Shopster Insider's Blog

Last Blog Entry

2010-03-05T19:10:00.000-08:00

After almost 5 years at Shopster, I've accepted a new job in my home town of Vancouver. I am going to miss all the people, as everyone has been terrific. Shopster is now well positioned to take advantages of the new opportunities in e-commerce, and I am proud to have been part of that.

While this blog has never really been that popular, and this will be the last entry, I hope it has been useful to the people it has reached, and I wish you success in your online enterprises.

Good bye and good luck!

Neil

Funki Friends

2009-12-17T15:55:00.001-08:00

At the last Festival of Crafts here in Calgary, AB, I mean Elena, who makes Funki Friends sock toys. I thought it would be neat to create a store from here products.

Click here to take a look: Funki Friends Store

Shopster Community Launches

2009-11-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

Shopster has lauched a new community-powered support system (powered by Get Satisfaction) for Shopster.
If you have a Power Merchant account, click on the 'Community' tab on the top navigation.

Basically, you enter the question you have, and it then presents similar questions and answers. If none of the answers what you are looking for, you can submit it as a new question.

As employees, we've started putting in common questions and answers we've gotten before, to get the ball rolling.

I recently submitted one question "What's the easiest way to receive payments by credit card?" and then posted my answer here.

This week, I also helped one of our Power Merchants import a large number of products using our new datafeed standard.

Our new datafeed standard always Power Merchants not only to import their products easily into the wareouse, but also automatically creates the categories for their store, and sets the price.

One interesting aspect was that the merchant wanted to put pricing information directly in the product descriptions, but that pricing information was specific to the consumer's price in their store. To do this, I added an undocumented additional column called StoreShortDescription, which had their store specific description, while ShortDescription carried the general description for the warehouse.

After importing the data, I then manually set their store descriptions different from the descriptions in the warehouse.

Finding Great Products to Sell Made Easier

2009-10-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

Finding Great Products to Sell Made Easier

I’ve been working on a very interesting feature lately, which has launched without much fanfare, but is really cool.

Long time users of the Shopster E-Commerce platform can acknowledge that finding products from our huge virtual warehouse has been a challenge in the past. You could spend every second for an entire year (without sleeping) looking at each product and still not see everything (at only 10 seconds a product).

Under the new Merchant Network model, you choose the suppliers who have products you are interested in. Based on your local context, Shopster now generates daily the list of new products added, and products which have dropped in price.

This means, within 24 hours (or less) of a supplier making a new product available, you can have that product available for sale in your store, or for drop shipping.

How it works:
1. Supplier makes a new product available on their website.
2. Shopster picks up that new product (as fast as within 1 hour for some suppliers) and makes it available to you in our warehouse.
3. Every morning, the system finds all new products added by suppliers in your network, and generates a Network Activity message for you.
4. Next time you log in, under Network Activity, you will see a new message like:
Audio, Mobile, Gaming and More has added 12 new products.
5. Clicking on the link takes you straight to the 12 new products, where you can instantly add them to your store, or purchase them for drop shipping.

With this level of automation, you can be one of the first (if not THE FIRST), person to have that product for sale on the entire internet.

Try adding Books, DVDs, CDs and Video Games or Audio, Mobile, Gaming and More to your network to see this feature in action.

Currently, Network Activity informs you of new products, price drops, and partner updates to their profiles, with more to come.

If you haven't signed up with Shopster yet, you can still test out this feature with a free account.

Shopster's Network Continues to Grow

2009-09-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

Shopster's network is continuing to grow, with new people and products coming in everyday.

It seems that momentum towards Christmas is starting to build, and preliminary data is showing a pickup in activity and sales.

Personally, I wrote the code for the new "Buy Now" button, which makes it easier to purchase products if you are a pure dropshipper. (Previously, you had to add a product to your store inventory before being able to move it into the shopping cart).

I've recently helped some of our suppliers update their inventory in our virtual warehouse, and here's some highlights.

"Audio, Mobile, Gaming & More" continues to update their cellphones (both locked and unlocked), and has recently added a fresh supply of T-Mobile Sidekicks.

"Poker, Tools, As Seen On TV" has recently added Airsoft guns and accessories, as well as Star Wars merchandise.

Both "Bath & Beauty 2" and "Bath & Beauty 7" continue to add new fragrances on a daily basis, and continue to be retailer favorites.

Shopster Merchant Network

2009-06-22T14:08:00.000-07:00

So, this morning Shopster has quietly released the latest features in Shopster, branded Shopster Merchant Network. Personally, I like Shopster Social better.

What's different? Pretty much everything. It was a huge code release, the biggest in Shoptser's history, and I'm glad it is finally out the door.

Some of the notable changes in this release are:

1) You can finally add your own products, and are not limited to products supplied by our integrated suppliers.

2) Money collected from sales goes directly into your payment gateway (Authorize.NET, PayPal, BeanStream, etc.) instead of passing through us.

3) You can build your own network of relationships, decided whose products you want to sell (including your own), and who can sell your products.

One of the biggest changes you'll notice is the Power Merchant application is built around people, not products. View other people's profiles, view their products, and start building relationships. Starting with My Space, and now Facebook and Twitter the Internet has become more personal, and Shopster provides the platform for managing your business relationships with the same ease of use as managing your personal relationships.

You'll notice a 'Beta' sticker next to the Network tab in the application. It's not really 'Beta' in the sense of being unstable. It is marked 'Beta' because we want to be open to the direction set by our users in how they want to Network to work.

The traditional roles of supplier, retailer, and consumer have become blurred. How do you classify someone on Etsy who buys a leather band for another Etsy member, adds their custom silver charm, and then sells it on their store? or a big supplier who provides bulk sales to store, drop ships for eBay sellers, and also has their own direct sales store?

Click here to give it a try, without needing a credit card.

Latest Shopster Release

2008-10-17T13:48:00.001-07:00

Ahh.. Friday afternoon after a mid-week launch. The perfect time to reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and what can wait till Monday... :)

So, in case you haven't received the latest Shopster Newsletter, a major release went out mid this week. I worked on two key features, the ability to export order data out of the Shopster system, and into your own data analysis application (a.k.a. Excel), and the ability to reactivate your account.

Before now, to reactivate your Shopster account, you had to call customer support. Now, you can do so by simply trying to log in again with your email address and password. The system will tell you if your account is currently cancelled, and ask you if you want to reactivate.

Currently, if you reactivate through the automated system, you get an additional 1 week trial. Note that there is a limit on the number of times you are allowed to reactivate, so please don't abuse this system thinking you can cancel and reactivate every week for free service.

For the order export utility, we had to made some hard decisions in how the data should be formatted for export. Currently, the system lets you export order data out for the last 3 months. You can choose to export out in Excel, PDF, or comma delimited format (CSV). An interesting report is the Product Statistics report which gives you summary product information over all your orders in a given month. If this feature is well received, I hope to be able to offer more analytical reports for export, rather than just raw data.

For the first time, a Shopster e-Commerce subscriber can export out their customer's full information related to an order, including the email address, billing and shipping addresses, and contact information.

If you are a e-Commerce subscriber, the reports are available through:
Storefront Channel, Manage Store, Download Reports

If you are a Product Source subscriber, the reports are available through:
Product Export Channel (or eBay Channel), Manage Orders, Download Reports

Now that the release is out the door, I'm going to have to address the backlog of business intelligence requests sitting in my Inbox.

Shopster Super Release

2008-08-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

As of right now, the newest release of Shopster is live.

There was a ton of navigation changes to make getting around the site easier.

More importantly through, there are new ways to get access to interesting products to sell. On the main page of the Shopster Virtual Warehouse are a bunch of boxes which feature products.

By far the most interesting is the Price Drops box in top right can corner. Clicking this box will show you all the products with price drops in the last 24 hours. Currently, this list is not sortable by price drop amount (but hopefully will be in the next release), but it gives you a good indication of products that have good margin.

The 'What's New' box gives you the latest products added to the Shopster system. Since we get new products in every day (in reality, multiple times during the day), you can check this box every day and see new products. New products are great because it is less like they are already saturated on eBay or other storefronts.

Speaking of storefronts, we are finally dropping the term 'RShop' from the Shopster vocabulary. It makes a great database table name, but not so clear of a name for our subscribers.

Is Shopster Any Good?

2008-06-30T13:57:00.001-07:00

* Is Shopster any good?
* Is there a link to a Shopster review?
* How does Shopster compare to Doba, Megagoods, Dropship Direct, etc?

As you know, I work for Shopster, so I can't provide an unbiased review. I would suggest however, before you trust any dropship / wholesaler review, make sure to check the authenticity of the review site.

Check out a list of biased dropship reviews here:
http://www.scamreviewsites.com/

My best advice is to try the 1 week free trial. Make sure to cancel before the end of the first week, or you will be charged. The first week is 100% free. This means, if you cancel before the week is up you won't be charged a single penny.

Increase RShop Traffic with Sitemaps

2008-06-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

Updated Oct. 17th, 2008: Good news! There is now a feature within Shopster to general the sitemap.xml file for you. After logging in, go to Promote Store, Submit to Search Engines

RShops and Sitemaps

One of the toughest problems you'll face in creating a profitable RShop is generating traffic to your website. The first step is to make sure Google, Yahoo, and all other search engines are aware of your site. That way, if a person is using Google to search for products, there is a chance your RShop will be in the search results.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live become aware of new web sites by following links from existing pages. Unless you've linked to your new RShop from a personal website or blog, and a search engine has followed the link to your RShop, your RShop may be never been found by the search engines.

Creating and uploading a Sitemap solves this problem. A Sitemap is a file which contains all the links in your website. You manually direct a search engine to your Sitemap file. Best of all, it's free!

While not technically difficult, there a number of steps to use a Sitemap.

Register a search engine account (i.e. www.google.com).
Verify your RShop with the Search Engine.
Generate and Upload the Sitemap file to your RShop.
Get the Search Engine to Read the Sitemap File.

For my example, I will use www.google.com. At the end of the post are links to other search engines which can also read Sitemap files.

Step 1: Register a Search Engine Account

Go to Google's Webmaster Tools page (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
If you don't have a Google account, you'll have to create one.

Step 2: Verify your RShop with the Search Engine
While not technically a prerequisite for Steps 3 & 4, the first thing you should do it verify you are the owner of the RShop. This will let you see if your site is currently indexed by Google or not.

Login to Google's Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
On the Dashboard page (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard) under Sites, add your RShop's site. For example: 'thryva.secure2u.com'
Under Next Step, click the Verify your Site link. (The same link is also available on the Dashboard page next to your site's name.)
The page will say, Verification status: NOT VERIFIED.
For 'Choose verification method..' choose the Upload an HTML file.
Open Notepad, or any other text editor, and save a empty file with a file name specified by Google. Mine looks like "googleced35171b031861b.html". What is important is the file name, and not the actual contents of the file (it makes no different if the file is empty or not).
Open a new browser (will be returning to the current page later), and log in to your Shopster account (http://service.shopster.com/).
In the top navigation bar, click the EDIT RSHOP link.
From the left navigation panel, click the RShop Settings label to expand the menu choices.
Click the File Manager link.
You show now be on the RShop Settings: File Manager page. If you aren't, cheat by pasting this URL in your browser (http://service.shopster.com/retailer/designer/managefiles.aspx).
Make sure under the Current Folder panel, you see "/ Root /". If it is longer than this, make sure to click the Root link.
Under the Files panel, click the Browse button, and select the file you created in Step 5 (the empty file whose name is like 'googleced35171b031861b.html').
Click Open and the path to the file should now be in the text box to the left of the Browse button.
Click Upload File link to the right of the Browse button.
Your verification HTML file is now uploaded.
Switch back to your original browser displaying the Google Webmaster Tools - Verify a Site page.
Click Verify.
If all went smoothly, your RShop should be verified. You can check this by going back to the Dashboard page and looking at the Verified? column. It should be a green checkmark.

Step 3: Generate and Upload the Sitemap file to your RShop
I'm ashamed to admit Shopster does not generate this file for you. You'll have to user a third party tool. I used xml-sitemaps.com.

One xml-sitemaps.com home page, in the Starting URL text box, enter in your RShop's URL. In my case, 'http://thryva.secure2u.com/'.
I choose Change frequency to 'Monthly', but choose what most actively describes how often you will be updated your RShop.
Leave default choices for the rest of the options and click 'Start'.
Note that the 'free' version of their generator will only allow up to 500 pages.
Once it finishes, download the sitemap.xml file to your computer.
If you have more than one RShop, you should name the file to -sitemap.xml, because the files you upload to your RShops are stored in the same directory, and you will need one sitemap file for each RShop.
You will now want to upload the Sitemap file to your RShop exactly in the same way you uploaded your verification HTML file in the previous set of instructions. (go to http://service.shopster.com/retailer/designer/managefiles.aspx and upload file to root directory).

Step 4: Get the Search Engine to Read the Sitemap File
By this step, you have now verified your RShop with the search engine, and make available a Sitemap file available on your RShop.

Log in to Google's Webmaster Tools. (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
From the Dashboard, choose your RShop's site and under the Sitemap column click Add link.
For 'Choose Type...' choose Add General Web Sitemap.
In the text box, enter the file name of the Sitemap you uploaded to your RShop. This is either 'sitemap.xml' or '-sitemap.xml'.
Click the 'Add General Web Sitemap button'
Google should now tell you your Sitemap status is 'Pending'. Google will eventually use your sitemap to add your RShop to its search engine. Once done, you can use Webmaster Tools to see how your site is being found through Google searches.

Now that you have a Sitemap for your RShop, you should let the other search engines know about it. Here are some links:
Yahoo! Site Explorer (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit)
Microsoft's MSN Search (http://webmaster.live.com/)
Ask.com (http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22)

New Everything

2008-05-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

Today is Friday, Calgary is finally getting warm weather, and my belly is full of burger from The Ship and Anchor.

You may be have noticed that www.shopster.com got a huge update. Both our web price, pricing, and application all go overhauls. Note that our subscription fees did not increase for existing customers.

One of the cool features I worked on was product lists. After you login in, on the Home page:
http://service.shopster.com/home/default.aspx you'll notice a new scoller which shows various product highlights.

I wrote a system where Dan, our regular Shopster supplier blog writer, can pick and choose products from the warehouse, and publish them to retailers in a product list form. So, for instance, if a supplier is having a special, we can highlight those products for you. I'm hoping this system will also be used to provide easy access to the newest products in the system, which we get every day.

For new retailers, the biggest shift is catering the product to different customers. Basically, we have retailers who want to use Shopster purely as an eBay product source, and others who want to use Shopster as both a product source and online store solution. By splitting the product, we can better cater to each group as the product development moves forward.

We also have lots of new faces around the office, and issues which I think have previously been overlooked are now getting the attention they deserve. I think the Shopster E-Commerce solution will be getting lots of customer facing improvements in the near future.

Supply-Side Week in Review

2008-04-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

If you are a Shopster retailer, or on a free trial, make sure to read the 'Supply-Side Week in Review'. It's both informative and hilarious.

http://forums.shopster.com/blogs/support_blog/archive/2008/04/04/18972.aspx

The Supply-Side Week in Review posts are you best source of information on new products in the system, as it is written by the guy who actually loads the products. I don't think his posts pass through any type of corporate communications departments, so the hilarity is left untouched.

Shipping Costs

2008-04-09T15:31:00.000-07:00

People are naturally suspicious of shipping charges. Our retailers often have questions about shipping:

How are shipping charges calculated?
Is Shopster making money on shipping?
Why is the shipping different today from yesterday?

First of all, Shopster has no margin built into the shipping options. Anything we charge for shipping is purely cost recovery. We calculate shipping differently, depending on what information the suppliers provide us:

flat rate shipping
product weight
product size

First off, if the supplier has a flat rate set shipping domestically, we use that. If they don't, then we use the product weight the calculate the shipping using a linear shipping estimator. This would be a base cost, plus a variable cost per weight unit of the product. For example, if a book is 1 LB, and the shipping rate has a base cost of $5, with an additional $1/LB (not an actual shipping rate in our system), the shipping would be $5 + $1 = $6.00. Similarly, two books would be $5 + $2 = $7 shipping.

In addition, each of our suppliers have different shipping rates because of which carriers they use, whether or not they combine handling costs with shipping, etc. When the supplier's rate is off from our base estimator, we adjust the rate up or down to make the shipping cost more accurate.

Finally, if we have historical information on shipping costs for an item, and the same item and quantity is going the same distance for a new order, we use the last invoiced shipping cost as the shipping cost for the new order.

So, the reason shipping can change from day to day can be due to three reasons:

Supplier corrects the product weight, size, or flat rate.
Supplier's shipping adjustment is changed to make the shipping estimate more accurate.
Historical information becomes available, so more accurate shipping cost is used.

Note that as a retailer, if you ever come across shipping numbers which look way wrong, that gets escalated to me in a hurry if you contact customer support. It's a very large problem, but we do our best to make our shipping costs as low as possible without losing money.

Boy is back!

2008-03-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

Boy is finally back to normal, so off to daycare he goes, and I reported dutifully to Shopster. Rosie got back today too! All is good, and all that is missing is an XBox 360.

In Shopster news, we have a bunch of internal reports of new products in the system by supplier, as well as products which have dropped in price. My challenge now is how to make that available in the Browse Warehouse page.

The main challenge with the Browse Warehouse page right now is that it is geared for finding a specific product, rather than 'browsing products' (ironic, given the tab's name). There is some internal debate what the starting navigation point into the products should be, by supplier, or by product category. While being able to filter on multiple dimensions is good, any more options would make it too cluttered for a new user.

Personally, I would like to see supplier specific pages which show a show description of the supplier, the turn-around and fulfillment statistics, the new products, and a list of the products which have dropped in price. (Retailers, I wouldn't object if you drop suggestions of just such a feature in the Shopster forums. *wink*)

For instance, we have a brand new supplier in the system called Tiffany-style Lamps, but you'd never know it from the Browse Warehouse page. Here's the link: http://service.shopster.com/warehouse/browseproductwarehouse.aspx?sid=97707
They supply stain glass lamps, shades, etc.

Here's another brand new supplier that is 'buried' in the warehouse:
http://service.shopster.com/warehouse/browseproductwarehouse.aspx?sid=97161
The have some really highly specialized and hard to find computer and home AV cables.

Poor Kid

2008-03-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

So, my boy Elliot is sick. He had a high fever for 5 days on and off, and now has both ears infected. We started him on Amoxicillin, and developed a rash after 24 hours. Doctor suspects he is allergic to it, so switch to another antibiotic.

Elliot can't be put down for one second, which is way different from his normal, run away and explore. Today he threw up, and is flat out refusing to eat, but will still drink milk (thank goodness).

It's like I have a newborn again...

Rosie, my wife, if currently away on a pairing (flight attendant), and so it is just me. It's rough. I don't know how a single parent survives.

When he gets better, and Rosie gets back, I'm buying myself an XBox 360 in celebration, and plan to be very negligent dad.

Our CEO has a blog?

2008-03-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

I had no idea our Shopster CEO, Sarath Samarasekera has a blog:
http://lifeatshopster.blogspot.com/

No mention of me. I'm offended.

Finally, a Shopster Blog Update

2008-03-20T13:17:00.001-07:00

I'm taking a little time out of my work day to give this blog an update, as well as to step back and view Shopster from a high level. Shopster is ramping up fast. For the first quarter of this year, our retailers have seen sales quintuple (5x) from the same period last year.

Last Christmas was busy here, as we chased down every delayed order with the suppliers. We need lots more people, and lots more efficiency to survive the forth quarter of 2008. There are a lot of new faces around here already, and we are forced to become an efficiency driven organization. Given that many of those systems are under my responsibility, I've been busy. One side effect of having more people around it the company culture changes. Before, there were no set rules for when you had to be in office. As long as the work got done, hours were flexible. There were 4 of us. Now, when you have to coordinate meetings with 12 people, you have to start coming in at a regular time so meetings can be scheduled. That kind of sucks. What also sucks is that when the organization was smaller, your work, or lack of work, was immediately obvious. Therefore, you never had to worry about not appearing busy, cause everyone knows what you contribute. Some days, I'd just go walk around for awhile in the sunshine, and get the coding done later. Now, in an office environment, there is more pressure to 'appear' busy, even if you just want to slack for awhile (like say, writing a blog post... heh heh)

One interesting thing about last Christmas was Wii sales. Because Wii's were hard to get anywhere, Shopster actually went above and beyond with a particular supplier, to ensure our retailers had first dibs on any Wii stock that supplier got in. Some retailers were making $40 profit per Wii sale (even after the supplier raised the price on us).

Currently, the top 10 list of RShops by sales is crowded by a lot of electronics stores. Wii's and mobile phones are generating the highest sales and profit margins. I have a couple of theories of why that is. First of all, we have good prices on many electronic products. Secondly, I think a lot of those customers already know everything about the product they want to buy, and are just looking at price. The store doesn't have to 'convince' as much as other products.

The stores themselves are attractive, but fairly basic. One store is still using our logo generator's logo as their store header. That made me chuckle, because the logo generator is a good way to get your shop looking presentable, but I always assumed our retailers would eventually replace it with a less generic looking logo.

I would prefer it if our sales would be a bit more spread out among product categories. We have some successful shops in inexpensive jewelry, perfumes, and health products, but given the huge amount of products in our warehouse, the top selling stores should have more diversity. In that vein, we are having some internal discussions here at Shopster about starting a retailer acceleration program. When we see shops that have had a few sales, and are on the verge of success, perhaps we should reach out to those retailers to really get the sales going.

RShops I would like to see Shopster help grow:
1. Non-electronics stores.
2. Stores concentrated around new suppliers in the system.
3. Stores making sales, but with margins set too low.

For all retailers, I would like to see the product information presented better. I have internal reports which show me which products have dropped in price, as well as the new products in the system. Our browse warehouse functionality is designed around finding a single product, as opposed to 'shopping' the products to find interesting, sellable items. Hopefully we can get that improved soon.

Quiet Quiet Quiet

2007-08-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

We recently had a release. Decided to finally update the Shopster's Insider's Blog. Looking for inspiration, I talked to the developers. I talked to our marketing department. I talked to our CEO. I have nothing to write about.

All my work this month has been internal. SQL 20005, reports, accounting. etc. Woo hoo. I spend a long time to try and get 'infinite drill-though' to work, until it was pointed out to me that it requires the Enterprise Edition, not Stardard Edition.

The majority of other people's work is under the 'Top Secret' category, and will be released pretty soon, but is currently hush hush.

If you are a heavy user of Shopster, especially looking at products in the Virtual Warehouse, you'll notice a significant performance improvement, especially paging through products deep in the list.

If you have a lot of products in your RShop, you notice improved searching capability for your customers. It allows drill down by category.

So, a very boring Shopster Insider's Blog entry. Next month though, wow, watch out.

Don't mess with my baby!

2007-07-31T21:37:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure my boy was trying to flip me off.

He's quick to forgive though!

A Little Something More Personal

2007-07-27T23:34:00.000-07:00

It’s very hot, and very sunny here in Calgary at the moment. Walking outside, everything is vivid. Cars (not of the modern muted tones) are cartoonishly bright. The lines on people’s faces are drawn in sharp relief, adding too much depth to the context of every smile or furrowed brow. Smells walk around. A low contrast cloudy day would be nice, a chance to wander through life glossing over the details. As a more introspective person, I am feeling overwhelmed by the volume of external information that is forcing its way in.

When I was young, emotions were intense, primary. How I felt was exactly described by short, precise words: happy, sad, angry, upset, calm. As I grew older, describing how I feel requires longer, fuzzier words, like melancholy, grateful, respectful, overwhelmed, appreciative. Feelings become less delineated, both in description and intensity. As I sit here now, I find no easy words to describe my current state of mind. I try to conjure phrases, prefixing to try to differentiate one shade of gray different from another. Future regretful, tempered happiness, awkward contentment, tense appreciativeness. I think I need a holiday, to get back to happy, relaxed, joyful.

Although I get a couple of hours with my son almost everyday after work, I am missing some parts of his progression through life. A few days ago, when I tried to sit him up by himself, he could only manage staying upright a few seconds. Today, he seems to balance quite well. It’s like seeing a home movie of Lance Armstrong learning to ride a bike with training wheels, immediately followed by clip of him winning the Tour de France for the seventh time. You get the gist of what happened in between, but it still would have been nice to see it. My wife has always been understanding when I stay at work late, but now, I’m finding it harder to find the balance, as staying late at Shopster & missing Elliot’s bedtime, means missing irretrievable moments. Do I really want to be the cliché father, always to busy at work to come to little Johnny’s baseball game? On the other hand, I know I can never be someone who at 5pm, shuts down all thoughts of work.

Sleepless Nights

2007-07-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

It's so hot here in Calgary, it's very hard to get a good night's sleep. Maybe we should have sprung the extra $4K for air-con when our place was built. Naw, that's crazy.

Boy-O

2007-07-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

Although Rosie has cornered the the market in boy-o updates (boy-o.vox.com), doesn't mean I can't post a picture now and again!

Here he is with his Jungle Chime ball (the first toy I ever bought for him), and the highly reviewed Freddie the Firefly. He loves to sleep on his front now, which at first freaked us out, cause of the whole "Back to Sleep" campaign. I did a little research about it, and am really not worried about him sleeping on his front now, after looking at the statistics.

Shopster Insider's Update #2: Avoid Order Cancellations

2007-07-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

It's very frustrating when you make a sale, only to see Shopster cancel it. Obviously, it doesn't benefit use to cancel sales. There are two main reasons why orders get cancelled, fraud and stock issues. Fraud, unfortunately, is something we all have to live with. You do have control over the order cancellations though, by being selective in the suppliers you choose products from.

That being said, there is no easy way in Shopster to see the rankings of all the suppliers. So, here's an up to date list of the best suppliers in the warehouse. Clicking on the supplier name will take you directly to their newest products in the warehouse (after the required login).

Top Suppliers in Shopster

These suppliers have a proven track record on order fulfillment, and are highly recommended.

Up and Coming Suppliers

These suppliers don't have a long track record within Shopster, but are doing quite well so far. These products are under-represented in the RShops, so you can set higher margins.

As you may know, Shopster does 'boot' suppliers from the system which have poor fulfillment rates. However, we must balance supplier performance with product diversity. Generally, the larger suppliers who do a lot of drop shipping have the highest fulfillment rates, but if we only used these suppliers, you wouldn't have access to unique products (that aren't already all over eBay and the rest of the Internet).

Blogspot versus Vox

2007-07-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

I must say Vox is much easier to use. Uploading of pictures, formatting of the posts. For the last post, I had to do some manual HTML coding. Crazy.

That said, blogspot seems to be much better for SEO and ranking stuff. Google Analytics is really wicked. You know, I always thought that Search Engine Optimization was some mystical art form. It's not. Want a good ranking when people search for 'shopster blog' in Google? Put 'shopsterblog' in your URL (shopsterblog.blogspot.com), and host your blog on the preferred blog platform of Google.

I mean it's crazy, on Vox I had routine posts about Shopster since January, and I didn't make it past 7th on the Google rankings. With just the one post before here on Shopster's Insider's Blog, I already jumped up to 4th.

Shopster Insider Update #1

2007-07-04T22:23:00.000-07:00

Shopster v1.13, More than a Fresh Coat of Paint

If you'ved logged into Shopster recently, you'll find a totally reworked interface! Instead of a really cool code name like 'Jaguar', or 'Whistler', internally this release was called 1.13, and it is a whopper.

Shopster Home Page

Ooohh, shiny!

But there's a whole lot more that got improved other than the color scheme. In my opinion, there are two major features which have been under discussion a very long time, and I am overjoyed to see them released. There are a few companies who are partially our competitors, and have dubious practices to say the least. I, and many others on the inside, have been pushing for more transparency for our retailers, to prove that we are different.

View Customers

We've always said that Shopster doesn't own your customers, you do. Finally, as a retailer, you have access to customer's email address, phone numbers, and personal details. Although incredibly valuable, Shopster has always believed that the customer belongs to you. We've never contacted them beyond keeping them updated on their order, and now you can market directly to them yourself.

View Customers Page

Pricing Change

In the forums, over and over again we heard retailers complaining about pricing. Sometimes justified, sometimes not. The major problem was, in the past, the price you saw in the warehouse was not the 'wholesale' price from the supplier. It was the the wholesale price, plus the payment gateway fee (more about that in a sec), plus any applicable handling fees. These are all costs you would have incurred even if you had bought the product directly from the supplier, but it was a mistake on our part not to make the pricing stack more transparent.

When you browse the warehouse now, the product details are displayed in popups, as not to break navigation:

Electronics and Accessories 11

Here's a product from Electronics and Accessories 11 (an excellent supplier by the way). Here I've clicked the 'Supplier' tab to see the Handling Fee (if applicable).

Wholesale Price: $114.99
Transaction Fee:$4.17
Total Price: $119.16
Handling Fee: $3.00

The wholesale price is exactly the same price we see when we get the product updates from the supplier.

What is this 'transaction fee'? Here's a hint, calculate transaction fee divided by wholesale price. Yup, 3.62%. Sound familiar? It's the first 'half' of the transaction fee which is charged by the payment provider to process the transaction. The second 'half' is on the margin you make on the product (the fee that gets deducted from your profit checks). Both the transaction fee and handling fees are charged by Shopster to purely cover the cost of the transaction, and we make nothing from them.

So, notice that the MSRP on the product is around $140. To make this product attractive, I've added it to a margin goup of 17.48%, to bring the price up to MSRP, and then added a 10% sale:

When the user checks out, here's what he sees:

And there's the $3.00 handling fee we saw earlier.

It nice to finally see features being released which bring the product closer to how I originally envisioned it. I hope we will continue to be able to grant more and more transparency into the system for our retailers.

Happy Canada Day!

2007-07-03T00:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a pic of me and boy-o at Moraine Lake in Banff National Park on Canada Day. He's in what's known as a Baby Bjorn. We were kinda limited on what we could do, so no major hikes this time round.

So long Vox, Hello Blogger!

2007-07-03T00:10:00.001-07:00

'Oh, hello, American investor. I see you are interested in distributing Shopster in you home prefecture. You have chosen wisely.'

This blog is a continuation of 'Shopster, Babies, and Bah!' blog over at synch.vox.com. It's all about touting my own horn, giving an insider's view into Shopster, as well as some personal posts now and then.

Here's the first 'manifesto' post from the previous blog:

---
January 13th, 2007

Between Shopster and the baby, this may be the most interesting year of my entire life.
At Shopster, we are starting to garner some interest and some press now. Well, I shouldn't say we, I should say, the 'Top 3'. If you see a picture of three people in a magazine article about Shopster, that's my arm at the side in the frame, or possibly the back of my head if they did an 'action' shot, with employees in the background.

Alas, if my name is to be recorded in the annuals of computer history beside Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and, um, that Moore guy that got his own law, my greatness will have to be touted by one lone horn, this voximighty blog. (Moore's lesser known, but equally accurate law: "My sexiness will double every 24 months." It really seems to work for him, either that, or his net worth of 3.7 billion dollars. You know, either / or.)

By the way, as the first employee of Shopster, I have stock options, so if you are making investing decisions based on this blog, well, don't. And two, you can't really jump start an alien spaceship by attaching electrodes to a bunny rabbit's ears. I know, cause it says 'dramatization' right at the bottom of the commercial. At most, you'd get a really angry bunny, and nobody wants that.

My Profile Picture

2007-07-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

This is me. In both a metaphorical and physical desert.