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Business
November 4, 2011
Business
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Fedex’s Christmas shipping schedule

The holidays is fast approaching. I’m both happy and stressed about it. On one hand, the business will be earning more than any other time of the year – but on the other, I’m going to be glued to the screen until it’s all over.

Anyways, I want to share an important page for any online retailer using Fedex for shipping.

Here are the cut-off dates for holiday shipments arriving on/before Christmas day:

fedex_christmas_cutoff_schedule_dates

You can also view this on Fedex’s page: http://www.fedex.com/us/holiday/shipping/lastdaystoship.html

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November 3, 2011
Business, Internet
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Do people really prefer $99.99 over $100? [reddit]

I was browsing Reddit…for work (naturally) yesterday night and came across an interesting question on pricing tactics.

The question to the community was, “Do people really prefer $99.99 over $100?”

The answer is: It depends, but generally yes.

Here are some of the more notable comments:

Yes, they do prefer the $X.99. The effect is stronger among those who have lower income and education levels.

Result of a quick Google search.

- DrivebyGroper

I managed a luxury brand furniture store and found that $9,950 worked better than $10,000. I found that in lowering the price by $50, the client would often refer to the piece in the future as $9000 compared to them confusing the $10,000 price tag at a higher rate ($12k or so) in their memory.

- barcelonaKIZ

Yes, it works. It even works on people who know how it works.

It the same as using numbers to make things APPEAR smaller – using percentages instead of large numbers, using different scales, etc…

Some stores also use different price endings as "code". Some will use x.95 to indicate it is on sale while x.99 is regular price and x.98 is on liquidation, etc…

- Glossy_Paper

You’re communicating certain things with certain prices. Generally, the communication is: $XX – you’re selling a premium product, and therefore you’re not picky about the minor details of money. Use this pricing on higher end products, and especially one where service is emphasized. Don’t do $XX.00, this kills some of the illusion.

$XX.99 – You’re selling a low-end, budget product, where you’re trying to squeeze every last penny out of it. Use this for the highly price sensitive-consumer.

$XX.95 or $XX.90 – You’re offering a value product, generally in the mid-range.

People tend to look at, when considering price (roughly in order though market segment and other factors apply), the first number, the number of numbers, the last number.

- zhidzhid

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October 15, 2011
Business, Internet, Science/Technology
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Auti: A toy designed to help autistic children

What a great product! Auti is a toy for autistic children that uses behavioural science to promote good behaviour and discourage bad ones.

It works by sending positive feedback by way of cuddly actions to the child when it is handled gently (ie. whispers, petting) and becoming unresponsive when it is mis-treated, such as when hit or yelled at.

You can read more about it here: http://www.springwise.com/education/toy-designed-autistic-children-learn-play/

Or, see a video of how it works below:

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October 13, 2011
Business, Internet, Science/Technology
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CS-Cart vs Drupal (or Dedicated shopping cart vs CMS + shopping cart module)

There are loads of shopping cart solutions out there for your online store. The biggest players being Magento, Prestashop, Shopify, Drupal + Ubercart, Joomla + Virtuemart, and CS-Cart.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on each ecommerce solution and there seems to be plenty of comparisons between each cart. These comparisons tend to focus on the features of each cart, which does vary but are more or less the same after installing certain modules that fill the gap.

Sure, a web store must have functionalities that suit your specific needs but these can be easily extended through third-party modules, which are available for free from the community or purchased at a reasonable price. If not available anywhere, you can always hire a team of developers to create it.

What I’ve found to be a more useful metric for comparison is the resource use, stability, back-end interface and the scalability of the cart since these cannot easily be changed and make up the back-bone for the store experience and management.

From all of my research, I’ve found very little comparing the two types of shopping cart setups: a dedicated shopping cart and CMS with a shopping cart module installed.

The current setup for my online store is Drupal + Ubercart which falls under the CMS + cart module category. It’s a setup that is often recommended by web developers. And I can see why. Drupal is an extremely powerful CMS that can be extended to do anything, and it’s easy to develop for. Likewise, the shopping cart module, Ubercart, can also be extended easily. Seeing all the good things said about the ecommerce setup, I used it for Postertext.

Big mistake.

Ubercart feels like an extension of something else, which it absolutely is. The back-end interface pales in comparison to dedicated shopping carts like CS-Cart. Scalability is great on both platforms but you get more ecommerce-related opportunities with a dedicated solution. Also, I know I just made my point on functionalities, but they are made so much more usable with more sub-feature sets than what you would find in a cart module. In other words, Ubercart is a toy compared to a full-fledged ecommerce solution like CS-Cart.

Here are the opinions I’ve developed after my research:

Magento

+ stable even with 1,000+ products

+ many features

+ beautiful back-end

- resource hog

- extremely expensive, and pricing structure doesn’t make sense

- hard to develop for

Prestashop

+ huge community

+ light-weight

+ easy to design for

- ugly back-end

- most modules cost money

Shopify

+ very easy to manage because it’s a hosted solution

+ beautiful templates to choose from

- monthly and % fees

Drupal + Ubercart

+ powerful CMS

+ easy to extend

+ huge community

- module is flaky

- functionalities lacks attention to detail

- ugly back-end

Joomla + Virtuemart

+ tested and true, many stores use this setup

- built on very old programming

CS-Cart

+ medium-sized community

+ popularity is up-trending

+ beautiful back-end

+ cheap one-time payment

+ solid and growing roadmap (that they actually follow)

+ has common ecommerce functionalities in the core

- hard to create unique design

- built-in CMS lacks customization

- many developers have not worked with the cart before

A notable mention is Lemonstand. It’s a beautiful cart, inside and out but is too new for a serious business. This is a cart that I will definitely keep an eye out for.

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October 4, 2011
Business, Internet, Social
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WebeTalk: A chat room for web entrepreneurs

There has to be an IRC channel for entrepreneurs, I thought. Many months ago, I had searched all around the web for one but to my surprise I couldn’t find any.

But last month, I came across someone mentioning WebeTalk on an online community which I’ve already forgotten the name of.

WebeTalk homepage

It’s a simple but elegantly designed website with a web-based IRC client in the middle with the banner text,

“We are a group of web entrepreneurs who like to talk with each other about new ideas, internet topics, and various other things. Come join us today!”

It’s mostly quiet when I’m logged in, but I also happen to be on the other side of the world, assuming that most of the chat members are from North America. But having just logged in at 1:20PM (UTC/GMT +8 hours) there seems to be some short bursts of activity.

Not sure if you want to join this small WebeTalk community? You can find interesting stats on the channel here: http://webetalk.com/stats.php like my favorite, Longest Monologue.

See you there!

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September 26, 2011
Business, Finance
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A quote on price and value

“There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.” John Ruskin

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September 16, 2011
Business
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I intentionally clicked on an ad today

Time has stopped. Hell has frozen over. And the world is coming to an end soon.

I intentionally clicked on a banner ad today.

It all started when I was doing some background research for a top internet retailer. Before I knew it, I ended up on a useful site that lists the top 500 internet retailers.

There I was drooling over the list when I scrolled to the bottom to see this:

Was the landing page for the ad helpful? It sure was. It’s a service that directly relates to me – after all I had clicked on it. Whether to use it or not is a different question, however.

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April 25, 2010
Business, Internet
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Focus on your core business by using websites like Shorttask and Fiverr

There are tasks that you should dedicate time on and there are tasks that are just blatant chores. With online services like Shorttask or Fiverr, you can find people that will get rid of these headaches for you.  The services are cheap too, under $5 for all the offerings I’ve seen.

What kind of helpful services for your business are there? Here are a few:

From Fiverr

- I will make a colorful contact form for your landing page for $5

- I will create a custom logo for your business or website for $5

- I will write a short review of your site and bookmark your site link once on twitter,digg,reddit,stumbleupon, propeller and yahoo buzz for $5

- I will write you a new slogan for your business/product for $5

- I will become a fan and suggest your page to my over 10,000 friends for $5

Right now, I would recommend using Fiverr over Shorttask, seeing there are more people offering services. Although, I guess it doesn’t really matter since you can make postings to request specific services on both sites. Fiverr looks more user-friendly though!

Peter Kao

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January 23, 2010
Business
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Permanent Innovation Seminar by Langdon Morris

I attended a seminar by Langdon Morris in Taiwan this September. Langdon Morris’ work involves developing “innovation, strategy, and collaboration methodologies to solve problems with very high levels of creativity and innovation.” He is also an author of several books, the recent one being “Permanent Innovation.”

The presentation talks about creating a work culture of permanent innovation, which is a bit of an oxymoron if you ask me, since the word ‘innovation’ is regularly used within the context of change. But Morris argues that it is, in fact, possible to have continuous innovation within any company. It just takes a lot of work and requires a few elements to exist first. The details though, Morris points to his book.

Nonetheless, here are a few notes I had written during the seminar:

1) Innovation is a company’s only sustainable competitive advantage.

1a) Failure is very costly and it doesn’t always produce results that translate into profit for companies

2) Starbucks is a good example of a brand that can sustain selling high-cost products because they provide something extra to your drinks: A unique cafe experience, and the guarantee that your drink will be perfect the way you want it.

3) There must exist three roles for developing an innovative culture:

- creative genius (sees what others do not see)

- innovation leader (sees the future and engages society in the quest to achieve this)

- innovation champion (holds everyone up, makes everyone successful, can break existing rules)

4) Three types of innovation:

- business model innovation (change the way profit is made)

- incremental innovation (change the product/service)

- internal innovation (organizational reform)

All in all, it was an alright seminar – definitely not the better ones I’ve attended. One major reason was the attitude of the speaker, Langdon Morris. He must have been irritated before coming to his presentation since he was pretty rude to the volunteers of the event, and questioned the reaction of the audience at certain times. I understand that the event could have gone more smoothly, but there is no need to talk to people (the same people helping your event!) the way he did. And whenever you are doing a presentation, never ever question the intelligence of your audience!

It may have been that he’s not accustomed to Taiwan’s culture, but irregardless his attitude affected my perception of his character. Just because you are in a foreign country doesn’t mean you can be rude to others.

Ultimately, I came out of the seminar knowing more about his character than his speech.

Peter Kao

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November 19, 2009
Business, Internet
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Twitter for Entrepreneurs

Here’s another website that uses the Twitter model: it’s called Sprouter - just launched this week!

Check out their video tour.


I don’t use Twitter anymore, but I’m enjoying this neat little startup though. With Twitter, there is too much noise from too broad of  a network. All I see when I log in to my Twitter account are short, barely-descriptive statuses written by bored people. Too often I see the extended version of these statuses on Facebook, so why even bother logging in at all? (More beef on Twitter later in my upcoming blog post)

I think Sprouter (and also Yammer) did exactly what Twitter needed to do, but didn’t: divide and conquer. There is a need for micro-blogging, but it is important for users to sift through the sea of statuses. Twitter could have done that by implementing filters to segment different interest groups, but they decided to invest in the unfamiliar realm of real-time search instead. This is great, but it requires active involvement – the act of ‘searching’ – too bad people are lazy online!

In the near future, there will be more and more startups applying the micro-blogging concept (or Twitter model). And Twitter will be a dead bird – a martyr for micro-blogging – the Youtube comments of the internet.

You can follow me on Sprouter here: http://www.sprouter.com/peterkao

Peter Kao

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November 12, 2009
Business, Ideas/Notes, Internet
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Halfbakery.com – A Place for Wild Business Ideas

There are great business ideas, and then there are half-baked ideas. This is where halfbakery.com comes into play. It’s a website that is solely dedicated to ridiculous, improbable, and naturally – hilarious business ideas.

To give you a sense of what the website is like (because, you know, visiting a link yourself is hard) take a look at this invention, entitled, “evil laugh activated hand dryer.” It works as follows: “instead of a button or infrared sensor, people sometimes rub their hands together in the airstream, activate this hand dryer by laughing evilly.” Look! There are even pretty pictures,

Basic model

Activate!

Now, this is my kind of humour!

To give the website some credit though, there are some serious ideas. For example, the “Panic PIN“ idea, which is ranked as the top idea on the website, works by “entering [an] alternate ATM PIN number [to summon] help.” The idea is that if you are forced to withdraw cash, you can alert the police without the robber knowing.

There are great business ideas, and then there are half-baked ideas. This is where halfbakery comes into play. It’s a website that’s solely dedicated to ridiculous, improbable,…[add more], and naturally, hilarious business ideas.
Now this is my kind of humour!

Look around, you might even find a solid business idea to stea- err, I mean, examine.

Peter Kao

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August 20, 2009
Business
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2009 Canadian Telecom Summit .iso File for Download

I received a nice little package from (surprisingly) the Canadian Telecom Summit I attended a few months ago. The package was in my mail after about 1 month the conference ended, which is pretty good considering the have hundreds of these DVD’s and packages to send out (for free!).

I’ve created an .iso file for those interested, but was unable to attend the conference. There shouldn’t be an issue with duplicating the DVD for sharing, since I don’t see any notices saying not to.

Anyways, here it is: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ENCQRQBO

- Peter Kao

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About me

Follow me around the world. I'm an entrepreneur who runs an online business while travelling the world. I write about my travels, thoughts and anything else I want to say. You can read more about me here.

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