A little over a year ago I wrote a post entitled New Warehouse Layout, Inventory Zones, & Efficiency where I explained our new “inventory zone” system. Prior to implementing that system, packing slips would just print out items in alphabetical order, potentially sending one of us all over the warehouse to pull the products for [...]
Archive for the ‘Ecommerce’ Category
Designing the New Detailed Image Home Page
Yesterday we launched a new home page for Detailed Image. Here’s what the old home page looked like: And here’s the new one: In retrospect, Mike and I both thought that we had taken several steps backwards with our last few home page designs since we re-launched the entire site about 15 months ago. We [...]
The Sad End of Bing Cashback
Bing is discontinuing their Bing Cashback program as of tonight at 9 PM PST. The program allowed customers to receive a percentage of their purchase back (anywhere from 2% – 10% usually) if they visited the merchant using Bing’s shopping search. As a consumer, I thought this was an awesome program. I got over $100 [...]
Chargeback Fraud – Customer Caught Red Handed (Finally!)
Without a doubt the most popular post I’ve written was last years post about chargebacks. Like most retailers, we feel pretty helpless when it comes to chargebacks, and I think that resonates with people. Since the system at it’s core is very broken, retailers don’t have a whole lot of options. Any system you put [...]
How Amazon Exploits the “Mid-Tail”
Last October I wrote a post about how Amazon uses data from sellers like us to gain a competitive advantage. You can pretty much sum up the entire post with this promo image of Amazon’s that I “amended” to reflect our experiences: We’ve since stopped selling on Amazon, but I’ve continued to receive emails about [...]
Inventory – the Death of e-Commerce Companies, Large and Small
A New Company Let’s take, for example, a brand new company that’s getting into the blue widget business. For fun, let’s call the owner Carlos. Widgets cost $50, and retail for $100. For simplicity, we’ll assume that Carlos has to pay in cash up front (which is somewhat common when you just start out), that [...]
Making Shipping Estimates a Little More Obvious
Back in September when we did our exhaustive shipping project on Detailed Image, one of the more interesting features was a system we developed to estimate the ship date and arrival date of the package based upon the delivery location, time of day (before or after our last shipment time), day of the week, upcoming [...]
No Longer Shipping Internationally
Effective yesterday we are no longer shipping packages internationally. This also includes US Territory addresses and APO addresses. Much like closing down Tastefully Driven, there were a lot of reasons behind our decision, but it can all pretty much be summed up by saying that it was too much work for how small of a [...]
Goodbye Tastefully Driven, So Long Amazon
In an effort to become more efficient, more profitable, and more flexible, we’ve decided to close Tastefully Driven and stop selling our products on Amazon. Effective March 1 the e-commerce store will be closed down and we will sell any remaining inventory (non-detailing of course) on Amazon. We’re running a 30% off sale to try [...]
Thank You DI Customers!
It’s 4:13 PM on Tuesday and I think this is the first second that I’ve had to relax since last Wednesday. The past five days have been out of control busy. When posted on Thursday I was excited to find out what was to come of our Thanksgiving-Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday sale, but I wasn’t quite sure what [...]
