An attachment set for a mixer I don’t own.

Well heck.  Blogging is becoming expensive.  

About a month or so ago I wrote an entry about eBay search where I said that on Kitchenaid.com there were 85 results for mixers and on eBay there were thousands… well apparently as part of that research I put a mixer attachment in a shopping cart at Amazon.  Then I went back there to buy something else (for real) and bought it at the same time without realizing it.

Grr.  $50 I’ll never get back.  Probably donate it someplace or give it to a friend — I don’t think I’ve ever returned a single item online.  Hassle.

This leads me to wonder what % of online purchases are accidental.  I’ve prevented myself at the last second from doing this once or twice before, so it must happen to others as well?

I don’t think I’ve ever actually used a mixer.

One of the reasons I enjoy blogging is I really enjoy thought experiments on businesses.  This is another one of those.  I choose eBay/Amazon a lot because they are both commerce leaders, visible/transparent, and so they set the standard in some ways for the industry.

One of these kids is doing his own thing, come on can you tell which one?

The proposal: 

The eBay.com site and brand should become mainline retail as the primary focus and optimize around that.  Liquidations and collectibles would be relegated to a sub-brand and separate experience (much like an offline retail company might do — think “Ann Taylor” and “Ann Taylor Loft”, there are literally hundreds of examples.)

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Ok I’m headed to Barcelona and it should be a lot of fun.

Gaudi.  All that. 

Why does an ECommerce nut get to go to Barcelona?  Well to talk about Marketplaces of course!

Conference: E-Commerce Summit 2012 Barcelona

Dates: June 4-6, 2012 (soon!)

Topic: Is Running a Marketplace Right for Me?

A topic near to my heart.  The theme of the conference is primarily European retailers getting to hear what’s going on in the United States.  I have the Marketplace session. It’s obviously a trend.  I’ve been on both sides of the fence — helping retailers succeed on Marketplaces, as well as building a Marketplace at Barnes & Noble.

The things I’ll talk about — I’ve not seen them before, and you will likely never hear again.  Not in this detail.

If you’ve never heard me speak before — I’m pretty transparent.  I will lay out step by step my decision points coming into Barnes & Noble, what we considered, why we did it, how we did it, and most importantly if you’re a large retailer: does it make sense for you to do the same thing?

My presentation is laid out in my head already, but if you have any questions in particular you’d like me to answer, let me know and I’ll include them.  After the conference, I’m happy to post the slides to Slideshare.

Folks that follow me in Europe?  Feel free to drop by — I’ll be in Barcelona all week so would love to catch up.

Thanks!

- Rick

“Oh that, idea? We’ve done that before 5 years ago!  Let me save you some time.”

Being a leader is tough.  Not only do you have to pick a good idea, but you have to get the execution right.  It struck me the other day that many times when people move onto a new idea, org structure, whatever, they don’t have a clear picture of why the old one was not appropriate other than:

It was done by my predecessor.

There are a whole set of reasons why something fails, and only by getting the most important ones right can you succeed.

• Wrong idea
• Wrong rollout to org
• Wrong message
• Wrong funding
• Wrong market
• Wrong follow-on effort
• Wrong time
• Wrong leader
• Wrong team
• Wrong company
• Wrong alignment between groups
• Wrong contributor
• Wrong process
• Wrong metrics
• Wrong goals
• Wrong tweaks in response to feedback

Which ones are most important to you?  To success of your effort?

Often, the  job of a leader is to take a failed idea - one that no one thinks will work - and with the right root cause analysis, tweak one or all of these and have it succeed.

Ever wonder what Jeff Bezos means when he says “Stubborn on vision, flexible on details?”  

This is it.

Are your eyes tired?  Too focused on building new things to see the pile of stuff building up in the corner?

Paypal has recently rolled out some new messaging and tiers around its products, and it hit me that the fact they are doing this is a really good external indicator for Paypal.

The reason is that it shows Paypal is looking at their business with a fresh pair of eyes.

Seems simple, but it’s not.  Forever, Paypal has been a jumble of confusing terms.  Paypal Websites Payment Pro.  Paypal Express Checkout.  Paypal Direct Payment.  Paypal Payments Pro.

And this is barely counting all the things that were carried over from the Verisign acquisition.  Gems like Payflow Pro and Payflow Link.

What if they wanted to add new features to this?  Just throw another one on the jumbled mess of names?  How do you even begin to speak about this to the market?

Answer these questions:

1. When’s the last time you killed a product?  A feature?
2. How many products and features have you added in the last year?
3. List out your most frequently used pages or features, and write down when they were built.  They haven’t been redesigned since then, have they?  Are you sure your users are exactly the same?

Engineers call this refactoring.  And this is Paypal doing it to their product lines.

Close your eyes.

Remember the first time you used Google?  That ‘a-ha’ moment when you felt that someone understood what sort of information was truly important to you?

If search queries are the database of intentions/wants/desires, then search results are perhaps the database of understanding.  

It’s the way for a website to say, “I hear you”.  

The fact that search results can inspire empathy in users is significant in the world of ECommerce — which supposedly represents the fulfillment of user needs/wants.  If an ECommerce company has a search problem, they have a pretty major business concern — which brings us to today’s topic:

eBay Search.

eBay has a tough job on its hands.  It has a search domain on the scale of someone like Google.  Its business model, inventory source,  and product relationships are completely unique in the industry.

As I thought about eBay’s options to improve that experience, I wanted to consider two paths in particular:  one is to keep working and improving what they have, and the other is outsourcing.

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Over the years, I’ve #FAILED. MISERABLY. at least 3 other times I’ve tried to setup a blog.  

Here’s how I failed in the same insane way those times:

Setup Wordpress.  Infinitely customize plugins.  Post something.  Watch your Google Analytics traffic.  Get uninterested.  Start thinking you have nothing to contribute to others.  Customize your plugins some more.  Stop blogging.  Shut site down.

Dead like my blog.

It’s not that people aren’t listening to you, they just don’t care.  And they don’t care because they don’t know you.  And they don’t know you because you aren’t committing to engage with them over time.  Why should I care about you if you aren’t going to care about me?

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