What Works
March 17, 2004
Reviewing some recent postings, I realized I have been complaining a lot about email, so I want to balance the negative by spending some time thinking about and writing about what works well in the Internet. I am a suspicious sort (being a lifelong Red Sox fan will do that to you), so I fear that I may be jinxing myself. But I will try anyway.
So what does work? My first thought is that many of the large e-commerce sites seem to not only work well but seem to be improving over time. Now, I am sure people run into problems, but I wonder how the problem rate in major e-commerce sites compares with, for example, catalog ordering by phone. Has this been tabulated?
I mention this because of some recent experiences with eBay. I am an infrequent seller and buyer on eBay. As a seller, though, I am attuned to ease of use. Over the past year, eBay has added a number of features, most notably better integration with PayPal. You still have to log in separately to PayPal for many functions (a drag, but perhaps a necessary evil for security reasons), but the eBay selling interface provides a much more unified view of status than it formerly did. It feels more like an application, instead of a bunch of loosely aggregated links.
Now I can check payment status and shipping status on items much more easily. One newer feature caught my eye. I can now print postage and shipping labels directly from my paypal account. The fee is charged automatically, the labels printed, and the recipient notified via email that the package is being shipped. The email notification can include the tracking information for the package. This newer feature eliminates many manual steps for me as a small seller.
The one drawback is fees. The profit from small sales, especially, can be eaten up by the combined fees of eBay and PayPal. The goal should be an e-commerce infrastructure that makes profitable even the smallest sales (think a total sale of 10 cents for an archived news article, with the total fees being less than a penny).
I can see small publishers taking advantage of this kind of infrastructure over time. Such an infrastructure should widen the kinds of products publishers can
efficiently produce and profitably distribute.
Posted by Bill Trippe at March 17, 2004 2:27 PM