Waterstones have been over-charging on their books. Naughty

The common assumption is that almost everything is cheaper online. Lower staffing and ‘bricks and mortar’ costs means savings made can be passed on to the consumer via deals and discounted RRP. There is no doubt that one of the biggest beneficiaries of this in recent years has been the Book industry. Since Amazon lead the charge, books have never been so popular. And this seems to be something that Waterstones has been using to it’s advantage as a recent report from The Bookseller shows Waterstones selling books online at a higher price point than the RRP.

Check out internet Retailing article here

This brings up another important online factor – laziness. People have become very lazy shoppers online, almost total creatures of habit. The assumption is that they are getting a good deal and so they go with what’s in front of them. This is massive business on portals like Ebay – a friend of mine makes about £20,000 profit annually buying stuff from traditional websites – like PC world, Amazon – and then selling for a mark-up on Ebay. And it sells. People cannot even be bothered to price check when it would take a few minutes.

Waterstones will likely lose some customers now but it shows the value of a brand that people trust – they won’t look elsewhere. If you want to help build a trusted brand online (and not rip off consumers) then get in touch with us at Neoco. We have a wealth of experience communicating brand messaging and communications to the right audience in the right way – from traditional online methods to emerging ones like social networks.

amazon trade-in grab

In these budget-minded times, companies aplenty have begun offering cash or trade-ins in exchange for unwanted electronics, gift cards and gold. Now, from none other than Amazon, comes a program to offer gift cards in exchange for second-hand video games.

To be eligible, games must be in good condition and include the original manual, cover art and case. Amazon’s Video Game Trade-In site lists a wide variety of games it will accept, along with their trade-in values. For Wii, for example, “Marvel Ultimate Alliance” is valued at USD 6, “Winter Sports the Ultimate Challenge” brings in USD 6.50 and “Super Paper Mario” is valued at USD 15.50. On Xbox 360, on the other hand, “Call of Duty: World at War” brings in USD 24.25. For shipments valued at USD 10 or more, Amazon even gives consumers a way to ship them for free. Upon receipt, Amazon deposits an Amazon.com Gift Card into the consumer’s account. The games, meanwhile, are ultimately purchased by a third-party merchant. While trade-in prices might not be as high as a seller can get on eBay, there’s no denying that Amazon’s service is the more convenient option.

Until economic conditions begin to improve, consumers will continue to seek out recession-busting strategies to make their hard-won dollars, euros and yen go further. Help them do that, and you just may be able to do some recession-busting yourself!

Interesting to see how this impacts ebay and the other high street retailers like Game, HMV, Blockbuster and CEX.

RB @Springwise

whilst looking at the iphone screen, the WWExpo designer had a great idea for a logo...

Hooray! Widget Web Expo is coming to town (London)! The future of the web is widgets – in fact, the present of the web is widgets too. Long time associate and thoroughly nice bloke Ivan Pope (Mr Widget) is chairing the WidgetWebExpo 6-7th October, in Covent Garden, London. It should be a great event and you should really make it one of the things for you to do in October. I’ll be down with some of the team and maybe a few clients, so let me know if you want to come along – it will definitely be a chance to put you ahead of your competitors.

Wondering what a Widget is? The simplest explanation is 90% of the elements that make up your Facebook profile are widgets. It’s a loose term for little applications or interfaces which let you stream video, bid on ebay, upload docs – pretty much do anything you can already do on the web! The other great thing about widgets is the way users can incorporate them to their own environments or behaviour. This presents great opportunities to communicate brand messages and experiences in a way that engages the audience.

This Thursday, the internet’s regulators will vote and ultimately decide whether the strict rules on top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can finally be relaxed.

If the plans are agreed, it will have a huge impact on the address system, as companies will be allowed to turn their brands into domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) oversees the domain name system and has been working towards opening up net addresses for the last three years. They have said that any string of letters will be allowed to be registered as a domain, but there will be an independent arbitration process for people with grounds for objection (who hopefully won’t treat every possibility with rejection as they did .xxx – although I’m guessing they are going to). However, hundreds of new domain names are expected to be created by the end of the year, rising to thousands in the future.

While there are clear reasons as to why these plans have come about:  a) the Internet has changed so much since the original address system was established that this system is dated; and b) existing domains are running out; I can’t really see many existing brands and companies actually using them. Maybe in the future once a few others have tried and tested the new domains they will start to catch on, but to start with I think most brands will stick with what they’ve got. After all, brands know that consumers are familiar with their current addresses and that their consumers know exactly where to find them. For example, if I want to visit a site for a brand, say Nokia, the chances are I’ll type in nokia.com and that’s where the site will be. I don’t want to have to start guessing at nokia.nok, mobile.nokia or nokia.nokia (which looks stupid anyway!). Also, changing domain names to turn your brand into a domain will have implications for your SEO. Well established and search engine friendly sites are not going to benefit from starting from scratch – especially taking into account Google’s 6 month sandbox period.

However for some sites, I think the .brand domain will work really well – .ebay is a domain that it’s suggested will be introduced and this make a lot of sense for them. Individual store owners/sellers could then have their own address at .ebay, so for example, my clothes range could be on sale at laurawear.ebay. This system would also work well for other huge sites that have individual pages or subdomains – Facebook members could each have their own address at .facebook.

Another interested point is that the plan would also allow for the new domain names to be internationalised, and so could be written in scripts for Asian and Arabic languages. And again, like most things these days, it will all come down to money in the end. Icann are still working through how much the application fee to register a domain name will be, but it is expected to be at least several thousand dollars. And, in cases where there is a dispute over a domain, there will be an auction and it will go to the highest bidder.

I guess we’ll just have to await the outcome on Thursday to find out whether the rules are relaxed, but hopefully they will be because it will be interesting to see how brands react to the new possibilities.

eBay are suing community ad site Craigslist to “safeguard its four year financial investment”. eBay believe that Craigslist’s executives Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster have adopted unspecified measures that have disadvantaged eBay and unfairly diluted their “economic interest by more than 10%”.  EBay’s general counsel Mike Jacobson has said “since negotiating our investment with Craigslist’s board in 2004, we have acted openly and in good faith as a minority shareholder, so we were surprised by these recent unilateral actions”.

In response, Craigslist have said in their company blog that they are surprised and disappointed by eBay’s “unfounded allegations”, and that eBay’s legal action “came to us out of the blue”. It said “we have always treated eBay fairly as a minority shareholder, and plan to continue doing so, despite this unfortunate development. EBay has absolutely no reason to feel threatened – unless a hostile takeover of Craigslist, or the sale of eBay’s stake in Craigslist to an unfriendly party, is their ultimate goal.”

Read the full article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7362221.stm

The latest earnings report from eBay shows that Skype is now making money! For those of you that are unaware, eBay bought Skype for about $4bn a few years ago when Skype were losing money – and everyone thought it was way overpriced. However, opinions may now be changing, as a result of this announcement:

“Skype continued its strong growth trajectory, reporting $126 million in revenue for the quarter, representing 61% year-over-year growth. Skype added 33 million registered users in the quarter, ending the period with more than 309 million registered users around the world. Skype now has the largest registered user base within eBay Inc.’s portfolio of businesses.”

Although Skype might not be a good fit for eBay, after these impressive earnings it is likely that if eBay were to spin off Skype as its own public company, there would be huge benefits for eBay – it would appease eBay’s shareholders, put money in the bank for more sensible acquisitions, and be one of the hotter Internet IPOs in a few years. After all, few companies of Skype’s size can grow revenue and users more than 10% quarter by quarter – making it a very attractive company to Wall Street investor types. Perhaps eBay has hung onto Skype this long just to let it grow into its $4 billion valuation before offering it up on the public market. Or perhaps they are thinking about selling to someone else? Whichever option, eBay certainly doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to decide.

So, with Skype continuing to grow rapidly, perhaps it was a good investment for eBay after all?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgQMTLKmwrA]

Adobe have lauched new software ‘Adobe Air’ which aims to make the transition between the on and offline worlds seamless. Users will be able to use online applications offline on their desktops, and developers will be able to build tools that still have some functionality even when a computer is no longer connected to the net.

The first programs that use the technology have been developed by a host of companies and web sites, and some have already been released. Ebay for example, have built a program that allows users to do much of the legwork required in setting up auctions offline. The next time that the user connects to the Internet, the listing is posted to the website. The BBC is also building prototypes with Air.

You can run any Air application on PCs, Macs and later this year Linux, after a free download. I’m sure they will come in pretty useful when travelling and on the move. Let us know how you get on with them.