Snipesoft Blog

The fastest sites in New Zealand (yes, we’re in there!)

ProjectX have published an interesting post about how well optimised New Zealand’s most popular websites are:

The bragging rights for NZ’s fastest webpage does not belong to Trade Me but to Land Transport at #1 and Canterbury University at #2. (Although Trade Me dominate the Top 10).

The key takeaway from this audit is the effect of too many page elements will kill download speed. Reducing the number of page elements will speed up the site!

We’re very happy to be among the fastest sites tested, coming in right behind Trade Me!  Being one of New Zealand’s 75 most popular websites means that we need to pull all the stops to ensure fast, reliable access to every visitor and user.

Our server infastructure and development techniques take advantage of the latest technologies which keeps us ahead of the pack and maintains our position as leaders of New Zealand e-commerce integration.

We wouldn’t have it any other way.

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The price is right, regardless of the postage

Test auctions on eBay showed that most people prefer to pay a low price for an item and also pay postage than pay a higher price and get free postage, even when the former added up to more than the latter.

A CD for $5+$6 postage is preferred to a CD for $10+freepost. It wasn’t presented as that stark a choice: multiple auctions with different price-postage ratios revealed a net preference for low item price and a poor correlation between auction success and stated postage costs.

Interesting but hardly surprising: the salience of the price is greater than the cost of shipping (the anchoring cognitive fallacy), and people in general are not as rational or systematic as they/we believe. Or, as the authors put it:

We show that these results can be accounted for by boundedly rational bidding behavior such as loss-aversion with separate mental accounts for different attributes of the price or disregard for shipping costs.

This is science with real-world application: if you’re selling something in online auctions in competition with similar/same products you’ll do better, all else being equal, to price it low and impose a large-but-ignored shipping cost.

Source: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/02/make_money_on_e.html

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Upgrading from Auctionitis has never been easier!

Switching to a new system can be a daunting task – especially one with as many features as OMINS!  There are usually many new options and new ways to think about things and it can be a bit overwhelming at times.

Now, however, migrating your product data just became a whole lot easier!

OMINS has always been able to import your auctions from Trade Me and create products out of them.  It was a simple matter of entering the auction numbers to import and letting OMINS do the work.

What’s changed?

We’ve now extended this feature to support importing from the Auctionitis XML export.  This will make upgrading from Auctionitis to OMINS a whole lot easier!

How easy?

All you need to do is export your XML from your current Auctionitis system, then upload it from Products -> Import Products in your menu.  Within a minute or so, all of your Auctionitis auction setups will be imported as OMINS products and auction rules.  Simple!

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The story of OMINS and the golden kiwi…

For the past two weeks, Trade Me has been running a 10th Birthday celebration – a treasure hunt of sorts.  The goal was to find the golden kiwi when you placed a bid or listed an auction.

The promotion seems to have been a great success for Trade Me.  We’ve heard of many people who have finally gotten around to listing their products; or who have been placing more bids in the hopes of snagging the coveted golden kiwi.

Enter OMINS…

We first heard about the competition on the afternoon of Thursday the 12th.  We looked at how it worked and realised that, if nothing was done, OMINS users would miss out.  Since they let their software do all the listing for them, they wouldn’t be there to spot the golden kiwi and claim their prize!

So, that evening, we added full support for the competition into OMINS and waited for it to start…

What we did

The competition was simple – when placing a bid or listing a new auction, the standard Trade Me logo could change into a special golden kiwi logo instead.  If this happened, you simply needed to click it to claim your prize.

This made it very easy to support.  Whenever OMINS performed a list, it simply needed to check the page to see if it contained the special logo.  If it was there, the prize was collected.  Easy as that!

What we won

We were pleasantly surprised at the results! OMINS users won more prizes than anyone else, and by a large margin.   OMINS found 175 golden kiwi’s in total, and of those…

• 43 were Trade Me t-shirts
• 122 were $20 Trade Me account credits
• 5 were $1,000 Trade Me shopping sprees!

We’re very happy about these results (and so are our users)!  It seems OMINS is a virtual four-leaf clover.

Conclusion

There appeared to be a common misconception that using automated software put you at a great disadvantage in this competition.  However, users of OMINS experienced quite the opposite…

When there’s a change on Trade Me – whatever it may be – we react immediately to support it.  Snipesoft works hard every day to give you the best possible advantages – whether it be day-to-day tasks like listing your auctions, or one-off specials like this competition.

If you’re interested in expanding your business, cutting your workflow or putting yourself at an advantage over your competition, take a look at what OMINS has to offer or contact us for more information. We’d love to hear from you!

For your viewing pleasure…

Claiming the Trade Me t-shirt…

Claiming the Trade Me credit…

Claiming the shopping spree…

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We have an Alexa Graph.

Alexa is a site that ranks the popularity of websites. They rank your site against all the other sites in the world.

For instance, Trade Me was the 1,005th most popular site in the world yesterday.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/trademe.co.nz

If the site has ever been in the top 100,000, they display a graph of how your rank changes over time. You can see the Trade Me page above has a nice graph.

Whereas, for instance, the software-for-trademe.co.nz page below has never had a rank below 100,000- so it does not have a graph.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/software-for-trademe.co.nz

Being a web application company, this ranking is something we check regularly. Our rank has been getting better and better over the the last few months!

Yesterday, snipesoft.net.nz got a rank of 84,256. This is the first time snipesoft.net.nz has had a rank of under 100,000…. so today we g0t a graph – yay!
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/snipesoft.net.nz

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OMINS – 1 system, 9 marketplaces

OMINS now supports Trade & Exchange, Lixtor, WhatsOnSale, PriceSpy and PriceMe!

When selling online, it’s important to get your products out there and in front of as many potential customers as possible.  This of course means you should be listing on as many marketplaces as you can to reach the widest possible audience.

And OMINS makes this easy!  As the only true multi-channel system in New Zealand, all major online marketplaces are supported and fully integrated into the system. It’s a simple matter of signing up to a marketplace and clicking a box.  It couldn’t be easier!

OMINS was the first auction management system in New Zealand to support Sella (by 6 months!) and now we’re very happy to announce we are also the first to support Trade & Exchange, Lixtor, What’s on sale, PriceSpy and PriceMe.

As of today, OMINS supports the following marketplaces:

1. Trade Me (www.trademe.co.nz)
2. Sella (www.sella.co.nz)
3. Zillion (www.zillion.co.nz)
4. Trade & Exchange (www.tande.co.nz)
5. Lixtor (www.lixtor.co.nz)
6. What’s on sale? (www.whatsonsale.co.nz)
7. PriceSpy (www.pricespy.co.nz)
8. PriceMe (www.priceme.co.nz)
9. Your own, fully integrated e-commerce site!

Coming soon:

• eBay (www.ebay.com)
• eBay Stores (www.ebay.com/stores)
• Magento (www.magentocommerce.com)

Multi-channel marketing is a great way to expand your business, and OMINS can help you achieve that with ease.  Why would you use anything else?

Contact us if you’d like more information about getting your products on New Zealand’s best marketplaces.

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Updates to OMINS

As part of our regular update schedule, we’ve introduced two updates to OMINS this week.

1) Notification of negative feedback

OMINS has always provided a full report of all your feedback from the day you signed up, and like any report in OMINS it is fully searchable and sortable.

However, we’ve made use of this report and have provided a new email template which can email you whenever a negative feedback is placed.  This allows you to investigate the problem as soon as possible and hopefully come to a resolution with the customer who placed it.

To enable or customise this new email, simply open Settings -> Record Emails in your menu.

2) New search engine friendly URLs for all OMINS websites

The integrated OMINS websites have always been SEO-focused, and this small change is the latest update in this area.

Previously, your OMINS website urls might have looked like this:

• http://www.iworld.co.nz/category/187/
• http://www.iworld.co.nz/product/45/

Now however, the same URLs will look like this:

• http://www.iworld.co.nz/category/187/antiques-collectables/
• http://www.iworld.co.nz/product/45/surround-sound-speaker-cable-80m/

This small change will make all the difference in Google and other search engines.  Google puts a lot of emphasis on what’s in the URL, and by adding these keywords it should increase your Google rank and help direct people to your OMINS e-commerce sites.

What’s coming up next?

As some of you know, we’re hard at work creating some fairly major updates to OMINS, as well as a couple of side projects which we’re very excited about.  We’ll release more information about both of these things in the near future.

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Webstock09

Last month, Owen and I attended the Webstock conference in Wellington.  This is a fantastic conference for anyone interested in web development and social media.

We had a great couple of days listening to the variety of speakers, and talking to other companies in the industry.  In particular, we caught up with the Trade Me development team at the after-party and had a good talk for an hour or so.  It seems this year will be an interesting one.

In short, WebStock09 was well worth visiting, and we encourage anyone developing for the web to attend next time around.

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Trade Me category changes: Electronics & Photography

Today Trade Me made a change to the categories in the Electronics & photography section.

Although OMINS updates categories automatically the instant it detects a change, there is still the task of updating your products to match the new categories.  We understand this can take a bit of time, so we thought of how to best solve the problem…

We considered providing a list of changed categories to help customers adjust their products, but decided that just providing a list isn’t good enough.

So instead, we’ve devised a way to automatically correct your products when this happens.   This means that whenever Trade Me makes a category change, OMINS will automatically adjust your products to match up with the new categories and your products will continue listing without a hitch.

We’ll implement this feature within the next week, so next time a category change happens you probably won’t even notice!  In the mean time, we’ll run the script manually to update everyone’s categories due to this change so everyone’s products will continue to list.

Just another way OMINS saves you time.

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OMINS powers 7 out of the top 9 Trade Me stores

While looking around today, I noticed something exciting – 7 of the top 9 stores on Trade Me use OMINS to manage their Trade Me listings and after sales!

We’re obviously very happy about this;  it shows how OMINS can help grow your business and reach the top.  By making it simple to list and manage many hundreds of simultaneous auctions, OMINS allows businesses to focus on the more important things, like helping customers or sourcing new products.

Keep up the good work guys!

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