Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

I've been watching closely for that BOC on Woot for the past 2 days. Now, the woot-off is done, and all I have to show for it is an airplane (that'll be fun with my boys) and a monkey. Yes, I got a monkey. No, you can't have it. But I still haven't been able to buy a BOC, and having a woot-off without a BOC didn't feel as fulfilling. Sure, it was still fun seeing all sorts of junk flying by on my screen, but c'mon, where's the BOC? What's up with that, woot? :(

Now that we're going to put our current back-end into a new site, it turned out to be the perfect time to buy another mini. We'll have two v2 minis running for ToolBarn and a v1 mini on the new site. That'll make load balancing much less of a headache. Also interesting is that they no longer include the print books with the machine, instead giving a CD with the instructions. Seems much smarter to me. Oh, and they now have a 30 day trial. Excellent. I look forward to experimenting with the price range search on the v2, so overall this should be a great upgrade. I'm pretty happy with the $2k we spent this week.

Those of you who enjoy a good joke, remember that there may be repercussions from your actions. Not only in terms of reputation, but also in terms of links / SERPs / business. Take, for example, a couple days ago. We didn't do anything special for ToolBarn. A couple of our competitors did "Funny" things. We saw one of our best Sunday sales totals ever. For that, I've got to thank them. But sometimes the joke bites back at you for days afterwards. For example, today's #1 result for "seo blog" on google. Yes, Mr. Cutts did a nice "Hacked" theme for the day, and two days later we're seeing the Hacked SERPs. You'd think he would have known enough to cloak that so his SERP description didn't lessen his credibility. All in all, not the best planning I've seen.

I've discovered something this week that I'm working on fixing. What I discovered is this: real-time lookups aren't a good thing. For years now, we've done real-time lookups whenever someone adds a product to their cart and enters a zip code. This allows us to not worry about rate changes and focus on the products. But what it's also meant is we're leaving money on the table. A quick test over the past few days has shown that nearly 10% of the time, UPS's servers aren't returning data. That doesn't seem good to me. There are days where our customer service reps complain about shipping rates taking a long time to load. Those are the times I knew about. But the 10% figure is even without taking the "Nothing returned" into account - this is just "Something useless returned". So, as a fix, I've queried enough to get all the rates now, and I'm rewriting our shipping calculations to run entirely without querying their servers. W...

Todd has convinced me to start a new domain, so the contents of this post have been relocated on my new blog. How important is one-box?

We've never really wanted to offer free shipping. After all, it something we get charged for every single order we send out. So we're running a test. Let's see what our conversion rates do. It's not actually free, but it is one penny. Close enough for me. Over the holidays, we had some manufacturers pony up and pay for shipping on a lot of the orders. Our conversion rates really went up. But this will mark the first time that any order over $99 (and under 75 lbs) will ship for 1¢ on ToolBarn. I've got my eye on it, and when I learn something, I'll report back here. But for now, it'd be a great time to buy something from ToolBarn .

I got interviewed alongside Allan Dick at SES in Chicago last week by WebProNews.com, and they posted the video on their site. Go ahead and give it a watch. I'm sure I said something stupid somewhere, but I think it shows my long-term strategy a bit.

It appears that just like everyone was speculating who was more reputable than the news, Monday wasn't the biggest day for online sales. In fact, today has been MUCH stronger than Monday was. In fact, today was over 40% better by sales numbers, although it was fewer orders. This sort of mirrors last year... with us showing a 40% increase just as December started. This could be the sign of good things to come for sure. Higher and higher... until eventually the top will blow right off the building. Ok, maybe not. But it is nice wondering how we're going to get all of the orders out the door and not wondering if we're going to have anything to do tomorrow like some site owners I've talked to. If I could just take everything I know about building an online business, put it in a bottle, and then sell it... why... that'd be worth at least 35 cents plus tax. If I'm still attached to those thoughts, then what am I doing in a bottle? Let me out and I could help out a lot...

For years now, I've been holding out on a P3P implementation. My reasons were a few. P3P participation was voluntary. P3P xml files have a lot of options, and I didn't want to muck them up. I didn't really see any negatives for not participating. Well, in researching the checkout issues we've been having, it seems I may have stumbled on what's happening. It appears that some anti-phishing filters were getting tripped because we're collecting personal information without P3P disclosure of what we're doing with it. Grr... this could be a real pain in the... Hey! Turns out, there are several simple tools for creating a P3P Privacy Policy now. I tried the tool from IBM, and it wasn't too good. It seemed tougher than just making an XML file, since you had to know what all the options meant. I think you may as well just look up the spec and write one if you're going to use their tool. I looked at a few others, but they didn't take AmEx (the only busine...

We got done with inventory today. It looks like we located items we had written off when they weren't in the right spot... and we even found more than had grown legs for once. So now that we know where everything is and how many we have, I think we're ready to ship it out by the truckload for the holidays. Ah yes... 4th quarter, when warehouses and wallets shall both run empty. It seems those are connected this time of year.

Physical inventory. Two words I dread more than, well, anything. Ok, so "We need to talk" would scare me more. But in this virtual age, why can't I count all the bits and bytes while the people who deal with physical goods deal with the physical inventory? That'd be fair, right? Look, I can do it now. df -v Ok, so that's a bit of Linux humor, and not all that good either. But physical inventory with orders literally flying in the door is going to be interesting to say the least. But I guess it's better to have too many orders than not enough. I better get started counting. 1, 2, 3, 4...

I've heard this question a few times. The answer is both simple and complex. So let's take a look at what you can do for an eCommerce site using RSS. BLOG feeds Ok, so this answer is probably too simple. But the important thing here is that you've got a blog talking about all the neat things you learn about your own products as you add them to your site, get feedback from customers or (better yet) use them yourself . Nothing beats personal experience, and if you can relate that to your customer well, you gain credibility. Plus, a well done blog gathers subscribers over time and those are "trusted" feeds, so you don't have to worry about SPAM filters when delivering your message to potential customers. New products Yes, a new products page is very important to have on your site. I've seen people question their usefulness, but to me there is no better way to get bots to index new product quicker. We maintain our new products page (in an automated fashion, of...

We've been having some trouble with the checkout process on our sites over the past month. First, we have been preparing a third party integration on ToolBarn (not even Offermatica, as that's been installed and running for a while now without problems) that caused SSL warnings in checkout. This lasted most of a business week, causing sales during that week to seem slightly "soft" (our term for below average.) Secondly, Shoemoney had a $50 coupon for AdCenter (Microsoft's advertising platform for those not familiar with PPC). Well, I got it all up and running, and we immediately started having people calling in saying they were having problems with checkout. The oddball part here - they all have MSN as an ISP, most using MSN Explorer for a browser. So I'm left trying to figure out why. I mean, IE and FireFox are both used in our call center, and we've got the occasional Opera user testing it. I have a Mac to test things on as well. I also use Linux, so yet ...

We had a record Monday yesterday, and October has proven to be an overall record month online for us. Both of our sites had individual records, leaving no choice but to have a combined record month. But the month wasn't without problems. In fact, both sites have been suffering from some serious problems, which leaves a record month as even more amazing to me. I'll describe some of those in my next post... but this one is all about the celebration! Let's get this party started!

We are just getting a corousel system implemented in our warehouse. After years of running around the building to fill our parts orders, it's become too cumbersome finding things. This means that we're now going to allow the parts to come to us. With a platform that raises and lowers, we'll have people waiting at the end of 70' long carousels for the parts to come to them, then light up a bin number and a quantity next to the shelf that is supposed to have parts pulled from it. That's all fine and dandy, but what's the best about this is that it becomes tougher for people to make pulling errors, so we'll not only be able to ship out more orders per day, but also have fewer errors and store more inventory. Considering that we've got well over 100% more sales than just 12 months ago, this will be important as we move forward. After getting top rankings for many of the most obvious key phrases for our site, there are still so many combinations available tha...