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:

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

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

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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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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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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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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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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