Maybe this is why CA is being more aggressive about trying to find more customers:

Or this from Alexa.com:

This was the email I and like 10 other people received (click to enlarge). Many of the other people did not receive it as it was sent to a dot com that is no longer registered by anybody. No website there. Certainly no email boxes at a dot com not owned by anybody. But nobody at CA noticed, and the email went out…

But what really caught my attention was when a client who got cold called told me that ChannelAdvisor told him we are competitors. As Was does not compete with ChannelAdvisor in any way. We do not offer software at all. They offer software. They fired their designers years ago, and have a web page on their site where they recommend “design partners.” We used to be on that page back when I was doing everything I could possibly do to support and recommend CA. Once I was hearing from so many unhappy CA clients, I could no longer recommend them, so they took us off their page. But we don’t compete. You can work with both of us as we supply different services and products.

We have supported CA customers since we first saw the system in 2001. We can install our fantastic eBay listing templates. We can do CA basic stores, though you’d never really want one. We can do CA Premium Stores, should you think you want one. If you are considering Channel Advisor, we suggest looking at Solid Commerce. We make no money from these recommendations. As consultants who live on our reputation, it’s important for us to make impartial and unpaid recommendations to match sellers with the right system for them. Most people looking at ChannelAdvisor would probably be happier with Solid Commerce, or so I’ve found. But then again, we had some clients leave ChannelAdvisor for Blackthorne and Auctiva! I have a British client trying StoreFeeder.com instead of CA. No idea if StoreFeeder is any good, but it sounds like they’re an option.

I also think Magento is a fantastic choice. It’s a GREAT eCommerce system that we’ve been designing for for years. You can list to eBay, Amazon, etc… It’s a real multi-channel system with a lot of flexibility. Magento was great before eBay bought them, and now, eBay appears to be putting nearly all their eggs in the Magento basket. This means we are (still) not recommending ProStores.

I can’t really make much sense out of ChannelAdvisor. I never understood why they told people they competed with us when they don’t. I never understood why they told people in 2008 that eBay was going to outlaw As Was templates. Wasn’t true then and certainly isn’t true now, but was really surreal. Any company that has to say these types of things to try to make themselves look like a better choice… well, I guess they feel like that’s the best way to try to compete. CA and As Was can happily co-exist.

It also never made sense to me that ChannelAdvisor had $75 million in venture capital funding, but had its first profitable quarter at the end of 2008. To get that profit, they had to cut 19% of staff. Plus it shouldn’t be missed that the profit came in Q4, which is holiday selling time, and CA takes a percentage of their users’ sales. It was interesting that they announced at that time that they’d stop innovating around eBay. I had always felt that they had stopped that around 2002. But their profit in late 2008 was on $10 million in revenue for that quarter. This means that investors gave them $75 million, and they used that to bring in $10 million of business in their best quarter to date. I think that’s a bad sign. Give me $75 million, and I promise to turn it at LEAST into $75.1 million. And I’ve noticed that CA has stopped publicly talking about their revenue or number of customers.

So in closing, we don’t compete with CA. We don’t recommend them. We think other options will work better and cost less for most sellers. Some sellers will still need CA, and we support them. We can design for CA’s stores and eBay features. If you sign with CA, my main suggestion is typically to mark in your calendar the day you need to tell CA whether or not you are continuing with them another year. The word on the street is that if you let that day come and go, your contract renews for a full year, and there’s no way to break the contract. Mark your calendars just in case you want to terminate with CA as you’ll need to play by the letter of the contract.

The types of changes I’m talking about include:

• Removal of email addresses.
• Removal of outside and social media links.
• Removal of sizes from titles. I think this is mostly for Motors sellers.
• Making sure you have a clear return policy INSIDE your listings.

Some of our clients have THOUSANDS of items on eBay, and it’s hard to use those bulk revision tools when you don’t know HTML. But now, we can help!

Even if you’re not an As Was client, we can run our own “find and replace” tool to get the nasties out of your listings, and put in the good stuff. We can change as many listings as you need changed, and we can make multiple changes. For example, you might need your email out, your sales tax percentage changed, and a link to your Facebook removed. We can do it!

Our charge is $200 for every 8,000 listings you have. So if you have 21,000 listings, it would cost $600. If you are interested, please fill out our contact form, and let us know what you need. This service is first come, first served, and we’re doing our best to get everybody changed before the deadline in about 2 weeks. Also, please note that we can only revise items that eBay allows to be revised. Still, that should get most if not all of your items, depending on how you list.

If you need your template changed, even if we didn’t do your eBay listing template, let us know. Prices for changing wording in templates starts at just $50.

http://brassflowers.com/ebay-wants-you-to-do-business-like-its-1899/

In case the graphic isn’t coming up, he’s tweeting that he JUST listed his first item on eBay ever… which even he found “surprising” since he has been designing Stores for eBay for 4 years now.

Ugh.

It’s amazing what natural As Was selling points I stumble upon. I remember years ago when I was surprised that I had to actually tell potential clients that unlike other companies, we KNOW eBay rules. We follow them! You’re not going to end up in trouble with eBay, and watch your items suffer in Best Match, because we designed something that got you in trouble. I also try to explain to people that we’re consultants. We’re here to understand their whole business, and help where we can, especially in listing strategy. Giving you a design makes no sense if you’re not going to use the right eBay strategies to get it seen and found in search!

The next selling point was that our design and other work isn’t sent to Eastern Europe. Not sent to Asia. Not being done in Israel, India, China, or the Phillippines. And nobody on my staff is a “junior.” I didn’t think those were selling points until I found out what other companies were doing. And then, yes, we’re offering something better than that!

Then it was that we didn’t get cracked down on in January 2009 for breaking eBay Store design rules. While other companies had to take down or change hundreds and hundreds of eBay Stores, we had never designed eBay Stores outside of the rules. So our clients didn’t have anything to change. Selling point!

Evidently now, I also need to tell potential customers that we’re better than other design companies they may be considering because my staff are former and current eBay sellers. They actually know eBay rather well! This is also an important point for people who are considering using Elance, oDesk, or other “find a random person” systems for eBay design. Have they ever listed on eBay? Do they know the rules? Will they fix their work if eBay finds it’s against the rules?

At this point, potential clients are coming to me having Googled these companies who you might call competitors, though I know we don’t really compete. I refuse to do what they do, how they do it, as it doesn’t match my standards. They don’t offer what we do, and certainly not how we do it. But sure, you could hire them instead of us. The real question would be… knowing the above, and Googling everybody to see the word on the street, why would you want to hire anybody else?!

Our Account Manager takes approved template designs, slices the Photoshop file into HTML, CSS, and images, installs them into a variety of listing software choices, and also does our eBay Stores and About Me pages. This is all done by hand. If you slice with Pshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, or anything other than hand-coding, you don’t qualify for this job. Familiarity with eBay listing software helps, but we can train on that as many of them are darn easy and somewhat intuitive.

We can’t train for knowledge and familiarity with eBay. Please only apply if you are at least a part-time eBay seller. Considering the blog post that’s launching tomorrow, we do not hire people who don’t use eBay. Our clients expect us to know eBay really well, and it makes no sense to serve them up somebody who doesn’t!

You’ll interact with clients, so we only hire native English speakers who are friendly and customer-service oriented. You must be in North America or the UK.

We’re friendly and casual. We have a sense of humour. We love what we do. You should be part of our infectious good mood.

If you have any questions, or would like to throw your hat in the ring, please send an email to HR [at] aswas [dot] com. Thanks!

Let’s start with a sample As Was template. We did this one YEARS ago… probably 2007. So how does it hold up in a new, mobile world? Click to enlarge to see the original, which is a screen shot from a regular computer screen.

For mobile web, eBay is stripping out all design, and just reading text information. That means your As Was template will be gone, but all the wording in it will be there. A screen shot from my Android phone (Dolphin browser, not the native Android browser) looks like this (click to enlarge):

The picture that eBay knew was “picture 1″ was there. All the policies that were fed to eBay were there. And then eBay stripped out any design and most of the HTML to show just this text. You’ll recognise that it’s the description text as well as text it pulled from our policy sections.

How about the phone apps? When I pulled this item up in the Official Android eBay Application, it looked just like the web. Full template. Nothing stripped. In fact, the links worked. I clicked on her item picture, and got a window with just the item picture.

So the templates look and work fine. We write clean, hand-coded HTML. So it’s always a shame when the template is stripped out , but at least you know that the main info will still show up.

My blog post in my Brass Flowers blog explains the problem, and my suggested solution for it. I suggest you head over there since I’m curious what you’ll think of my proposed solution.

http://brassflowers.com/solution-for-ebays-pogosticking-problem/

Of course, As Was can design and customise these shopping carts, and many more.

Many online sellers ask me the difference between a hosted solution and one where you get all the code. A hosted solution is more turnkey. You turn it on, it’s installed, you can start using it, and as the company updates features or fixed bugs, you have all of that automatically. When you get the source code, like the full version of Magento, you have to install that on a server. You have to admin that server or hosting account. As there are updates, you have to have someone install them. If something breaks, you have to find someone to fix it as Magento doesn’t want to troubleshoot your custom install of their system (well, not for free!). So it can be more work and more expense, but the result is something that you can nearly limitlessly customize.

A third option is one I hear from time to time, which sounds something like, “I found a guy who’s going to build me my own eCommerce system.” In nearly all cases, this is a bad idea. Unless you are a giant marketplace with needs and requirements that no system could come close to fulfilling, then maybe that’s a good idea. But 99% of the time, it sets you up for two things: 1) Being beholden to this guy for all of your maintenance, upgrades, etc…, and 2) feeling like your eCom world fell apart when you can’t find the guy or he goes and gets a real job.

So remember, for most businesses, a hosted solution is a good way to go. A solution where you get the code, like the full version of Magento, can be right if you don’t mind running your own server, maintaining that code, and finding people to install your updates. It’s nearly never a good idea to have some guy or some company build you your own eCom system from scratch.

Everybody thought my vision was great. Things were in focus, and I could even read small things very far away. I could see the 3D thing in the test book, and my peripheral vision was good. So what could be wrong?

I noticed about a year ago that I was having trouble focusing, but it changed from day to day. I finally saw someone about it. My eyes are healthy. No disease. I’m pushing 40, so my eyes don’t focus as fast as they used to, and it takes a bit more effort for them to stay in focus. I have a very slight astigmatism.

The optometrist mocked up some glasses in those funky steampunk things they have. He asked me to try those, and make sure the floor wasn’t warped and the walls weren’t slanted. I put them on. And something amazing happened. I felt like I had put on 3D glasses.

Evidently, for many years, my left eye has been weak and terrible. My brain’s response to that was to mostly ignore what was coming through. My right eye is nearly perfect and in focus, so life was in focus… but life was fairly flat. I had decent depth perception. I could drive well. I played tennis. I didn’t bump into things, or try to put a drink down where the counter had ended. But everything looked like a flat photo. Things closer to me didn’t stand away from the background. They seemed part of the background.

Because my brain was mostly ignoring my left eye, I didn’t have a true stereo 3D view of life. I couldn’t describe this to people… how when I put on these glasses, they were like 3D glasses. My friend, Eli, an artist, understood. He said, “You have parallax.” Yes, that was it! I wiki’ed that, and found my way to stereopsis. People confuse stereopsis with depth perception, but according to the article, people without stereopsis can still have good depth perception since the brain gets plenty of depth and distance info from one eye. So that was me.

I have 3D glasses! My life is in 3D. I had no idea anything was wrong. So make sure that when you get your eyes checked, if you live in a flat world, if everything looks like a flat photo, make sure the doctor knows. It can be helped! These glasses help so much that the moment I put them on, my brain accepts a lot of what’s coming in from my left eye, and I get stereopsis. Amazing. Life-changing.