This is my journey as an E-commerce Consultant
Archive for March, 2009
Flesh Bid! ChannelAdvisor Catalyst Tickets + Scot Wingo Meeting
1155 days
Oh yes, buy your self a man….an e-commercey man….
Two Tickets for ChannelAdvisor UK Catalyst Event + Meet Scot Wingo + eBay “Goodie” bag
+ ChannelAdvisor Gift Pack + Company Profile on Tamebay
All proceeds from this auction go to Oxfam
New Hairfreax eBay Shop and Listing Design Part 1 – the Pretty Bit
OK, so I was a bit ambitious with exactly how much time I was going to be able to spend on the coding bit, but I got the designs done!
eBay Shop frame
eBay Listing Template Design
The actual coding part will come, I am slicing it up and coding it as we speak so hopefully I will get the time to play with the new stores experience before catalyst. As you can see I am not the ‘best designer’ in the world, but I will do for my small projects and illustrations.
Edited to add: Apparently my early work in eBay design css inspired these guys and they are now fully compliant with NSE. I will review at a later date. http://smartzstores.co.uk/
eBay New Stores Experience Promise
Right then, so my mind is in tip top condition for Catalyst with respects to the latest and greatest developments in eBay store design I am finally this weekend going to convert that Hairfreax PSD into a matching store frame on the new stores experience.
Promising full store compliance lets look at the key rules broken in the last store design:
Externalised CSS
Oh yes, I am guilty so all the css will now be held within the design pages, which is a right pain if you have to update your css as every page would need to be changed. A step back in coding evolution from eBay…
Using eBay’s own ID or class based rules
OK, so again I manipulated eBays css id’s and classes. Changing them is their prerogative and I will steer clear and make up my own funky names for things. Prepare for the ridiculous.
Basically, the new store will be a nice HTML based frame with the eBay gunk in the middle. I will bust my buttons to make sure the category pages also have this frame so the design is not splash-psge-esq. If I have to jump backwards and not externalise CSS I’m not taking another giant leap backwards by splash paging.
I’ll leave the splash pages to marketing freaks.
I am going to go backwards on this one a little, providing the full code up front then working backwards and breaking it down step by step. I know there are hungry bunnies out there wanting their next eBay design project fix and my time is limited so I want to concentrate on the bulk of the task in hand.
I will update on Saturday with how far I have got. As always the code and crappy images I create will be all free free free, and I won’t even ask you to link back or credit. I would just like see your eBay shop for your take on the framework!
Frooition New Stores…Bugs Bugs Bugs
Is this just MY settings, or does this not show the gallery, just the design frame?
http://stores.shop.ebay.de/Chic-Interiors
Darn it, the shop does not work properly outside the UK. The gallery is just blank, it doesn’t default to the ‘no items’ bit on eBay (seller does not ship abroad) it just looks like dead design. Footer does not work in Firefox either.
And has anyone noticed the left and right hand side navigation links go to pop ups in I.E 7? My pop up blocker is going nuts 
Overall a poor show for Frooition, I did really expect more from their new flash technology…ahh but that has been re-worded to ‘Improved custom box style with flash transitions.’
Frooition paved the way for eBay design in the UK, but like Woolworths*, can not hold up to the competition however cheap the price.
*I brought a cheap DVD player from Woolworths and it started sticking within the first month so now I am having to spend again. If anyone cares, I am replacing it with a PS3….go Blu-ray.
Return of the Experiment…and err corsets too..Google vs eBay
My poor hair business is always the lab rat for my evil experiments. This one is simple though, I am just checking how far things have come as I used to sell corsets on eBay only.
So I have a corset to sell, my only advertising is Google Adwords, Google Base, My site and My blog. This is to chart how much money it would cost to sell this item and the speed of uptake. On eBay I am going with the ’3 listings’ rule. That is the item should sell after a maximum of 3 goes at 10 days each. eBay would cost: £3.90 insertion fees, £0.45 Gallery fee and a single FVF of £6.82.
Total £11.17 for a sell time of 30 days
Lets see if Google can beat that…if it has not sold in 30 days I wacking it on ebay!
