol of the accounts PayPal has wrongly “frozen”?
Not there yet
These advantages notwithstanding, it’s not all smooth sailing for WePay just yet. While so far they are appealing to a lot of the things that PayPal has dropped the ball on, their Goliath still has upwards of 80 million customers to call on. The daily worry over at WePay is that PayPal will decide to alter their services one day and offer the same group payment architecture that WePay is focused on.
There is also the economic consideration that WePay’s services come at a price. Their 3.5% transaction fee is high for the industry. Scanning the comments that we saw in some of the articles about this company, there are still a lot of customers who are willing to deal with PayPal’s corporate deficiencies if it means saving a few bucks. This is a hard line to walk, and with so much of WePay’s revenue coming from investments, one would not be irrational for being concerned that these guys are being a little too loose in rolling the dice.
As good a chance as any
Then again, when facing off against a behemoth like PayPal, does one have the luxury to not take any chances? While things are riding hard and fast over at WePay headquarters, so far there doesn’t seem any sign that it’s moving faster than they are capable of handling. PayPal is vulnerable, and Aberman and co-founder Bill Clerico just may have struck at the right time in the right way. We can’t predict the future, but we can say that so far from what we’ve seen, it’s possible that we could be in the beginning phases of the passing of a great torch in the world of online payments.
Related posts:
How the Kindle Fire is a Catch-all Reflection of Current Web Trends
Posted by: | CommentsDo you know what’s one wonderful thing about history? At any moment in time society is caught up in countless evolving trends that will be fascinating some day to the historian. While you’re living in them, though, they can be difficult to see. This is not a bad thing. It’s by all of us “enjoying the moment” that these stories get written in the first place.
Now and then, though, we see something that reminds us that we can take a step back and look at some bigger picture. We typically refer to this as a “sign of the times.” In browsing there some recent tech news I caught up with some of the newest information about the latest product from Amazon, the Kindle Fire. In reading the early reviews of this device, I realized that this is a great example of this phenomenon. The Kindle Fire is the coalescence of many modern web trends all shoved into a single new device.
Here’s a rundown of this new toy’s features, and why it’s a good reflection of the World Wide Web, circa 2011.
It’s a tablet. Stop there.
When was the last time there was a new desktop PC that was released to such fanfare that it took the tech world by storm? I honestly can’t remember myself. More get released than we can keep track of, and they all draw collective shrugs, even as we continue to gobble them up.
When a new portable device of almost any kind is released now, though, it’s like watching a old-style carnival where crowds rush back and forth in swarms between new attractions. Then what follows from it is a scrambling of analysis and IT reshuffling, as the rules for how things were done before get altered by the specifications of this new interface.
Web browsers as integrated components of E-commerce
Gone, it’s starting to seem, are the days of web browsers simply existing to allow users of all platforms to browse all web sites with the greatest of ease. Former love affairs like Netscape and then Mozilla existed because of programmers who looked at the browsers that came before them and saw how they could make them better.
Such is not the case with Amazon Silk, the browser built into the Kindle Fire’s Android-based operating system. Programmed into it are features specifically designed to work with Amazon, or its Kindle, or both. In fact, at least as of right now, Silk exists only on the Kindle Fire. However, some commentators have found reason to believe that this might be a test run. If the Silk gets a strong enough reception, it’s reasonable to believe that Amazon might use this as a launching pad to get this browser into other more popular operating systems.
It’s important to recognize what this means, if so. It means that a retailer is using the technology of a new device to push a new browser to devices outside of it: a new browser that, in turn, was created to drive more customers their way. So you might someday be on FaceBook, mention a movie, and get a free trial download suggested to you by Silk on your PC because of this device designed to get people to buy more books.
To try to put this into perspective, this would be like Walmart, instead of making you want to shop there more, designing cars that are specifically engineered to make driving to their store easier, and then that technology making it into cars that had nothing to do with Walmart in the first place. Some might argue that Microsoft already pulled this trick with their Internet Explorer. It’s not a bad example but Amazon being a non-IT-based (i.e. “old economy”) company at its core, this analogy doesn’t match up that well.
The cloud eats everything!
There’s more. Silk is designed to be what Amazon calls a “split browser.” What they mean by this is that some of the browser’s more processor-intensive functions get farmed out to Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Amazon’s EC2 isn’t entirely new, with 5 years of development behind it, and Amazon has already integrated this technology into other facets of their business.
Putting it directly into their new browser, however, represents one of the most invisible forms of cloud computing yet. This may seem little, but it quietly signifies that we’ve crossed a threshold in how we handle even the most basic computing tasks. The immediate reason for the development is that, by sending out computing tasks that take some muscle, your device can cut down on the amount of processor time per request, and thus extend its battery life.
Here is the larger point. As cloud technology integrates itself into our computing world on continually smaller computational task levels, computing devices and their associated programming languages are going to have to increasingly take into account the possibility that the requests they are serving are not local. This signifies a whole lot of seismic information technology changes, not the least of which is the potential for a whole new generation of security issues. This might be why one user described the Silk as being about as “secure as a bathroom stall without a door”.
Spending money to make money – the next generation
Still, that probably won’t stop those lining up to buy it given the Fire’s aggressively low price of $199 per unit. This blows away a lot of the related devices that consumers might choose this over.
There is something important to note in this low price, though: it’s lower than the manufacturing cost by about $50. Amazon is outright expecting to lose money on each Fire sold. In turn, they’re expecting to gain that much more from the extra sales of digital media that this new tablet will push.
It shouldn’t take an economic genius to divine all sorts of fascinating conclusions from this bold marketing play. Here’s the most obvious one we get out of it. This is the strongest proof yet that the move towards making digitally downloadable media a viable long-term economic model, which was the point of the original Kindle in the first place, has proven successful. Amazon couldn’t have made such a daring move as this without a room full of number crunchers displaying charts that showed just how much they were sure they’d recoup. This makes the release of both the original Kindle and the Fire a major event in the piracy/intellectual property wars, itself another important modern battlefield.
A sign … but of what?
Before we betray too much excitement here, let’s be clear and state that we can’t tell just yet where this is all going. Especially with the huge price gamble that Amazon has taken with this device, it’s not impossible that, before all is said and done, the Kindle Fire will go the way of New Coke. Amidst the excitement for it are a lot of valid concerns, and we’ll have to see how they play out.
The Kindle Fire is a fascinating new development to watch, largely because it highlights where much of our web and E-commerce development is going. The great thing about signposts, though, is that they only tell you where you’re going. They don’t tell you what it’s going to look like when you get there.
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Linux and E-Commerce: The Top 5 Best Hosts for Two Long-term Trends
Posted by: | CommentsLet’s mix up two of the biggest of web hosting trends for this Top 5. Linux is quickly becoming the operating system of choice for many webmasters. It goes without saying that where there’s web hosting, there is a need for E-Commerce. Given the enhanced reliability and added security that comes from a Linux server, more hosts offer it, and thus, it appears likely that the intersection between these two trends will only keep growing stronger.
If that’s the case, then it’s a good idea to go over the options available to someone investigating Linux servers and E-Commerce for their web sites. Here are five hosts that are good selections for the Linux E-Commerce user, judged not just by their specific E-commerce offerings, but by what else they have to offer surrounding those packages:
WebHostingHub’s Premium Website Builder lets you build a storefront from scratch without having to fuss with any other programs. For those of you who want to dive into the nuts and bolts, though, WebHostingHub should have everything you need to get started. Their supported shopping cart packages include Cube Cart, OS Commerce, and Zen Cart. Among important and related features are RingCentral, a virtual phone system, RatePoint, a word-of-mouth marketing program, and iContact, an email marketing tool.
2) JustHost
This big name in the web hosting world impresses with a strong array of both E-commerce and other supporting features. They offer OS Commerce and Agora shopping carts, several types of security protection, Merchant Account and PayPal support. Their accounts also come with several different types of site building software and lots of ad credits.
3) iPage
The very affordable web hosting accounts at iPage have three shopping cart options (ShopSite, osCommerce and Agora), multiple content management system packages, $150 in ad word credits, related scripting and other software of all varieties. They are one of the largest hosts around today, meaning they have experience in managing and supporting these packages.
4) DowntownHost
One of the better-kept secrets in the hosting world, DowntownHost has a dazzling array of features. CubeCart, OS Commerce and Zen Cart are all offered. Even more impressive is their dozen different portals and content management systems, 5 blogging software packages, 2 project management software packages, and a few miscellaneous programs that you don’t see often but could greatly enhance the right E-commerce site, such as Noah’s Classifieds and PHPAuction.
5) BlueHost
Another big player in the web hosting world with millions of sites on their servers, BlueHost has one of the largest selections of shopping cart systems, with OS Commerce, Agora, Cube and Zen carts all present. Rounding out their offerings is support for lots of types of multimedia, script support with some more rare inclusions such as DHTML, and an average 30 second hold time to reach a technical representative.
As stated above, the amount of hosting companies that we will be looking at for this category will likely do nothing but increase over time, and increase rapidly. It appears safe to say, though, that these five companies will continue to have a strong place on our list for some time to come.