ecommerce: May 2007 Archives

Following on from a recent discussion on the Enterprise Ireland e-Business mailing list about hosting and domains I offered to draw up a comparison list. The list, which is available here, is of the top 10 or so companies as listed by WebHosting.info. The pricing listed is for the following items:

• IE domain registration
- there maybe a lower cost for a transfer, but this is ignored
• .com registration
• .co.uk registration
• .eu registration
• entry level hosting plan
- basically the cheapest on they offer

The list is split into those with servers in Ireland and those without. I may do another more detailed breakdown of these, but the work I did this weekend is just a starting point. EDIT: Actually including the link might help! EDIT 2: At Keith's suggestion the columns are now sortable and a bit of CSS magic makes this all the more obvious. Thanks to Keith for the code (and links)

I just got an email from CDWow promoting a one day special:

For one day only...every 50th order on CD WOW! will be FREE! No matter what the size of your order, whether it’s for CDs, DVDs, books, games or any combination, we will credit back every 50th order so it costs you zilch!

It's not clear whether you will be told that your order is one of the ones that is being credited or not, though I'd assume that some form of notification would have to be active .... I already placed my order for Scrubs season 5 yesterday, though I was able to save 1 euro thanks to Realex!

When I was in LA earlier this year I finally got to meetup with Frank Michlick who I've been corresponding with for quite some time. He'd just left his job with Tucows to start a new venture, but was tightlipped about the whole thing. A few days ago he let the proverbial cat out of the bag, as the runup to SharedReviews.com's launch was made public. So what exactly is it all about? The underlying concept is quite simple. People buy based on recommendations from other people. Just look at the product review sections on Amazon and you'll get the idea. The problem for reviewers is that until now their reviews were free ie. they didn't make any money from writing them, while the ecommerce sites that published them were able to reap the rewards. SharedReviews.com takes the idea of user-contributed content and adds a shared income model and meaning. The "meaning" part of the equation is very interesting. As someone who doesn't like anonymous posts to mailing lists it fits in with my philosophy very neatly:

We don't feel a review is a review unless you understand the reviewer. The more profile data you choose to share, the more relevant those experiences will be to others in the community.

As Peter, one of Frank's business partners, puts it:

This belief goes beyond just rev-share where users are rewarded for their personal contributions alone. There should be mechanisms in place that allow users to define themselves within the community and be rewarded not only for the contributions that they make, but also how much effort they put into sharing them.

The actual details of the revenue sharing are currently a closely guarded secret, but Frank's team have provided a glimpse of the concept: However, during the beta you will be able to earn US$10 for every 5 reviews published up to a maximum of US$100 per person (they've got US$100k to spend during the test period) Since it's 2007 you can expect to see APIs and widgets galore in order to make posting reviews as easy as possible. If you signup now you can get in on the beta which will run next month

I ordered the new Agricantus CD on Sunday night / early Monday morning from IBS I wasn't expecting it to arrive until tomorrow or possibly Friday, but it got here around 10 am this morning Wow! That is impressive!