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Table of Contents
Off-the-Wall Ideas by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
Web Notes by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
New eBay Insights by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
It's amazing that after all these years the game companies and the PC companies haven't gotten together to define systems and make game buying and PC buying easier.
All they need to do is establish specs for levels of computer performance and capability. They could establish a range of processor speed, RAM, etc. and give it a year-associated label. Then if the box says "requires 2006-grade system" and you have a system with that designation, you know the game will run on it. And if you desperately want a 2005-grade game, but your computer is only 2003; you may well be tempted to upgrade or get a new system. And the computer makers should, at the same time, strive (as long as makes sense) to make their systems backward compable, so consumers can know for sure that a 2003-grade game will run on a 2006-grade system.
The last time the CD/DVD drive in my computer started acting up, after an hour on call-waiting, a support technician suggested "dust-free" air.
Apparently, accurate reading of CDs and DVDs depends on light, and a little dust on the lense can cause serious problems. When that happens, a simple shot of air is all you need to fix it.
So why don't computer makers and makers of CD and DVD players build in a mechanism to automatically shoot air at the lense and at the playing surface of CDs/DVDs at startup? These machines already have fans, for cooling. All they'd need would be to redirect that moving air for a second.
With public domain books on CD or DVD, the library can keep the disk on its premises (perhaps with the reference librarian). When a patron wants to read a particular book, the patron copy that book onto a floppy or email that file to him/herself to read at home or school or anywhere else PCs are available for general use.
Then when the Revolution began, the Continental Congress turned to Washington, with his military experience and his lofty rank of Colonel, and made him Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.
With his unique style of command, Washington won the war (despite losing nearly every battle but the last).
So you could argue that if Washington hadn't done so well in trigonometry we might have lost the Revolution.
Since I do read about 100 books in a good year, I decided to assemble a "Year of Reading" CD, with a hundred books. You can see the table of contents at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/1001.html
In December, In December I also created half a dozen other CDs:
Dime Novels and Pulp Fiction http://store.yahoo.com/dime.html
The Shelly Clan http://store.yahoo.com/shelley.html
Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning http://store.yahoo.com/browning.html
Political Science http://store.yahoo.com/political.html
Scotland http://store.yahoo.com/scottish.html
Hobbies: Crafts, Games, Sports, and Gardening http://store.yahoo.com/hobbies.html
I also updated five of our DVD book collections http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/dvd.html
The folks who say that don't understand how the Internet works.
Regardless of what wild and wonderful multimedia experiences may be available over the Internet, people navigate by search engines which are fuelled by text. If you don't have lots of good and interesting text that's well-indexed, you'll be forced to pay high prices for advertising to drive traffic to your great dancing-prancing experience.
In other words, text content is a marketing asset, helping bring traffic to sites by way of search engines. Multimedia might make the experience at a Web site far more compelling. But text indexed by search engines is what gets visitors there in the first place. Sites that don't have significant text or do not use it well with regard to search engines pay far more for advertising to get the same level of traffic as comparable sites with lots of text.
Also, the Internet is not a few-to-many (mass media) environment. There
is not a limited number of channels/choices. The number is not fixed by
government regulations or licenses. Rather there is an infinitely
expanding universe of content -- hundreds of million Web sites already,
and growing fast. Tens of millions of people use their own Web sites to
talk to one another and express themselves. Joe-six-pack isn't
just a viewer/consumer, he's also a competitor for the time and attention
of his friends. Today he uses just text and pictures, but he'll soon be
playing with audio and video as well. In a competitive environment like
that, where the level of chaos keeps increasing, it's a very good idea
to take advantage of all available means to make it easy for people to
find your site during the fleeting moment are interested in your kind of
content
Also, while broadband is expanding rapidly, so is wireless/mobile. And because of limitations of both screensize and bandwidth, wireless gives new life to text.
I presumed that having a longer time for your auction to run, would bring more bids and hence higher prices. So I set all my auctions for 7 days (the longest you can run without paying a premium). And sometimes I paid a few extra cents to have them run for 10 days (the maximum). That may well be the right way to go if you are selling collectibles or articles that you have a limited supply of. But in my case, these days I'm selling book collections on CD and DVD that I make myself. And in that case, my old strategy was dead wrong.
I find that nearly all the bidding happens in the last few hours; and many people get bored with auctions that last too long, and hence don't participate. And when I set up an auction for one day instead of seven days, that means I have the opportunity to sell as many as seven copies of a CD in the time I would have otherwise sold just one.
In the past, I had all my CDs listed at full price (as buy-it-now auctions) at my eBay store; and I would selectively duplicate a dozen or so as regular (non-store) auctions, at the same buy-it-now price, for better visibility in eBay searches.
Now I make selected CDs available in one-day open-price auctions. My costs are higher, and my profit is less; but I make far more sales, reaching new customers, who, once they've been introduced to the concept of book collections on CD, come back repeatedly for more.
Selling at eBay is far different from selling at an online store, like my Yahoo store (http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat)
At eBay, I get charged one fee after another -- a fee to post a listing, a fee for every little extra in the listing, a final value fee, and a PayPal payment fee (90% of the time, customers elect to pay by PayPal). I typically end up paying over a dollar on fees when I sell an item for just $6.
You need to set a very low starting price for bidding in order to attract bidders. But you also have to be prepared for the case when the starting price winds up the final price, and for days when half or more of your one-day auctions might have no bidders at all (but still cost you listing fees).
Many sellers set their shipping/handling fee to cover their fixed costs -- the fees, the postage, the shipping envelope, etc. Some even include the cost of the materials that go into making the product. Hence you'll see items with a starting price of two or three dollars and a shipping/handling cost of $10 or more, even as high as $50.
In my case, after lots of experimentation (eBay is a great place to experiment with prices and sales terms as well as products), I arrived at a starting price of $4, for the typical CD, and a shipping price of $3.50 (first class, inside the US). That compares to a sales price of $19 and no shipping fee (inside the US) for a comparable CD at my Yahoo Store. Sometimes demand drives the total cost at eBay (price plus shipping) higher than the Yahoo cost. Sometimes the items sell for the starting price. And sometimes an item that one day went for $15, the next day won't get any bids. I need to stay alert to avoid losing money, watching what days seem best for selling these products and which products sell best; and varying which items are available at open auction, and how many items overall.
At first, I only offered my "best sellers" at open auction. But when you have an eBay store (I'm at the $49.95/month level -- not a big deal), every listing includes cross-promotional ads for another 3-4 items of yours. So for my 35 cent listing fee, I'm not just advertising the item described in the listing -- I'm also advertising my other products. So it often pays to list lots of items.
I go out of my way to ship within a couple of hours of when I receive payment. Aside from striving to make the best possible product, that is the best way delight customers.
At first, I rigidly insisted on not offering shipping discounts when a customer bought more than one item. Now I charge $3.50 for the first item (in the US), and $1 additional for each additional CD bought at the same time. That reduces my profit margin, but the additional sales make it worthwhile.
Dealing with hundreds of eBay customers every month makes record-keeping
even more important that it was before. For instance, you can waste a lot
of time trying to deal with customers who send checks with no indication
of what they are paying for (and that happens all too frequently). But
if you set up your record keeping with too much detail (or with a database),
you could spend so much time on paperwork that you end up losing money.
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