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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Ecommerce
Our Improved Inventory Zone System
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 an order. We smartened up and assigned a “zone” to each shelving unit, which was then entered into our database to correspond with the products in the “zone” so that the packing slips printed products in “snaking zone order” like so: This helped pulling speed … Continue reading
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 wanted to bring back the emphasis on our products and all of our sales without overloading the user with text. We also wanted it to be a bit more eye-catching. Maybe a better way to look at this redesign is to look at just the … Continue reading
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 back when I bought my new laptop from HP a few months ago. The reason I’m writing a post about it though is because I also loved the program as a merchant. Detailed Image was accepted into the program just over a year ago. The … Continue reading
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 in place to reduce chargeback fraud invariably creates issues for legit customers. Creating new problems for all customers when a very small few are causing the issues, without guaranteeing any higher success rate, is what makes us tread very carefully. Dave wrote a post about … Continue reading
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 the post. Once such email was from a graduate student, Baojun Jiang of Carnegie Mellon, who was writing a thesis on the topic of topic. I think it’s absolutely awesome that someone would want to delve deeper into Amazon’s awkward relationship with their sellers. He … Continue reading
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 he orders once per month, and that he receives his inventory immediately (clearly, not very common). Carlos has saved up and he has $5k to start out with, so he buys 100x widgets. In the spreadsheet, Qty is the quantity that Carlos has in stock, … Continue reading
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 holidays, and shipping service selected. It’s a pretty sweet system. In the comments, Oke suggested that we include the day of the week so that the customer doesn’t have to peek at a calendar to figure out when their package will arrive. I agreed and … Continue reading
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 part of our business it was, and that we’d rather focus our time and energy elsewhere. However, unlike with Tastefully Driven, I think this will get a little backlash from our customers, which I’ll touch on more below. Here is the in-depth reasoning behind our … Continue reading
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 to blow out as much of the inventory as we can before that date. We’ve already pulled all detailing items down from Amazon and have no plans on listing them again in the future. As soon as the fitness items, poker cards, and personal care … Continue reading
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 to expect. Even with all of the preparation and all of the things we’ve improved upon in the last year (namely the new Detailed Image site, which has only been around some six months even though it seems like we’ve had in place forever), the … Continue reading