Day: January 15, 2008

A Far-From-Anonymous Birthday

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

So, today is/was my birthday, and as usual I celebrated it with my close family.

What was interesting this year is that this may have been my first “Social Networking” birthday.

Normally, I’d expect to get 10-20 notes, email and cards, from the subset of close friends and family who decided to take the time to do something.  This year was different, however.  I think I got over 100 messages, at least.

While I’d love to say it’s because I’m getting more popular, I think that there is something else at work: the social networking effect.

Let’s say you have about 50 close friends.  If about 25% of them remember your birthday, then you get about 10-12 messages.

Social networking, however, has changed that.  Skype knows my birthday.  Geni knows my birthday.  Facebook knows my birthday.  Even InCircle knows my birthday! (LinkedIn does not know my birthday… yet.)

If these sites let people keep track of 100, 200, even 1000 friends, then even a 10% sampling from these groups can lead to over 100 messages.  What’s more, these sites and applications make it incredibly simple to send a note, post on a wall, etc.

The strange effect is this:  On the one hand, you get more messages than ever before.  On the other hand,  the notes from your really good friends are obscured somewhat by the avalanche of notes from more distant friends who now can more easily keep up on these things.

So, overall, I’m feeling pretty good today.  It was quite a few notes to go through, and my apologies to everyone if I didn’t respond to them all yet.  But there is a little part of me that misses the implicit intimacy of knowing who actually took extra time to remember my birthday, the old-fashioned way.

I guess that nostalgia is a sign that I am getting old.  🙂

Amazon Beat eBay in Holiday Traffic

/ Adam Nash

This is a surprising piece from the New York Times:

For years, eBay ruled the e-commerce roost. Each holiday season, more visitors spent more time and looked at more pages on eBay.com than on any of its rivals, including Amazon.com. It made sense; eBay is a wide open forum for every kind of seller and item, while Amazon has traditionally pushed a selection of products through its network of physical warehouses.

But all that is now slowly changing. Amazon has opened its site to independent sellers, while eBay’s auction model is running into problems with fee-fatigued sellers and buyers wary of fraud and counterfeit items.

Now the latest audience figures from Nielsen Online confirm that the e-commerce traffic crown has changed heads. For the month of December, for the first time, more Americans clicked over to Amazon.com (59,624,000) than eBay (59,374,000).

Despite the slim margin between the two companies, eBay’s visitor count is particularly alarming. According to the Nielsen data, the number of visitors to eBay.com dropped 10 percent from December 2006 to December 2007.

The full article is here.

Now, in all fairness, Amazon’s rise in traffic isn’t all good news for them.  After all, the GMV (gross merchandise volume) on eBay is much higher than on Amazon, which means Amazon is far less efficient at converting traffic into dollars of sales.  In addition, given Amazon’s overall profit margins, it also looks like Amazon takes more traffic to generate a dollar of profits than eBay, by quite a bit.

Still, this is a really significant milestone for Amazon, and a significant warning sign for eBay.  Amazon’s ability to grow into categories through it’s seller marketplace is now hitting it’s stride, and it’s pretty clear that as e-commerce matures, it will be fixed-price e-commerce, and not auctions, that dominate the market.

eBay has a tremendous amount of fixed price capability at its disposal, but the fixed price market is about trust and convenience, not just about selection and value.   Merchandising and product promotion is also crucial, and these are areas eBay will need to invest in heavily.

Here’s hoping 2008 is a year where eBay hits some new milestones of its own.