VentureBeat’s Job Board
This is perhaps the best job board in the world for anybody who would be reading this blog - it focuses solely on $100K+ jobs solely in the high-tech industry.
Back from Asia…
So I’m finally back from my 2.5 week trip to Asia. I was in China (Shenzhen) and Hong Kong for work (we went to a few tradeshows and toured some factories) and then went over the Indonesia to visit my dad who works there on and off (a long-distance commuter of sorts).
It was a really good trip and I learned a lot - I will try to get some thoughts and pictures from China up on the blog within a few days.
While I was gone Sewell Direct was honored as the 4′th fastest growing company in Utah according to MountainWest Capital Network - needless to say we are very proud of this accomplishment.
Kiva
I put a new banner on the right-side of the page (near the bottom). No, I’m not making any money off of it - it’s for Kiva, a non-profit focused on P2P micro-lending. It’s an awesome company that allows you to lend money to a specific entrepreneur in a developing nation. You can watch as your entrepreneur starts their business - at the end of the cycle (when the loan is eventually repaid) you have the option of withdrawing your money or using it to fund another small startup.
They claim a 96% repayment rate, which is awesome. I would love to see this same model used in a for-profit setting. I think that if people could make competitive returns on their money there would be more interest in funding these micro-startups.
Feedvertising
So what is feedvertising? It’s Text Link Ad’s new rss advertising channel. If you’re reading this post in a feed reader you should be able to see the ad below. You can pay a flat rate to several advertisers in TLA’s index to be included at the bottom of their rss feed.
As an internet retailer I love the idea of rss feeds because it creates more relevant ad inventory. As a sometimes blogger I like the idea of monetizing some of my feed traffic that will never make it to my site. As an avid blog-reader I really like the idea that bloggers may no longer feel the need to make me open their site in a browser to read the full post - that’s so annoying.
If you aren’t using Text Link Ads yet for link buying, by the way, give it a shot. Here you can get $100 in free links.
Qchex
I still remember taking checks from Qchex to the bank to determine they were fraudulent (the fraudster did not use the correct number of digits for the routing number). Looks like the FTC caught on to them…
via threadwatch
The Goont is finally blogging
So the Goont (aka Lewis) finally got around to putting some content on his blog - I wrote a post a few months ago about dealing with hater sites - it sounds like the Goont has a legitimate reason to start his own hater site…
14% Margins? Nice one, Overstock…
When people find out I work for an internet retailer in Utah they usually ask me what I think about Overstock (based in SLC). I think that Overstock is a company fighting an uphill battle (appealing primarily to a very price-sensitive demographic), but I do think that the company has a lot of potential when they start running the company to generate profits as opposed to just revenues.
I had no idea, however, what a thin margin they were operating on - see Google Finance for some quarterly numbers. You can calculate their gross margin by dividing the gross profit by the gross revenue. You will see that in their most recent reported quarter (Q2 2006) they showed a 14.4% gross margin - ouch!
Why we discontinued “Inventory Counts”
Back in March we experimented with providing inventory counts here at Sewell. A few months ago we decided against providing the inventory counts and I figured I would share our reasoning for anybody else out there wondering if this will improve their conversion rate.
When you provide inventory information (ie, how many of a certain SKU are in stock on the product page) you will probably see an increase in your conversion rate for B2C purchases - consumers like knowing that their product is in stock and will ship out right away. Our problem is that in many cases there is a corresponding decrease in the conversion rate for some B2B purchases. Since business purchases are typically much larger than consumer purchases we realized that even though we may see the quantity of orders go up, overall revenue did not.
So why would orders go down for corporate/government purchases? Because these customers often want to buy 10’s, 100’s or even 1K’s of products at a time. So we may have, for instance, 43 units in stock for a certain product, but our corporate buyer wants 100. Usually we can get 100 from our supplier which will still ship the same day, but we were discouraging these purchases by indicating that we only had 43 available, so we figure that we are better off just saying that the product is in stock and letting volume customers call in to check availability.