The year saw a few big acquisitions of online properties with the latest being Amazon buying Woot.com. Woot is a deal based website that focuses on discontinued, past season, refurbished, or slow moving items that manufacturers/distributors are looking to get off their books.
I was first exposed to Woot when somebody either sent me a link or posted a link to a Samsung washer which was 40% off retail. The catch 22 with that was the fact that those washers had a program issue but it never left the factory floor before it was reprogrammed and corrected. Same thing like the Camry recall where they reprogram the brain of the unit. Only difference with the washer are, those units are brand new and good luck trying to get the washer 100mph down Route 66.
Woot should not see any changes in the staff or operations per their blog posting. Nothing was announced when it came to the value that Amazon paid for Woot.
Recently Buy.com got acquired by Rakuten of Japan, parent company of Linkshare USA. Prior to that, Amazon acquired Zappos.com.
My guess on some big company to be acquired – NewEgg.com
Today Microsoft announced that they are officially going to cease operating the Bing Cashback program on July 30, 2010. The Bing Cashback program was setup as a loyalty program that offered consumers a percentage of their purchase at selected partner online store in terms of a cash back. The primary goal of that program was to support the Bing Search engine by cultivating loyalty through cash back and the partner online stores will have their Bing Cashback appear above the sponsored ads on Bing. At that time, Microsoft could have turned that application into an affiliate marketing network or become a super affiliate, but I have no idea why the executives did not have that foresight.
The birth of this program started with the acquisition of JellyFish in 2007, and that morphed into Bing Cashback when it launched in May 2008. When the program launched in 2008, they signed up 700 online stores or so from Sears, Overstock to eBay. Within the last two years, they signed on another 300+ online stores to have 1000+ online stores.
Bing Cashback was never thought out before implementation from strategy to execution. Although they announce the death of Bing Cashback, I would spin this around and turn the program and platform into something else which would see a positive cash flow in 6 months. They just need to think beyond using that to support the Bing Search.
6pm.com, a sister company of Zappos.com took a big hit last Friday; at the same time they made a statement stating that they will honor all orders. An employee’s error in the pricing engine overwrote nearly all of its products to $49.95 on Friday for six hours, from midnight to 6 a.m.
It took the 6pm team several hours to notice the mistake. From 12am to 6am on May 21st all sales were capped at below $50 and the site managed to rack up $1.6 million in lost revenue because of it. Most companies would basically void all the orders and refer the customers to the T&C of the website which contained some verbiage about price mistakes.
Aaron Magness, director of brand marketing and business development mentioned that
While we’re sure this was a great deal for customers, it was inadvertent, and we took a big loss (over $1.6 million – ouch) selling so many items so far under cost. However, it was our mistake. We will be honoring all purchases that took place on 6pm.com during our mess up. We apologize to anyone that was confused and/or frustrated during out little hiccup and thank you all for being such great customers. We hope you continue to Shop. Save. Smile. at 6pm.com.
Among the items available at a steep discount was the Humminbird 1155C Chart Plotter NVB GPS system the site typically sells for $1857.85.
This is above and beyond what you call “Customer Comes First”.
I wondered what happened to the employee that caused this error? If I was in his/her shoes, I would basically apologize profusely and hand in my resignation letter. This is not $16 or $160 where you can repay your company.
Zappos was sold to Amazon for $928 Million in July 2009. I wonder if Amazon had a say in this as any price mistakes on Amazon will never be honored per their website usage policy.
I think this is going to be a big shakedown in the online realm with Rakuten Inc of Japan agreeing to purchase U.S. e-commerce site Buy.com Inc. The all-cash deal, valued at $250 million, will offer Rakuten its first major direct-to-consumer platform in the world’s largest e-commerce market. The move will give Rakuten a larger footprint in the U.S.
In 2005, the company made its first U.S. move via the purchase of LinkShare, but has largely focused on Asia. For instance, Rakuten and Baidu formed an e-commerce joint venture in China earlier this year.
Buy.com has yearly sales of about $500 million. The deal marks the second time Buy.com has been acquired all or in part by a Japanese company. In 1999, a group led by Softbank Corp. paid $165 million for a stake in Buy.com. Buy.com went public in 2000 and went private again in 2001.
Buy.com currently host its affiliate program on Commission Junction, and I think that in the very near future, they will migrate off Commission Junction to Linkshare, as Linkshare is part of the Rakuten web property.
With the economy bumping along, it seems like a good idea to sell some of the things you don’t need or want on eBay or craigslist but this turn out badly for a couple. A Washington state man listed a diamong ring on craigslist and that turned into a frightening evening that ended in murder.
Jim Sanders, 43, communicated with Amanda Knight who responded to the ad, saying she was looking for a Mothers Day gift. Amanda arrived with her friends; Sanders answered the door on April 28, three men and a woman stood on the doorstep. One of the strangers pulled a gun and the gang forced its way inside.
The night ended with Jim being killed and his wife plus two kids bounded. “These people were casing Craigslistings with this intent,” Ed Troyer of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department told ABC News. “Their intent was never to buy that ring. Their intent was to go there and commit a robbery.”
Here are some tips to reduce the risk of this happening: 1) Meet in a public place
The likelyhood of somebody pulling a gun at a mall to rob you for a $1000 ring is less likely than a secluded area like your house where there isn’t a lot of people around. 2) Bring some friends with you
Strength in numbers. If you have two or three other people to accompany you during the transaction, it would deter people from mugging you. 3) Pick up hints from the buyer
If he/she is suggesting to meet at a certain location that is known for its crime, or meeting at 1am at a gas station, those are red flags. Or even if they don’t even ask about the item and just want to pay for it.
North Carolina’s Department of Revenue had ordered the online retailer to provide full details on nearly 50 million purchases made by state residents between 2003 and 2010. NC is looking to collect taxes from NC residents that did not pay tax for that item that they purchased off Amazon.
Amazon.com filed a lawsuit stating that the lawsuit says the demand violates the privacy and First Amendment rights of Amazon’s customers. Amazon has no offices or warehouses in North Carolina, it’s not required to collect.
Last year, Amazon discontinued its affiliate program in North Carolina, which provides referrers with a small slice of the transaction, after the state legislature enacted a new law that would have used that program to force the company to collect sales taxes.
A North Carolina legislator said at the time that the state would be able to force online retailers to collect even retroactive taxes; tax officials have reportedly sent letters to online retailers in the last few months saying they’re required to pa
I suggested a custom Biz Card via Office Depot during one of the AS and I think a lot of affiliates went for it.
How about this? A custom shirt with your logo.
i.e. EricEwe’s Coupon shack Logo during ASE
Custom t-shirt for $2 + s/h ($6.99 total) – Use your own design/photo. Custom Shirts
A few restrictions:
- graphics only on one side
- only white shirts
- only one per person
Google took a bold step today and is in the process of moving out of China. In the controversial move about over censorship by the Chinese government, Google is currently redirecting all of the traffic from www.google.cn to the HK domain. Other than censorship, Google was hard hit by hackers which they believe that it came from China.
In Hong Kong, Google should technically enjoy less censorship as Hong Kong which is is a special administrative region of China and enjoys more freedom, including an uncensored Internet, than mainland China.
On that note, web users in China are still having their internet searches filtered at a higher level with the Golden Shield Project aka Great Firewall of China.
Unconfirmed reports are saying that Google will exit China by April 10, 2010. I am wondering about how is Google going to make up the est $600 million / year revenue that Google generated in China. Either way, this will absolutely help Baidu defending its marketshare.
With the recent development of Chinese nationals hacking Gmail – Google’s Free Email service, this lead the world’s largest search engine to rethink their strategy plus take swift action by enabling HTTPS for all Gmail users.
The hackers targeted Chinese human rights activists where these Gmail users believe that their Gmail accounts were compromised by the Chinese authorities. A law professor and human rights lawyer in Beijing, Dr. Biao stated that “At the end of last year, I received an email invitation to a human rights conference in Ireland. Two weeks later, our university officials came to me and said that the heads of the university had heard I planned to visit Ireland and that it was better not to go.” He elaborated “How did you know that? I have not told anyone” and was told: “Who do you think we are?”.
The hacking of GMail also put a strained on Google’s relationship with China as Google worked hard to tap into the Chinese market over 1.3 billion people and internet users of 384 million, according to Reuters on Jan 15, 2010. Revenue for Google in Q1 to Q3 for 2009 amounts to $16.9 billion and China’s est. revenue for 2009 is only $600 million, Google sees a huge growth potential in the country due to the sheer size of internet users and also the rise in disposable income for the Chinese middle class.
I do not think that the world’s 900 lbs search gorilla which is still trailing Baidu, China’s #1 search engine will leave the land of opportunities.
This came as news to me when Friendster.com was acquired by a company in Malaysia. Friendster.com used to be the leading online social networking site and was often copied by the one Maga social networking site – MySpace.com (see book I finished on Stealing My Space).
I know that Friendster.com is a big hit in countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillipines and maintains a strong foot hold in Asia, but the growth of the company within the last few years were very disappointing. According to an article in Wired.com (Issue 12.04 | April 2004), they valued Friendster at $53 million. After five years, Friendster was only able to double its value in comparison to companies like MySpace or the current social networking website titan, Facebook which is able to command a higher value and have seen a huge surge in growth.
A couple of days ago, Frindster was sold for a price tag of $110 million to a Malaysia company – MOL Global. MOL Global is an affiliate of online payment solutions provider MOL AccessPortal Bhd, which has Berjaya Corp Bhd chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Tan Sri Vincent Tan as the principal shareholder.
An industry blog, TechCrunch, had in July valued Friendster at US$210mil, a fraction of Facebook’s estimated US$10bil valuation. According to Compete.com, Friendster is currently generating 1.1 million unique hits in Nov 2009 while Facebook is generating 128.3 million unique hits for the same period.
I doubt that Friendster will come close to what Facebook is doing but I am sure that MOL sees a value in Frienster to cough up $110 million, and if TechCrunch is accurate in their estimate, then Friendster was sold at 50 cents on the dollar.
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