Dave Jenkins

Everything, Everywhere, Everyone.

Apr 172012

Will E Coyote: definitely a maker.

Everything is Everything. What is meant to be will be.

Lauren was probably speaking more towards her personal journey of acceptance and growth, but the phrase often comes to mind when I see ecommerce websites expand their categories and SKU counts. It started, of course, when Amazon realized moved beyond books and into DVDs, CDs, and other bits of consumable media. That all fits– media is media. The stroke of genius came when Amazon realized they had a pretty kick-ass marketing engine and millions of personal preference profiles: why not sell patio gear, clothes, groceries, and weapons? If Chuck Jones were re-doing Road Runner, he’d print Amazon on the side of all the gear.

Zappos learned the lesson the best: find a starting sector that appeals to _all_ customers, and then vector into additional sectors wherever purchasing capital, product feeds, and conversion rates allow. Amazon chose books, Zappos went with shoes. They both sell everything everywhere to everyone now. Welcome to Costco, I love you. I noticed this most directly when I worked at Shoes.com: we saw our competitors like Shoebuy.com expand first into belts, bags, and other accessories, but soon enough they had watches, cute clothes, and anything else they could get their hands on. We chose not to expand categories, because we thought it would water down the brand– the name “shoes.com” is kinda hard to wiggle away from (NOTE TO SELF: next time, pick a domain that’s easy to spell and generic enough to sell anything).

Where is ecommerce headed? Will every online store become an online marketplace, selling everything and anything? The technology for that is certainly in place: companies like Channel Advisor, Ixtens, and Marketfleet have product feeds canned and ready to throw onto your site. It simultaneously empowers the online merchandising managers with a plethora of products and diminishes them by subtracting any need to be choosy: just throw them all on there, see which ones convert well, and have the robots promote hose to the homepage (I’ll be in my office drinking a mai-tai).

Nothing new here, really– all retail operations are tempted to expand categories in order to maximise the return on all that advertising in getting people thru the door or to click on the website. The trick is to figure out which categories are wasteful and which ones are edifying. Walmart’s answer was the Big Box, don’t worry about picking winners and losers, just get a bigger building (the end of gasoline-fueled suburbia may put an end to this method). Department stores answered the problem by abrogating the category-choosing to the subleasing brands: everyone can buy floorspace in Macy’s, if you can afford the rent. Online, there were no restrictions on real estate footprint, and brands are more than willing to pay for placement in the nice slots on the homepage. It’s all about customer flow: online retailers that can manage the flow to the “right” categories will make all the money. This is what powers the whole ecosystem around personalization software like Certona, Monetate, and Adobe.

These “omnitailers” are trying to sell everything to everyone. If they’ve got a unique payment method (ebay, costco, or taobao), or if they’ve got enough money (Amazon or Walmart or Target), they can hinge their model on embracing the ubiquity. For the rest of us, however, we must build some sort of brand. The brand must be something to make the customer choose to buy that Webber Grill from us, instead of the 14 other places he can find it.

There’s another path here, I think: a whole class of websites have cropped up to go the exact opposite direction: the exclusive, the selected, the hand-made. We all know Etsy, but there are many more like her. I don’t mean the exclusive member-only daily-deal sites: those sites are just exploiting an artificial snobbery to invoke an illusion of luxury (all luxury is an illusion, but that’s another day’s topic). I don’t want to try to sell everything to everyone everywhere– besides the sheer joy of volume, where’s the fun in that? I want to sell stuff that’s cool to as many other cool people as I can. The Makers are onto something. We’re seeing new product launches done exclusively via Kickstarter projects. Wanna be cool? Build your own tube amplifier using a cigar box for the case and some arduino controls. These people actually relish the intent-slow process of manufacturing (latin for “create by hand”), and the realization of something unique. Big margins if you can do it right, but not a lot of money overall to pay the staff. There’s incredible branding in this scene, but not a lot of volume (by intent).

Which path will your website follow? The Omnitailer, or the Slow Maker? Is there a way to blend them?

On the Internet, Every Day is April Fools

Social Media No Responses »

Apr 012012

I’m not a licensed comedian, so I may be off-base on this but, I think the essential ingredient in any bit is the unexpected twist. The Stooges level of violence, Road Runner’s defiance of the laws of physics, Graham Chapman trying to use a banana as a lethal weapon, Beavis’ unexpected wit when hopped up on sugar, and The Onion: they take the ordinary, tilt everything 5-92 degrees one way or the other, and present it with a straight face. It’s the same reason you cannot tickle yourself: you know where your hands are going to be, so there’s no surprise, no betrayal of expecation, no twist = no laughing. The glimmers of real comic genius were actually when we could see the joke coming, but the rhythm had become unexpected (e.g. Lou Costello anticipating “I Don’t Know’ is on 3rd, but having no clue on how he got there).

April Fool’s Day used to be the day one could get away with the absurd in the office: tilt the boss’s desk with small stones under two legs, put sand in the sugar dispenser, stretch saran wrap across the toilet seat (one I’ve yet to try, but have a mortal fear of falling victim– something I probably shouldn’t publish here on a public blog).

Used to be. The Internet killed April Fool’s Day.

Now, thanks to the Internet dissolving any formality around advertising, news content, or coherent plot-driven storytelling, we can no longer distinguish any clear line of demarcation between The Goof and The True. Fark.com, Cracked, BoingBoing, LaughingSquid, FunnyOrDie, and any other of the army of ‘absurdist news’ items out there are just as legitimate as NBC, CBS, and certainly carry more weight than foxnews.com. Come April 1st, everyone simply goes bonkers, and nothing is trustable. The problem is: we’re expecting it, and thus we gain no comedy value out of it. Conan bought Mashable? Of course I don’t believe it, but all I can do is wonder which media partner sold out to which? Did Mashable buy Conan with a pile of Cash, or did Conan come over in order to promote his show? No actual comedy traded hands– they just shared needles. Any “respectable” news outlet (like the Washington Post) that used to be able to fool my grandfather sitting in his study with the actual print version is now just another random click from news.google.com alongside the goofy cat photos and fake UFO landings.

Meh. Thanks to the Internets, every day is April Fool’s.

Finding Style, Finding Happiness, and Finding Yourself via Pinterest

ecommerce, Social Media No Responses »

Mar 212012

Golden Gate Buddha, from DieselDemon's Flickr (found via an article on Venturebeat.com discussing social media, oddly enough)

George Carlin used to have a bit about how people spent their whole lives accumulating a big pile of stuff. Our houses were really just all our stuff with a wooden covering to keep the rain out. Our stuff defined our lives. Our lives were just a big pile of stuff. Well, congratulations– we can now become much better people with Pinterest.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Pinterest is a big public cork board where everyone can pin up and categorize their dream items. Do you see a cat-themed sausage maker that would be purrfect (and ironicaliciously hip at the same time) for your dream kitchen? Pin it. See an ab-crunching device that doubles as a cocktail mixer? Pin it. See the girl in the bikini that has the body you’ll get when you use the ab-crunching martini-o-matic? Pin her. See that mansion overlooking the ocean on a clifftop with palm trees and tigers? Yeah, pin that too. After all, you’ve got such immaculate taste, it’s only a matter of time before that mansion is yours right? Good thing you’ve got the kitchen appliances all sorted out, and you’ll have a washboard stomach while you lounge by the pool.

I’m not bitter, I promise. I actually make my bones selling stuff, just like everyone else. The part that I don’t quite get is how people can be so unabashedly publicly shameless with their avarice for other people’s stuff or stuff they don’t possess yet. But then again, if I question this too much, maybe I’ll have to turn in my Marketing License. Shopping, or the seductive foreplay of window shopping, is inherently enjoyable on some level. We all do it. Pinterest has figured out the right balance of stuff-pr0n with images and text (96% images, 4% wordy words), categorization to appeal to our self-esteem that we are good organizers, and the illusion that we’re not bragging (our friends follow us, we don’t go around shouting this stuff on Facebook, for dog’s sake).

Speaking of which, from a “social commerce” point of view, Pinterest may have Facebook by the short and curlies: Facebook is busy having to babysit 800 million insecure extroverts with their daily aphorisms, child-bragging, kitteh lulz, and political diatribes shimming for Ron Paul. Who’s got time to shop on Facebook? I’ve got some pithy retorts to these Ron Paul kitteh look-a-likes, dangit.. No wonder everyone’s drawing down their Facebook commerce sites. Pinterest, on the other hand, doesn’t care one whit about my emotional state, my edumacation, my friends, my social status. They only care about my self-perceived pile of stuff: real or aspirational. It’s a much easier and direct line to draw from that pile of stuff, throw in some affiliate links, sponsored photos, or whatever, and every retailer on the planet can make a little coinage on Pinterest. After all, everyone that pinned my products has already told me they like them. I just need to close the deal with a promo code and a check-out button. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy.

Take a look at your pins. Is that really you? If so, congratualtions, you’ve mapped out your path to sattori.

Statistics, Mistakes, and The Marquis at Barton Creek

ecommerce, Network, United States 2 Responses »

Feb 262012

Drove to Austin. First things first: find an apartment. (okay, the real first thing was to eat some Tex-Mex, but anyway…) We found what seemed to be a great place, the Marquis at Barton Creek (minus 10 points for a bit overly pretentious name). Nice apartment, close to work, garage attached, decent rate. We applied. We were denied. Their application website said that we had criminal backgrounds.

What?

I asked for details from the poor sap behind the reception desk. He had an honest face, but he had no idea. I began to get a bit frustrated. Flustered, he gave up his bosses email address, and the name of the company they use to screen applicants. I called that company, and spoke with an equally honest an equally clueless tech. She stated that their application, for privacy reasons, doesn’t use the SSN for applicants (even though we entered it into the website, along with our drivers license numbers, birthdays, and other sundry bits of private data). The screening process only uses NAME and BIRTHDAY. Awesome.

Statistically, the NAME “Jenkins” is the 95th most popular name in the United States. According to the US Census, there are 213,737 people in the country with this name. The name “David” is the 15th most popular name, with 1 in 145 people, or just over 2 million in the US. You can prove this yourself, I bet you’ve got at least 4 “Dave”s or “David”s in your Facebook (and tell the truth, the “Dave”s are more relaxed than the “David”s, right?). Wolfram Alpha won’t tell me how many “David Jenkins” there are, but just guessing from the 1 in 145 applied to the 213,737 gives us 1474. Culturally, David is popular with the Welsh, so I’m betting it’s a little higher than that. Let’s figure there are at least 2000 “David Jenkins” in the United States (I personally know of 4 others, including my cousin).

Now for the BIRTHDAY. According to the Birthday problem, chances are that if you’ve got more than 23 people in the room, two of them have the same birthday. With 2000 of us, I would guess that there are at least 20 Dave Jenkins who share my birthday. Can you see where this is headed? I’m pretty sure that one of my brothers out there has boosted a car, knocked over a gas station, or perhaps even done something far far worse.

The Marquis at Barton Creek, with their half-baked screening process, is relying on incredibly poor statistics, and a flawed model. Legally, IMHO, they’re on sketchy ground with this. Luckily for us, we found another (better) place to live, which used a proper screening process with SSN, confirmed that we don’t have criminal backgrounds, and granted us a lease.

LESSON: beware the poorly made screening application. Before entering data into something large/important (like a mortgage, rental contract, or auto purchase), confirm what _exactly_ they’re going to do with your data, and how the pieces fit together.

The Stars at Night Are Big and Bright

ecommerce, United States 5 Responses »

Jan 042012

Deep in the Heart of Texas!

Yumiko and I are moving to Austin Texas this month. I’ve accepted a job with a dotcom there. I want to send out all our love and appreciation to everyone we’ve met while here in The Lou. For what it’s worth, I’ll be one closer to the Alamo.

We’ve got some things that we’re not going to take with us. Some bookshelves, a glass computer desk, some books. Please let us know if you’d like them.

and another:

Siri is Not a Threat to Google

mobile No Responses »

Dec 022011

Good luck with the epistomological questions, Siri-chan. source: siricrazy.com

The second thing pundits exclaimed about Siri, the voice-controlled search bot on iPhone 4s, was that it poses a real threat to Google’s business model, and puts Apple as the company that could possibly unseat the Emperor. (the first thing everyone said was “Squee! New Apple thingy!”)

Pish-posh. Apple’s Siri is no more threat to Google as the iPhone itself, a Kinect, or a new keyboard. Siri is an input device, that’s it. Yes, it’s “smarter” than just a keyboard, and possibly more nuanced than a Kinect, but it’s still an interface point. “Ah!” they say, “Siri doesn’t pull from Google results, only Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and Yelp“, and therein lies the perceived threat to Google. This is premature, and backwards. Those sources for Siri are all curated (I don’t like how that word is starting to get overused, but it’s accurate here) query results. Wikipedia, WA, and Yelp have all been personally tuned in to the “correct” result by some crowd or learned scholars or something. Google is just spitting up whatever it’s robots think is a best fit. Siri, as a product of Apple’s obsessive devotion to quality, would only want to touch curated sources. Fair enough.

That misses the point, however. There’s nothing stopping Google from introducing some sort of curation process. They certainly have the data to start something– they just need the editors to straighten things out for them. I would submit that Google hasn’t been successful in this crowdsourcing recruitment because either: (a) they haven’t felt the need because their robots were smart enough, or (b) crowds wouldn’t feel to jazzed up about helping a company with a stock price of over $600/share. For point (a) Siri now shows them that there may be a need to introduce humans alongside the robots. For point (b) Google could easily part with some of all that GoogleAd money to an army of curators through some sort of affiliate micropayment scheme. Think DMOZ, but now actually getting paid for all those slavish hours you devoted to sorting out Land of the Lost episodes.

As those data improves those results, why wouldn’t Siri start including Google in her decision-making? Siri is not a threat to Google– she’s just a bit of a reminder they need a new suit and tie while she patiently waits for them. Eventually, Siri will need Google just as much as the rest of us.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I own, like, 50 shares of GOOG, or something, so I’m rolling in money.

Alibaba May be Yahoo’s Best Hope

China, ecommerce, Good or Bad, United States No Responses »

Oct 232011

Yahoo, you know I love you...

Yahoo! is in play, again. Microsoft has been rumored to renew it’s offer, Google may be lurking around, and Alibaba, the China ecommerce marketplace / payment method / sourcing B2B giant, has also been very public about it’s wanting to buy Yahoo!. In my opinion, Alibaba may offer the best path forward for Yahoo. My take on the reasons why:

Microsoft – Meh. Microsoft has been desperate to get something to counteract Google’s rise. As the world moves ever closer to full-cloud operations, the desktop apps become more and more irrelevant. Yes, people will be using Outlook and MSWord for years to come, but that’s just inertia, it’s not growth. Bing was a good shot, but it’s still getting 3rd place behind Google and Yahoo for keyword buys from companies. If MS could acquire Yahoo, they would increase their share of keyword revenue, and might get enough core revenue to start making something. However, this doesn’t really do anything for Yahoo– it just gets them bought out and assimilated into Redmond. Meh.

Google – Nope. I doubt the Federales would allow this one: Google already controls possibly 80% of the online advertising revenue out there– if they bought Yahoo, that share could surge up to 90%. Monopoly (funny how companies are getting to that status faster and faster…). Here again, Yahoo would just become a brand within Google, and probably quietly left to ebb away into nothing as users were migrated over to GMail, G+, and Google Apps.

Alibaba – Interesting. Yahoo already owns 46% of Alibaba. There’s a certain I Ching symmetry/irony that could come if Alibaba were to buy out their own “father”. If Alibaba were to get Yahoo, it would give them a solid beachhead to take all their platforms developed in China to bring to international markets: Tmall, Taobao, Alipay, and Alibaba B2B would gain a US-based staff and org in one fell swoop. But the important piece that Jerry Yang should consider, IMHO, is how Yahoo! might survive and grow into something sustainable: Yahoo! would likely disappear inside Microsoft or Google, but it stands a good chance of staying on– and perhaps thriving– as a branded portal inside the Alibaba group: as a company, Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba) tends to segment out new markets, pour money in as needed, and then interconnect companies as much as possible. Yahoo! enjoys strong portal loyalty with its users. It’s a decent news aggregator for people, it’s got a kick-ass web mail client (Zimbra). With all of these, Alibaba could suddenly gain a portal face for it’s considerable marketplace engine in Tmall and Taobao, as well as an ability to link Alipay’s payment services for micropayment content delivery as ipads and tablets push more and more rich content behind paid firewalls.

TMall Tries For An Expensive Velvet Rope

China, ecommerce No Responses »

Oct 172011

TMall, the online marketplace for “officially” licensed goods for sale in China, recently announced a severe (5x-10x!) jump in registration fees for businesses. Spots in the mall used to cost a small business owner about $1000 per year. Now, that could jump to over $5000 – $9000 (RMB30,000 – RMB60,000). The backlash has been harsh: small business owners spent all last weekend ordering stuff from the bigger vendors, making up fake addresses, jamming up online chat channels, or even having orders delivered to their house just to refuse payment (a quirk of China ecommerce: payment isn’t finalized until the customer takes physical possession on her doorstep). Taobao, TMall’s owners, are furious, their clients are furious, and now the Ministry of Commerce has intervened to tell both sides to calm down.

What are the takeaways here? Let’s riff for a second:

TMall’s move is obvious, and probably overdue. They have a reputation of very arms-length client management, probably because they have so many clients and it’s essentially a self-service model. If anything, the yearly fees for being on the site might have been too low. Chalk it up to artificially lowering prices in order to gain early mover position and long-term marketshare. TMall has an estimated 1/3rd of all ecommerce, if not higher.
The backlash from the vendors was to be expected: what was TMall thinking by jumping for at least a 5x in price? There are a lot of small businesses that really shouldn’t be on TMall in terms of sheer profit/loss. Good online marketing talent is tough to find in China, and a lot of these small businesses would probably have left over the next year or so anyway– more so if TMall had ratcheted up prices like any other service offering in a rational market.
TMall was intended from the start to be a step or two up from the counterfeit wonderland that is Taobao.com: where anyone can simply open up an online store with little or no requirements or proof of legitimate access to goods (think Yahoo stores but in a land where all the stuff is made in factories down the street and the grey market is chugging along at a nice clip). All the competing marketplaces are aiming higher and higher in the luxury chain. Online shoppers like the bling.
The government of China, which has welcomed ecommerce with open arms, doesn’t seem to want to get too dirty on this one. Their statements have been admonishments to both sides: TMall must respect the small business owner; people should voice their concerns through legal channels. Taken at face value, that’s a victory for TMall, as these people sending false orders and jamming websites are (technically) committing fraud. I don’t think anyone will go to jail over this, but both sides have been handed a yellow card.

We’ll see what plays out over the next few weeks on this one. Stay tuned

UPDATE: Tmall has announced a 9 month grace period in the new fees, along with US$282M investments to help small biz. It seems the threat of government intervention worked…

Older Entries

Everything, Everywhere, Everyone.

Statistics, Mistakes, and The Marquis at Barton Creek

The Stars at Night Are Big and Bright

Siri is Not a Threat to Google

Alibaba May be Yahoo’s Best Hope

TMall Tries For An Expensive Velvet Rope

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