Getprice.com.au introduce category bidding
In a smart move, Getprice have introduced a category bidding system for their customers.
Now, if you want to appear at the top of a category or search, you can bid more to appear there. With enough customers feeding products to the site now (they say 1.5 million products online), this is a move that should enable them to generate more revenue.
I have included their email to fee customers below.
Read the rest of this entry »
List of Australian Magento Stores
Magento is popular in Australia.
Here is a list of Australian Magento stores that I built up a little while ago, just as a reference. This list is a few months old, thre are probably more aussie magento stores active now.
I don’t intend to actively maintain this list, but if you come across any other good sites, then please add a comment below.
Click read more to see the list…
Want to grow your eBay business?
Want to grow your eBay business?
Then consider attending this years PeSA event in Sydney, called ‘Survive & Thrive’.
PeSA is the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance and the Australian arm is holding this year’s seller event in Sydney. Last years was a great success with hundreds otf attendees, and I think this years will be even bigger.
Tickets are $199 for attendance, and includes access to exhibitors to help you improve your business, and also speakers, workshops and more.
Last year I ran some one on one sessions with sellers (and I think we might do it this year too). It was great to meet smaller sellers looking to grow!
From the www.pesa-events.com.au site :
The agenda is taking shape and bookings are now open for the 2009 PeSA Summit.
Register to attend today and take advantage of our earlybird price of only $199 for the FULL two day Summit.
Check last year’s feedback if you want to know if this will be worthwhile to your business. And see what exhibitors you’ll be able to vist.
Ill be up there, exhibiting our ReadytoShip shipping automation product, so if you go to the event, be sure to say hello!
Woopra – Sounds wierd, but it’s addictive!
What the hell is Woopra? That’s exactly what I thought when I first heard the name.
(BTW, What is it with Web 2.0 products and brands seeming to require some sort of zany name? Bing? Woopra? Or make your own name)
Anyway, Woopra is basically a real time analytics tool much like Google Analytics though with a different twist.
Getting an account and setting up is easy, and they have a very flash dashboard enabling you to see in real time who is browsing your site, where they came from (and what they typed in a search to find you) and much more.
In fact, you can even start a conversation with a user as they browse around (but would that scare you if you were the user? It would totally freak me out if a conversation box popped up and said ’so, why didn’t you finish reading my article, huh!?)
I don’t think you get a lot more user intelligence than a package like Analytics, but the ability to see how your users interact with the site, the popular incoming search terms for the day and some custom reporting makes it worth having a look at.
That, and I just love stats. Watching them live can be addictive.
Woopra dashboard
woopra
Internetretailing.com.au launches today
Today a project that I have been involved with takes a big first step.
Mark Freidin and I today launched www.internetretailing.com.au.
We are not making a big fanfare, and it will surely evolve, but we are happy to see it live.
We are excited by this industry, and in particular the growth that our industry has and is experiencing.
Internetretailing.com.au is a site designed for online retailers. Those beginning their business online, those that have been selling for a while, and for the experienced too.
Over time as we add more content and functionality we want this site to be a hub of information for the growing community of online sellers in Australia, so I really encourage you to read, comment and contribute, and of course return and read again!
Thanks for checking it out.
Nathan
Twitter Spam – I Knew It Wouldn’t Take Long
Beware, it has started.
Twitter Spam.
If you haven’t been hit yet, just wait, I am sure it won’t be long. 3 times in 3 days I have been ‘followed’ by someone and after clicking through to their profile (like I do for everyone who Follows me – don’t you?) I am met with something like the image below :
So how do you not get sucked in by this?
I think it is going to be hard as the spammers get a little smarter.
This one’s account is/was http://twitter.com/BerthaA1975
I can choose not to click on links like that, but how do you know if a twitter account is a spammy time waster or not?
Would you click on these accounts?
I hope you would, as I follow them and they are interesting! But you could be forgiven (knowing about Twitter spam) that they could look suspiciously like generated spam names… (sorry to use you as an example guys!)
Twitter must act quickly on some though as I clicked one the other day and I got a Twitter page suggesting the acount had been closed because of ‘unusual activity’ or something that that effect. But it would be hard to autmoatically monitor properly as many people starting twitter accounts will find a bunch of people to follow straight off the bat (nothing wrong with that), just like these spam accounts are doing.
And, often the links are cloaked using URL shortening services so if the surrounding text is enticing enough how many twitterers are going to throw a curiousity click that way and get infected by some spyware on the resulting landing page?
I hope not too many…
Magento Fraud Detection Module Released Today.
Just a quick blog post to mark the launch of our first commercial Magento Module, the Magento Fraud Alert Module featuring MaxMind.
We had developed this for our eCommerce arm or the business to make it much easier to identify possibly fraudulent orders. Using the MaxMind minfraud services we check all available data about the order to determine a ‘fraud risk score’.
This is then populated in the order view and order detail view for the customer service officer to look at.
It works great, has caught a lot of orders for us (some that we would have shipped, even IF our staff had looked over them).
We think for the small cost, it could really save some Magento store owners a ton of money!
PS, as a special for my blog readers, use coupon code 15offx10 in checkout for a discount. First 10 readers only!
Magento Performance – Magento 1.3 Benchmarks
Magento Performance is a hot topic at the moment. We recently installed Magento Commerce version 1.3.0 on a test server with a current production database to do some performance testing and I thought I would publish a few results. They aren’t exhaustive tests, but indicative I think.
Although we haven’t done a huge amount of testing yet there are some interesting results (and some performance improvements over a ’standard’ non cached install).
First, any figures should be interpreted with respect to our own current configuration for this test. These results were NOT for a standard demo data set.
The Fast Rise of Magento Commerce
I follow Magento Commerce and it’s development rather closely. This is because on of my businesses retails online using the Magento ecommerce software and my other business leverages this knowledge (and a lot of other online retail experience) to develop Magento modules and code and shipping automation software.
I have written about some of this in my blog before, and will write a little more shortly as we release our first Magento Module for Maxmind (fraud detection for Magento) and some improvements to our shipping automation software ReadytoShip (which now supports Magento).
I have noticed a steady increase in the amount of traffic coming to this blog because of Magento keywords searches in Google. I just happen to rank fairly highly in Google for the term “Magento Performance” which is good, maybe I should write a little more about it!?
But I have also noticed a larger number of online stores in Australia either developing in Magento, or already using Magento. There are a few big brands too, like Durex and Homedics using it now too.
I did some Google searching this morning for the .au domain to see how many stores I could find built of being built in Australia and there are already over 120.
The Magento name is being searched heavily worldwide now, see Google Trends from All Regions and Australia here.
Google Search Trend all regions
Compare the Magento trend to that of ‘oscommerce’.
Not a bad start for Magento Commerce down under, especially when the product is only at an early version 1 stage and there is not a huge amount of developer and designer support for it yet (although this seem to be growing as well).
Mark Webber’s Daily Drive?
Apparently Mark Webber just handed back the keys to his daily drive whilst in Melbourne for the Melbourne Grand Prix F1 event in Albert Park.
Mark Webber’s Formula 1 car is currently powered by Renault, but during his stay in Melbourne he was handed the keys to a Ford Performance Vehicles F6, a turbo charged 6 cylinder Falcon.
What a great car… this is what I miss in Europe, awesome Aussie muscle cars!
Not a bad plug for Ford that one…
