Well, that was fun. Guess I’ll see ya in another 5 years, Hotmail.
Talk about Microsoft coming off age
Money well spent is money well earned!
One of the reasons why 9 out of 10 products fail.
This is the deep truth of most of the world’s organizations…
Share a Coke campaign. Simply Brilliant!!
Is this all there is to a daily deals site? part 1
It’s been nearly 18 months since I bought my first Groupon, and around 15 months for LivingSocial, but in all this while I don’t think anything has changed. I mean sure you can now get deals for travel, goods, instant use, adventure, family oriented etc, which did not exist when these companies were launched, but aren’t these just ways to better categorize the deals. What about ways to better target these deals? I still get a huge chunk of daily deals emails, probably more than what I got when I initially subscribed, 99% of which end up in trash. With 18 months of collecting my data, I assume there would be a better way to target these deals.
Even if you take the easy way out and ask the customer to build a profile, the way Groupon does, there is no correlation between the profile and deals you get. I have customized my profile by specifying 7 zip-codes where I want my deal and have also chosen the kind of deals that interest me. Guess my morning delight - a deal for laser hair removal, something that I do not even have the slightest interest in, in Springfield, MA that should take me…what…2 hours to reach. Seriously!! I have already told you what I want and where I want. If you don’t have those specific deals, spare me the bombardment of all the other crap you have.
It’s like going to your nearby Home Depot store to buy some interior paint when the sales representative comes to you and says “Hey, there is an awesome deal on Lawn Mowers in our Connecticut branch, would you be interested?” I mean there has to be a Product Manager sitting somewhere at Groupon’s technical headquarters wondering
“Hmmm, I want my customers to buy these deals. I do know what they want, but screw with deal relevance, maybe just for fun, I’ll throw in random deals. Who knows, maybe it’s a luck of the draw, and the customer might be tempted to buy it, after all, the deals are at least 50% off.”
In an online business, how can you not measure your effectiveness. Aside from the customer’s own profile, don’t you have enough intelligent data on me. I assume you already know how many times I’ve viewed the daily deal, what type of deals I’ve viewed, and how many deals I’ve bought and redeemed. That should give you a pretty basic statistic of my likelihood of purchasing another deal. Diving deeper, you can get much more intelligent data like how many times did I click on the buy button but did not buy the deal, how much time did I spend on viewing the deal, if I shared it with friends on Facebook or via email, if I looked at the merchant’s website or if I read customer reviews.
That’s the advantage of an online business, you can track almost anything and everything. For example if I’ve viewed a deal but have not bought it, maybe that’s because I clicked on the review link and found out that the merchant had a rating of only 1.5 stars. So maybe I’m interested in such deals, just not from this merchant. Shouldn’t your first priority be to highlight a similar deal the minute you get it.
And of course there are just some basic usability criteria that go above and beyond any data gathering. If I’ve just purchased a deal for a hair cut from a fancy salon that’s valid for 6 months, why would I purchase a similar deal only a week later when I’ve not even redeemed my first one yet. It’s not like a gourmet deal where you can eat out almost every day of the week. There’s only so much hair that can get cut.
Seems like the daily deals business is still in its infancy with an enormous potential to efficiently match buyers and sellers.
The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.
How the U.S. lost out on iPhone work
A very well written article. I think this statement alone highlights what is wrong with the manufacturing industry in a free America -
“Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”
For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews
I would assume a company using analytics in almost all parts of decision making would be smart enough to figure out when five star inflation is going on.
Microsoft CEO is out to prove Steve Jobs wrong and make Redmond relevant again
I love the idea of selling dreams, not products. Because people don’t give a darn about your product. They don’t care about your brand. They don’t care about you as much as they care about themselves, right, we’re all human beings. We care about our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions. Once you start helping people fulfill their needs starting from their perspective, not from the product perspective, you’ll start winning people over.
