The Cart Blog

Melbourne, FL (my old home town) entrepreneurs who started e-Gold are in deep brown stuff. Is blaming your software the new Twinkie Defense?

It’s not exactly the first time someone has made the argument that fuel prices are accelerating the migration from instore to online purchasing.  What I did find interesting was the idea investors should have an explicit channel target before making a buy decision:

Until the internet sales are 15% or 20% of total sales for a company like Gap, investors should not look at online revenue as a reason to buy retail stocks.

I haven’t heard anyone else use this 15-20% number, and I have long believed that gerrymandering revenue numbers  is a dangerous practice for investors.  Am I wrong?

Jason Calacanis has migrated from blogging to newsletter writing, where he gets to share his views and not deal with hecklers. Nice for him; not as good for me because I don’t get to read the opposing viewpoint to whatever he’s arguing.

Nevertheless, he’s not giving up on crowdsourcing. One of his first newsletter topics is “How to Generate Feedback for Your Startup.” The methods he discusses all hinge on drawing from the wisdom of crowds. Here’s one:

LinkedIn.com’s Q&A service
——————————

-
Shortly after launching Mahalo I asked folks on LinkedIn’s Answers
service what they would do if they were the CEO of Mahalo. The goal
here was to get feedback, but also to create empathy and engagement
with the product.

If users can understand that we’re humans trying to build something
helpful we move from being an abstract object in their minds to
something more like colleagues. We’re all trying to make our way in
the world, no one has all the answers, and asking for help is a humble
and worthwhile action no matter who you are.
…

On LinkedIn folks want to connect with you and they want others to see
how smart they are. As such, the answers on LinkedIn are massively
more considered than those on Yahoo Answers.

You can read the feedback here: http://tinyurl.com/linkedinceo

I have written before that I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn’s Questions & Answers section.  It’s a great vehicle for getting input you normally wouldn’t hear and showing off your expertise.

Shopping cart vendors, are you targeting eBay exiles?  Mom and pop shops are no longer eBay’s target market.

Business Week (06/30/08) reports that a number of vendors are upset about eBay’s recent fee increase. I wonder if this will lead to the migration of larger merchants away from eBay and onto their own shopping cart sites (hosted or not). We’ll see.

I was delighted to see that Best Buy has initiated a free electronics recycling pilot program. Hopefully it will catch on. I am even willing to pay Staples for a recycling service just to reduce my environmental footprint, but lots of people  need the threshold to be zero to get motivated to do this, so it’s nice that Best Buy is subsidizing the program to drive the cost to free.

Here’s the video.  He thinks we’re probably alone in the Milky Way, either because  we haven’t heard any radio waves from another planet – unless (yikes!) “civilizations don’t last that long because they destroy themselves.”

This statement was made in response to a question following the talk.  Only one question was allowed, because the three sentence answer Hawking composed took eight minutes.  He has an optical interface to a screen with blocks of words, and has to select the words one by one with the human-computer interface that has been designed to allow people in his condition to communicate.

Most wished for, most gifted, etc. from the web sales king.