Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Cyber Monday into resolution Tuesday? Not quite, despite the public “mea culpa” offered by Rich Riley, SVP, Online Channel Division, Yahoo!

Yahoo’s blog apology to the thousands of small business merchant Websites and stores left stranded on the premiere online holiday shopping day due to a 12 hour outage of Yahoo’s Web services does little to redress the damages suffered by Yahoo merchant customers.

Yahoo on “Here’s what happened”:

• On Monday at 6:00AM PT, the systems that power our merchant stores experienced outages, and shoppers of those stores were met with either error messages or they were unable to complete the checkout process.
• These issues lasted until about 1:00PM PT when, despite slow performance, transactions began going through at a much higher rate.
• By 6:00 PM PT things were back to normal and the performance of our systems was at 100%.

We deeply regret the inconvenience this caused to both our merchants and their shoppers. Our customers’ expectations were not met, nor were our own. And we are moving mountains inside Yahoo! to find out why and how this happened, and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

As for the future, rest assured that we are taking the necessary steps to prepare for the peak holiday selling season. We have technical and customer relations staff mobilized and ready to support our partners.

Yahoo small business case closed? Not for savvy Yahoo customers who will undoubtedly hold Yahoo accountable for delivering on its service promise of ”Consistent 99.9% uptime.”

Yahoo also promises “24/7 toll-free phone support” in its product specs. The Yahoo Terms Of Service is not so promising, however:

Yahoo! reserves the right to establish limitations on the extent of any support provided for the Service, and the hours at which it is available.

Yahoo assures now nevertheless:

At Yahoo! Small Business we know that our success and our customers’ success are interdependent, and yesterday’s issue reminds us that we need to continue to work even harder in the future.

Small businesses that missed out on big business Cyber Monday due to Yahoo’s non-performance would undoubtedly be more assured if Yahoo worked to provide 99.9% service credits instead of simply promising to “work harder.”

MORE: Intuit’s New Homestead: Local Advertising Revolution, or Evolution?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Who says who needs MySpace? Not Hearst Corp. In acquiring Kaboodle, Hearst Interactive Media president Kenneth Bronfin looks to MySpace for inspiration (not Facebook):

Kaboodle is a rapidly growing business in a distictive and fascinating space. We are delighted to becoame a significant player in the social shopping space and believe that Kaboodle will bring to social shopping what MySpace has brought to social media.

What is the “heart” of Kaboodle? “A fun and engaging community of people who love to shop,” so believes Kaboodle founder & CEO Manish Chandra. he looks to Hearst for “premier content” and “deep media and advertising relationships” in building out a “premier social shopping platform.”

Cathleen Black on how Hearst Magazines will support the Kaboodle build out: “Our readers will be able to find the products featured in our magazines, shop electronically with their friends and get their feedback.”

The Wall Street Journal on Hearst’s future Kaboodle plans:

Hearst says it is likely to build pages on Kaboodle featuring products from many of its 19 U.S. magazine titles, such as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, aiming to generate buzz around the magazines by allowing shoppers to sound off about the products they feature online. It wants to develop Kaboodle into a larger independent lifestyle site by linking it with deep-pocketed advertisers and editorial content.

The business newspaper of “record,” WSJ, says Hearst wants to “feature products from many of its magazines” and link “deep-pocketed advertisers and editorial content.”

Where will Hearst editorial stop and/or begin? Are “products featured” by Hearst, now in its magazines, soon at Kaboodle, editorial recommendations or paid product placements? Will “social shoppers” know the difference? Will Hearst take a commissison on editorial product “features” that are linked with “deep-pocketed advertisers” for ecommerce?

Shopping magazine editorial is already often a seeming compilation of corporate PR fueld covert product placements.

Conde Nast’s “mission statement” for Lucky Magazine:

Lucky is America’s ultimate shopping and style magazine. The best to buy in fashion, beauty and living. The voice of a friend you love to take shopping. Choices, not dictates. Price points ranging from high to low. Buying info for every item featured.

Lucky magazine online drives traffic to Conde Nast’s “Direct to You,” which Hearst undoubtedly evaluated while evaluating Kaboodle. “Exclusive shopping opportunities brought to you by Conde Nast Publications,” is the tag line:

Direct to You is a unique online marketplace that offers exclusive promotions you won’t find anywhere else.

REALLY? The “Careers & Education” Marketplace “from the publishers of Glamour, Teen Vogue & Bon Appetit, for example, is apparently little more than a compilation of paid links to third-party Websites. No Conde Nast advertorial disclaimer is apparent, though.

Conde Nast’s “Direct to You” also lets readers “sound off about the products they feature,” as Hearst intends to do with the Kaboodle destination.

Beware social shoppers: Editorial ecommerce blooms.

ALSO: Dabble DB Kedrosky VC Lesson: Business Model Required and Spock vs. Facebook People Search Smackdown

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Buy.com announces a three-way with Facebook and eBay, aiming to usurp eBay personal selling leadership.

Dubbed “Garage Sale,” Buy.com heralds it is “putting Internet selling power in the hands of consumers” via ecommerce capability embedded within personal profile pages on social networking sites.”

First up, Facebook.:

For the first time ever, goods can be bought directly on the profile page, and purchasers never have to leave the page to complete the purchase transaction. With Garage Sale, consumers no longer need to pay listing charges associated with online auction sites, and they can take advantage of significantly lower individual transaction fees.

The Garage Sale capability is currently available to Facebook users, and Buy.com plans to roll out the service to users on other online social networks shortly. Facebook users simply add the Garage Sale feature from Facebook’s application suite and upload product information and photos to begin selling on their personal profile pages using Garage Sale’s secure transaction capability.

Buy.Com CEO Neel Grover on the opportunity: “We see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay, and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing.”

In good Web 2.0 coopetition fashion, Buy.com needs eBay to compete with it, though: Widely used eBay’s PayPal will help power payment processing.

Facebook has some big, bad coopetition issues of its own, with the arrival of Garage Sale on Facebooker profiles. The Buy.com personal selling meets social networking venture is but the latest individual commercial option available within Facebook, following a recent string of conflicting Facebook social selling initiatives including Oodle Classifieds Group on Facebook and Facebook’s own “Facebook Marketplace.”

Upon the launch of “Facebook Marketplace,” I underscored that by not committing to a single, unified personal selling offering, Facebook not only dilutes its own position in the marketplace, it fragments Facebook users’ commercial demand.

The “Facebook Marketplace,” according to Facebook:

Make it easy for people who share real-life connections to discover listings and sell items among friends and within their networks. Marketplace is about individuals selling or seeking items within Facebook networks.

The Facebook embedded Buy.com “Garage Sale,” according to Gene Alvarez, Gartner:

Anyone who has ever asked a friend if they knew someone who would buy their stuff understands the power of that sales model. when you add the Internet’s community, collaboration and sales capabilities, we will see yet another transformation of e-commerce and the dawn of online social selling.

Mark Zuckerberg dismissed any need to directly monetize “Facebook Marketplace” when it launched; He also dismissed any need for Facebook to share in any monetization achieved by third-party applications in Facebook, when the F8 platform launched.

Facebook is apparently succeeding in NOT making money off of Facebooker selling via Facebook; Buy.com will pocket a 5% sales commission, though.

PLUS: Facebook Profile Hijacked: Beware the Dangerous OPEN Social Graph and Perfect Online Newspaper Storm: Digital Ads Explode, Pay Wall Implodes

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

eBay Kijiji aims to impact the entire online classifieds market in the U.S., not just Craigslist.

Classifieds aggregator Oodle wants to aggregate everyone’s online classifieds listings, including Kijiji and Craigslist.

WHAT IS OODLE’S REACTION TO EBAY KIJIJI LAUNCHING IN THE UNITED STATES?

I asked Oodle CEO Craig Donato to find out. Below is our Q & A.

DB: Do you already work with Kijiji outside of the U.S.? For example, Kijiji is very strong in Canada and Oodle just launched in Canada.

DONATO: In the U.K., Oodle includes Gumtree listings, which is the local Kijiji brand, and Kijiji in Canada. We’re hopeful that we can work with them in the U.S. but we haven’t yet started to do so.

DB: How does Kijiji launching in the U.S. impact Oodle?

DONATO: It’s great for consumers and it’s great for Oodle. Providing consumers with choice is alays a good thing. And consumers are increasingly getting more options to post free classifieds listings. Obviously as consumers use more and different marjetplaces, Oodle becomes more useful. It’s also important to note that consumers don’t publish listings directly into Oodle. As a search engine, it is our goal to partner with all the classifieds marketplaces on the Internet, big and small, local and national.

DB: Oodle seeks to be the leading classifieds site in the U.S. Oodlefieds site in the U.S. Oodle aggregates 75, 000 sources for its 20 million listings monthly. Craigslist alone represents the same number of listings monthly. Can any company, even eBay, dethrone Craigslist?

DONATO: Yes, we’re already doing a great job without Craiglsist. First off, the market for Classifieds listings is more fragmented than most people realize. Consumers can usually find more listings through Oodle than through Craigslist. In certain metros, where Craigslist is very popular, the numbers are closer, especially in the merchandise category, where they are very strong. But even when you look across the Bay Area, Craigslist’s bigggest market, oodle has more than twice the number of car and apartment listings.

Second, Oodle provides a wide range of tools–alerts, pricing guides, fraud detection–to help consumers find the reigh lsitings in the right marketplace.

With repsect to Kijiji, I do believe ebay can be successful. Unlike an auction, where you have to choose one venue to list your item, it makes sense for consumers to publish thier clasifieds in multiple places, epsecially ehen they are easy to use and free. So there’s no reason for consumers to not publish their lsitings in both Kijiji and Craigslist.

DB: Can Oodle be a leader in the classifieds industry without access to Craigslist listings? Is Craigslist a “walled garden”?

DONATO: Oodle can be a leader by best serving the needs of consumers trying to buy, or rent, things through classifieds. Consumers find great deals though classifieds, but its typically a painful and time consuming experience. We can lead by providing great tools that simplify the shopping experience and by partnering with clasified marketplaces across the Internet.

For example, when you’re looking for a used car, it’s great to go to one place to help you see al the local listings in your area. Our pricing guides help you figure out what’s a good price to pay and how often deals at the price pop up; If you tell Oodle what model you’re looking for, we’ll email you when one is posted.

Craigslist a walled garden? Yes, I guess you could say trhey are acting like one. They are putting up a wall between the listings that consumers publish in their marketplace and those consumers that may want to use a search engine or other tool to help them shop with online classifieds.

DB: Does eBay entering the U.S. classifieds marketplace change the Oodle business plan?

DONATO: NO. Indeed, we’ve been surprised to see so few companies come out and offer free classifieds. We’ve alwys believed that a vibrant ecosystem of classifieds marketplaces will serve a variety of local and Internet communities.

Search is generally recognized as playing a useful role to both consumers and ecommerce sites on the Internet today. The need for search in classifieds is even more pronounced.

With classifieds, you’re looking for one unique thing, such as that dream apartment, that perfect job, that disappears when someone else buys it, so classifieds need to be very timely. Also, classifieds listings tend to be poorly described with lots of unstructured data, so they are hard to search.

Classiifeds is very diferent than say searching for a specific Olympus camarea that is mainly about securing the best price. Consumers benefit as competing classifieds marketplaces innovate.

Thanks Craig!

For more exclusive Insider Chatter classifieds CEO interviews, see: Oodle CEO: Classifieds are Local, and Social and Craigslist Q & A: Classifieds Community NO ‘Walled Garden’ and Craigslist’s Craig Newmark: ‘My life is a sitcom’

PLUS: Backfence.com and Google: Money Can’t Buy Local Love

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

eBay Live was big on “Social Shopping,” circa 2006 in Las Vegas that is. What a difference a year makes?

Last June, the annual eBay power seller convention was riding the Web 2.0 community train, rolling out new “collaboration” and “sharing” tools for the seller faithfull, such as eBay Blogs and a eBay Community Wiki.

“The World’s Online Marketplace” also partnered with Kaboodle, a start-up e-commerce oriented Web 2.0 bookmarking service, for “MyCollectibles,” billed as a social sharing destination for collectable enthusiasts, but launched as a marketing platform for eBay sellers.

The eBay Live Boston agenda last week though was heavy on not so social bottom-line online retail sales tactics:

Opimize Your eBay Store
Digital Photography to Make You an eBay Power Seller,
Writing Better Descriptions,
Extreme Listing Makeover,
Managing Payment Risk…AND

Product Sourcing, Find Products Buyers Want

Finding out what BUYERS really want, and helping them get it, easier and faster at eBay, is a top priority for eBay going forward, according to CEO Meg Whitman, as cited by the New York Times:

I think people expect more from eBay. We have to make sure our old users stay with us, but we are going to be more bold around product changes than we’ve been in the past.

What may be bold in the eBay world? Consumer usability enhancements, such as: a less cluttered homepage to reduce shopper confusion and a categorization of search results by seller ratings, rather than auction expiration time.

eBay is currently testing a variety of buyer-focused usabilty improvements and hopes to begin rolling out changes in August:

We’re optimistic that the changes will translate to accelerated growth and help us chnage the trajectory of our two largest markets, U.S. and Germany.

Whitman underscores the impending eBay site modifications will be buyer focused, noting eBay has historically gone through periods where at times it “concentrated more on sellers” than buyers, but now it is the buyers’ turn.

The customer is always right? eBay believes that doing good by consumers will spark a virtuous eBay circle where all win: eBay buyers, sellers, and shareholders.

ALSO: eBay Trumps Google: Is Viacom Next?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

When a $160 billion corporation with a stated public mission of “organizing” online all the world’s personal and commercial information, kowtows to a $43 billion dollar corporation that fuels a big part of online commerce, is it a game changer? YES!

First at Google.com, then with Google News, now at YouTube, the “non-media” company Google is the defacto destination for accessing media content, of others.

Google gets away (for the most part) with making billions by selling ads against content owned by others at Google, even though it does not compensate the content owners for its commercial use of their content, because it dangles a seemingly “fair-trade” lure of Google search traffic.

BUT for those (large numbers of) content owners that do not win the high-stakes chase for top Google SERP rankings, Google has a (big) back-up defense: “fair-use.”

YES, Google claims it is entitled to sell billions in advertising against media while never paying a cent for the use of that media, because it “only” shows snippets of the content of others (Google’s copying, caching and controlling of the Web’s content is still not a resolved issue, despite popular belief).

Legal arguments aside, however, what about plain old “fair business”? Google’s entire no-need-to-pay for the content of others modus operandi, even though we make billions off of it, can not be sustainable in every sector, worldwide. 

In Google’s Big, Bad Risk: Coopetition and Google Turns eBay Party Crasher yesterday I underscore that Google “partners” have some defenses of their own against Google’s mighty search power. eBays huge AdWords spend, for example, estimated to represent Google’s largest single client.

How about YouTube’s $1 billion “massive copyright infingement” plaintiff Viacom?

Will Google CEO Schmidt and YouTube King Hurley continue their condescending “no need to sue” public retorts to Viacom, while still playing an incredulous copyright “tools are in the works” game? Most likely, even though Google’s YouTube “fair use” card is weaker than at Google.com, depsite the DMCA.

Nevertheless, eBay has made its power move to thwart Google’s power, and it worked. Viacom still has a Googley day in court to look forward to, a  potential $1 billion day.

READ my exclsuive interview with the lead prosecuting attorneys, Proskaeur Rose, in the class action against YouTube for “massive copyright infringement”: YouTube Copyright Infringement Claims ‘tip of the iceberg’

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN