Slightly embarrassed about an old Facebook entry showing you smashed out of your mind wearing an elaborate beer bong and a T shirt that says WORK SUX BUT I NEED THE BUX? You should be, and not just because it shows someone filling the bong with some lite beer that tastes more like a urine sample than actual malted hops. You should be embarrassed because your next employer will find it too. Or should I say the hiring manager at the next job you apply for.

Unfair? Of course not. Gimme a break! Suppose you had started a business with your own money. Given two equally desirable and qualified job applicants, is Mr. or Ms. Beer Brong the kind of person you’d put first on your list? Or would it be the who looked stone cold sober on that Facebook page? What if that page linked to a blog showing off that person’s expertise in web promotion, mentoring skills, or church involvement?

Maybe you’re not the business-minded type. Try this on for size. You learn you’re about to have new baby. You work your butt off at Olive Garden or Wal-Mart or a local insurance brokerage to get a managerial promotion with medical benefits. You hire someone with less than stellar work skills. Your boss turns up that same beer bong page in the three-minute-after-the-fact forensic investigation to determine why you hired the kind of flake who showed up on Wednesday for a job that started Monday. How do you plan to defend your hiring decision?

Let’s take the heat off you for a second. Suppose an apparel brand you like is demonstrably underpaying its employees and exploiting children in a third-world country. They respond to stories about factory conditions with weasel wording about local cultures taking a different view on child labor, about how they really aren’t associated with the company that runs the factory, and about how it was all set up by a consultant and not themselves. What message are they sending to you? Suppose another apparel brand you like has a factory here in your own country and has a great reputation for paying its workers fairly. You’ve seen a news story about how their workers stay on for 40% longer than the industry average and that job openings always result in lines that stretch around the block. You like both brands fine. Which are you likely to choose next time you need a T shirt?

Take it from a hiring manager. We know how to use that internet thingie almost as well as you do. Late-breaking update: it’s not even very hard. More and more, employers are acting on something you should know already. You are a brand. What you’ve published about yourself is often the only message most people will get from you. The web is the best way for a prospective employer (or children, or spouse, or ex-spouse’s attorney) to find out about Brand You.

And if you don’t control your message, it will control you.

I like eBay. I especially love the concept of eBay. It is easy to forget that just a few years ago, there was no eBay.

For years economists have used in their models the idea of a frictionless economy, which is one where both buyers and sellers know as much as possible about any particular item being sold, and about the market itself. Sellers can set fair prices and not accidentally price too low. Buyers can determine whether a seller’s price is reasonable and whether they are less likely to get ripped off. Before the Internet, this was a fiction used to illustrate how free markets should work. Until eBay it was understood that such an economy could never exist, but that as an illustration it could be used to calibrate the success of any transaction or market for both parties.

This problem led to the market for so-called “blue books”.  These were expensive yearbooks issued in particular markets to help buyers and sellers determine good prices for things like cars and comic books. In theory it’s a good idea, but it’s one that has always favored the dealers.  The blue books tended to be vague about where data came from. They would cite things like auction results and newspaper ads, but no rigorous explanation of their methodology could ever be found. So if you were a 14-year old who was assured by a comic book dealer that a comic was worth $100 and you paid only $50, the dealer would “prove” it to you with the blue book. Of course, when you tried to sell the comic back, that $100 would suddenly become $7, and you’d get some muttered dissembling about fluctuating market conditions. I always thought the blue book ideas was corrupt, and I remember seeing that notion proved when a guitar I know to be nonexistent was listed in a blue book with 3 different price ranges, one for each possible condition.

The power of blue books has decreased dramatically with eBay, and thank heavens for that. Think about it: eBay, or whatever replaces eBay if they don’t start minding the store, is the closest we’ll ever get to a frictionless economy. You can see what people were actually willing to pay for something, if they were willing at all. How cool is that? You can often see photographs of the actual item, and even, occasionally, comments from other customers. An economist’s dream come true, and in fact thousands of academic papers have relied on eBay data in the decade or so eBay has become a potent market force.

And yet for some reason eBay wants to become Amazon. Why?

My theory is this: top management at eBay is ashamed of of being America’s flea market. I think when they go golfing with their Silicon Valley cronies and hear about the latest play in social media or Amazon’s amazing profits, they’re a little bit embarrassed. eBay is so low tech. It’s so 1995.  It’s so… regular people. I think they’re throwing away an opportunity to become bigger than ever. Why not just be happy that you’re the best flea market there ever was? The concept of the agora is an honorable one, dating back thousands of years. Remember the stand-up philosophers in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World?” Something close to that really happened. Philosophers did sometimes stand up on platforms and try to sell their ideas while throngs of consumers shopped for grapes and olive oil.  The marketplace was thought to be an essential element of society, and might be thought of as the birthplace of the concept of free speech here in the West. Even if that sounds pompous, eBay is undeniably a vibrant expression of the near-frictionless market and is nothing at all to be ashamed of.

I’d rather see eBay spend an extra $50 million on fraud control than blow another billion on the next Skype. And I bet their bottom line would like it too.

eSnipe is an unusual business in a lot of ways. (eSnipe is a service that places bids the last few seconds on eBay, the best way to prevent emotional overbidding and to keep prices down.) Its way of getting new customers is a paradox: eSnipe relies on word of mouth. Yet to recommend eSnipe to another person theoretically goes against your best interest. This is far different from most businesses, which tend to make your life better with increased trade. More people going to Wal-Mart? Great, Wal-Mart can exert pressure on its suppliers to lower prices. More people going to MacDonald’s? That means they can offer more $1 meals. It’s all good.

Not with eSnipe.  Each person you refer to eSnipe is potentially a competitor to bid against you on an item you hoped you could score in secret. So why do people refer other users at all? An eSnipe customer with the amusing name of Dr.HopeToHelp commented

that my own little green eyed portion of self creeps out thinking “Why do I want to refer Bidding Competition to you, the Wonderful, Terrific esnipe website, that helps me get lower priced buys that make it EASY FOR ME TO RESELL and make a WHOLE LOT MORE than I would by getting referral money????”

I must confess, I tend to agree with the good doctor. My thought in recommended eSnipe to others before I actually owned the company was this: since no one I knew was bidding in my particular niche I felt reasonably safe letting others know about it. Still, I would like to get back some of the business we’ve lost to the general econonmy and eBay’s seeming insistence on erasing its reputation as America’s flea market (what’s so wrong with that, anyway?). Hence the notion of an eSnipe affiliate program, which would give you a cash or BidPoints incentive to recommend eSnipe to your pals.

At least the ones who aren’t buying Fender Performer guitars (oops, revealed my niche).

Last week was one of the scariest in my life, and that of my darling child. We went to Mayo Clinic because it was thought spinal cord and perhaps brain surgery would be needed very soon. Short answer: no to both! Sorry it took so long but due to a bizarre error in the web host’s security software only automatically scheduled blog entries could be posted. (For the technically inclined: a ModSecurity rule thought some of the wording in a blog post matched a MySQL injection attack profile.) It took over a week for me to resolve this problem.

Long answer: the situation will be monitored, with a new MRI and trip to Mayo Clinic every 6 months. It is quite possible no surgery will ever be needed. We just can’t tell yet. Maybe I need to revisit my theological leanings?

Mayo Clinic is, to me, the Microsoft of the medical world. It is beautifully run and seemingly everyone who works there is smart. Like other towns in Minnesota, Rochester is honeycombed with underground passages that resemble shopping malls. They call this their “subway”. To be honest, my daughter and I enjoyed Rochester and look forward to returning. Who’d have thunk?

Cheers,

Tom Campbell

Buying big-ticket items on eBay is scary.
There are more scammers than there used to be, but the selection of legitimate items is bigger than ever. I have used eBay to buy some expensive goods: up to $40,000, in fact. When I say big tickethere I define it simply as this: any amount of money that would change your life to lose. In this installment I’ll talk about the most important factor in taking a big risk on eBay: your relationship with the seller. It’s also the hardest to verify through automated means, though I’ll discuss that in a later installment.

What do I mean by big ticket? By analogy: If the drivethrough window at your favorite fast food joint gets your order wrong and you’re a few miles away when you find out, you probably won’t go back. If someone botches the special anniversary dinner you’ve been scrimping for, though, it’s a different matter.

Let’ s get the simplest solutions out of the way first. Don’t be afraid to use PayPal. As far as eBay purchases, if you’re a novice you may not realize that using PayPal is probably less of a risk than using a credit card at your local grocery store, and it provides some excellent buyer protection. One probem is that some sellers have a legitimate reason to avoid PayPal: they don’t like the PayPal bite, which on an expensive item can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

You may also not know that eBay recommends escrow.com, which lets you inspect an item before accepting delivery. It also works for intangible items in some cases, like domain names. Expensive, but well worth it.

It’s all about the Benjamin

If you read Benjamin Franklin’s hilarious, insightful, and truly inspiring autobiography, you will often find that people then relied on letters of recommendation when they moved to a new town. In the 21st century, it turns out, we must do very much the same thing. Since Franklin and his contemporaries lacked instant forms of communication like texting, email, or even that old-fashioned telephone thing some people are using, they relied on the reputation of the letter writer. In other words, it was all about relationships.

It still is. I have found that the most reliable way to buy expensive things is to build up a relationship with the seller both before and after you have won the auction. No matter how excited you are about the item, imagine that you are an antique dealer buying a supposed George Washington ceremonial sword-over the phone. You will want satisfactory answers to many questions, such as provenance (a reliable history of the item), the seller’s background and qualifications, and any previous blemishes to the seller’s history you can find online.

You are completely remiss if you do not obtain the seller’s phone number and have a talk. The best way to get this going is to have a reasonable question that is not answered by the auction description. This is inevitable for high-ticket items. If the seller doesn’t wish to give you the phone number, fine, move on. It may not be worth the seller’s time to deal with you. Your idea of high ticket may be different from the seller’s. Or the seller could be a scammer.

Disregard anything the seller says about this being the last item of its kind, get it now before someone does a BIN, yada yada. That stuff may possibly be true, but the scarcity threat also happens to be one of the most powerful weapons of manipulation a seller can use, one that punctures your conscious thought processes and goes right to your reptilian brain. Scarcity is an ages-old bugaboo and good sellers exploit it mercilessly.

Make sure you have questions designed to let the seller discuss any imperfections the object have. Does the back of the guitar have buckle rash? Why wasn’t there a picture of the back, anyway? When you say it has “the normal wear and tear” why don’t you show a closeup of that wear and tear? If this really is a 55 Buick Special in mint condition, why do all the pictures look like they were taken on an old cell phone? And so on.

If the seller doesn’t admit to perfections in a forthright way, if the seller doesn’t treat you the way you would treat your best friend in the same position, run. The seller should understand that you are making a decision that may be life-altering. If the seller doesn’t, you need to move on to a different item.

Next up: More on how to develop a good relationship in 10 days or less.

I’m in Rochester, MN with one of my children. Said child has spina bifida and is facing tethered cord surgery. As a bonus our precious one also gets to face brain surgery. Some folks have all the luck.  An annual MRI revealed a mass in the thalamus, probably unrelated to the spina bifida. It may be nothing, in which case the medical slang for it is incidentaloma, a piece of sardonic humor that means “we don’t know what it is but let’s leave well enough alone.”  Or it may be something, something that needs life-threatening surgery to investigate. We are here to evaluate the options.

I believe in some sort of higher power. Sadly I came to this conclusion through… software development. Information theory tells us that good programs don’t arise effortlessly out of bad ones. If you think about how robust DNA is and conversely how easily programs break when just a single bit is thrown wrong, you begin to realize there are some big unanswered questions about how things evolved from low to high information density. A single cell has within it components that are infinitely more complicated than the biggest software project. To think that such structure arose out of innumerable random events is to stretch my credulity well past its breaking point.

There are also some questions I have never seen answered well, nor even asked well. For example, all animals come from a single ferilized cell. How then do instinctual or swarming behaviors get transmitted through that tiny data pipe? In fact, the term “instinctive behavior” is nothing more than a way of passing the buck, if you think about it. Where does such behavior come from? If you raise a puppy without its mother it will still exhibit most of the behavior you expect a puppy to have. Where did that get “learned” or “passed on” when there’s no role model? Who or what wrote that program?

I do not bring these issues up to try to convince you that there is some sort of cosmic intelligent designer. Far, far from it.  It is intuitively clear to me that there is some kind of designer. But then what? Because of the path I took to this modest article of faith, because of my Yankee “show me” personality, my belief does not really extend to any kind of anthropomorphic personage with any personal interest in me or, more to the point, to my loved ones.

At times like this, I wish it did.

User rr_junk has made an interesting feature request, shown as item #3 here:

http://easyonme.com/blog/esnipe/esnipes-new-look/comment-page-1/#comment-60

“An actionable warning that another eSnipe bid outbids me, sort of an eBay within eSnipe. To be fair both bidders would have to be informed in a timely and actionable way.”

This has twists on it that the casual eSnipe auction sniper may not have contemplated. The obvious one is that it would arguably breach our privacy policy if we gave you the ID of the other auction sniper.  I think it would be a breach in spirit, if not the contract itself. (Feedback from attorneys welcome on this point.) Let’s say we get past that hurdle, perhaps via some kind of escape clause or additional option both parties would have to click. The other problem is that most eBay users are not, sadly, eSnipe customers. So while it would help you to know another eSnipe user had outbid you, you might still be outbid by one of the unenlightened few not discriminating enough to our service.

It’s a titillating thought. Let me know how you’d stand on the matter.

This probably sounds familiar: I have a lot of ideas, including a lot of business ideas. I needed a fast way to get them up on the web without having to translate them through a webmaster. I thought it should be cheap, easily maintainable by me, and attractive. I also wanted an easy to to back up the site, and to be able to restore it or move it to another webhost if necessary.

But I don’t want to be a blogger

I spent a long time looking around at the various solutions. WordPress was one of them, but it seemed to have some problems. First of all, it was a blogging platform, and blogging was only one of the things I wanted to do. Second, the installation instructions looked a bit… intimidating. I’m a programmer but also a businessman and hobbyist. The three don’t always intersect. When I’m thinking like a businessman, I just want to get the job done effectively and fast. My interest is in communicating ideas and reaching a large targeted audience quickly. As a programmer, well, I’m a craftsman. And as the old engineering maxim has it, choose two of these three options: Fast, Cheap, Good. Finally, WordPress just didn’t seem like it would have all the features I needed. So I kept looking.

By coincidence, I became eSnipe’s director of marketing late last year. Suddenly, putting up new websites wasn’t a matter of craftsmanship or having a cool hobby I wanted people to know about. Suddenly getting a robust, manageable, attractive website online was a business priority. So I did what any self-respecting business type would do.  I took an expensive internet marketing course on the company nickel. And when I say expensive, I mean $5,000. Since I own the company, that amount wasn’t just an impressive number. It was a number I had to explain to the directly shareholders, a.k.a. my wife.

What do you do when only results matter, not your designer’s ego?

The internet marketing world is a fascinating one, by the way. As you might imagine, there are charlatans-but many fewer than I had expected to find. I came away from that course with some powerful impressions.

• It’s all about results. Internet marketing means that every dollar you spend on advertising of any kind needs to be balanced directly against the bottom line. This ain’t for Coke or Abercrombie & Fitch, where hundreds of millions can be spent on nebulous, impossible-to-measure “image statements”.
• In my experience, many of the “best” web designers are far more interested in impressing other designers than they are in site usability or, horror of horrors, conversion rates (number of people who visit your site vs. the number of people who buy). These people have no pull in the internet marketing world. None. Nada.
• It’s all about delivering a high-quality product that answers people’s needs directly, now. Otherwise, you don’t make money. Very often these high quality products may not look as pretty as what you’ll find in a bookstore or on a magazine page, but they get right to the point and scratch a powerful itch.
• It’s done on the cheap, normally with software that costs nothing or is already on your computer.
• It’s a do-it-yourself business. Fortunes are routinely made by a guy and his computer late at night, after work and when the kids are asleep. These companies never start with a staff or venture funding.
• For all these reasons, their sites are built on WordPress a very high percentage of the time.

I had investigated WordPress a few years ago and had found it wanting. Things have changed. A  lot. WordPress can now easily be made to create sites that don’t look like blogs at all. It is fully equipped to let you create what looks like a standard HTML website, yet with none of the drawbacks (building an HTML website from scratch is time-consuming, bug-prone, such sites are exceptionally hard to extend with new features, and it’s very hard to add articles or news items to them without lots of time and specialized software).  Here’s a site I did illustrating that point. On the other hand, you can make a site that looks like a blog even quicker. EasyOnMe is one such example.

If you want to extend a WordPress site with new features and don’t have any technical knowledge, it couldn’t be easier. They have an architecture for plugins and widgets that means having to be a PHP expert to get the job done is a thing of the past. This architecture is well thought out and designed for end users too. Result: a massive market of WordPress plugins and widgets, the vast majority of them free!

If you look at the WordPress installation docs, you may run screaming in terror. Don’t. All you have to do is find a web host with cPanel and Fantastico. You’ll be able to install WordPress literally in seconds. Later, you’ll be able to uninstall or update it just as quickly. The trick is finding a web host with good 24 hour support by email or phone. There’s only one:  HostGator (affiliate link), and in my view they’re phenomenal. They also have an awesome moderated forum.

If you’re building a website for your small to medium sized business or other organization, you owe it to yourself to check out WordPress. I have developed an ecourse (free taste here) but you can do it all using the WordPress docs.

We are considering an eSnipe affiliate program. It’s one of those deals where we pay you a chunk of money if you point someone to eSnipe and they become paying customers. 

It would work something like this. We supply you with a special URL. You put it up on your website (or email it to people on your mailing list). If the person clicking the link creates a new account and eventually purchases with us, then you’d get, say, $10, or perhaps 75% of their first purchase.

Companies that seem to have the affiliate program down include Commission Junction, Paydotcom, and Clickbank. These companies do nothing but manage affiliate programs for others, which reduces the possible errors that might crop up if you create an affiliate program of your own. It also makes many other tasks, such as technical support and database management, easy for the company using the affiliate program. We would almost certainly use such a third-party site to administer the affiliate program for eSnipe. 

There are some complicating factors, namely that you don’t get paid for up to 6 weeks after you’ve referred a customer. Heh, you ask?

The reason for the exceedingly long wait time is fraud control. First off, we have a 2 week free sniping period. Second, we have a 30 day money-back guarantee. That’s 6 weeks total. If we paid as soon as someone bought BidPoints, what’s to stop them from obtaining a refund immediately after we’ve paid out the referral cash? I want to stay married, so there’s not going to be an immediate payout. So 6 weeks it is.

Another issue to deal with is payout. I assume most people would want cash. I could also do it in BidPoints, maybe offering twice the value in BidPoints as cash. So instead of $10 cash, you’d get 2,000 BidPoints. Just a thought.

Have any feedback on this idea?  Please post a comment if you do. I’d love to hear about it.

Cheers,

Tom Campbell