First of all, sorry about the service outage on Saturday. Launching and testing the latest version took a bit long. But it was definitely worth the wait! So… let me tell you what this latest version is all about:
- There is now a ‘Compare Deal’ button in the deal window. Click on it and you will automatically generate a price comparison across eBay, Amazon, and Google Shopping (Froogle). This way, you can see what are the best prices out there and only buy from CountSpin when we are better than everyone else.
- You can now browse through a Deal Catalogue by clicking on any image of upcoming or past deals. This way, you can see bigger images and details — something you couldn’t do before and had complained about.
- You can set an alert for any upcoming deal in the queue. This way, you will receive an email just before the deal is about to go live — so you can go do other things without worrying about missing out on the deal.
You spoke; we listened. Hope you will enjoy this latest version. Of course, this is just the start. We will keep making this better and better. Just share your feedback — at least, you can see we take it pretty seriously.
There is more exciting news coming up in the week ahead. Stay tuned… and enjoy the show!
Caroline Bayley posted a thought provoking article on BBC today. In ‘Buy none, get one free,’ she talks about how the digital world is spawning a marketplace where products are being given away free and yet companies are still making profits. The underlying basis for this new form of economics is a subsidization from the few to the many. “The new form of cross-subsidy is one where a tiny minority of people who really appreciate the product, really get value from it, can subsidise everybody else, because the underlying cost of doing things online, in digital, is so low that you can give away 90% of it for free.”
The key point here is that the negligible variable costs for digital products make this viable. For instance, I am paying nothing to Wordpress to use their platform for this blog. They can afford to let me get a free ride because they are making money from others who want more from their blogging platform and are able to pay for it. At some point, I may need more and want more, enough to be willing to pay for it, and so they have me engaged as a potential future revenue source.
It may seem that this is only possible in the byte economy, but the fact is that CountSpin is doing precisely the same thing for the atom economy (ironically, using a digital infrastructure). To be sure, our variable costs are far from negligible since we are selling physical merchandise. Hence, in our case, the gap between the high payers and the low payers has to be smaller. But essentially, we are allowing everyone an opportunity to pay according to their value perception and, in that sense, we are operating on the same principle as the byte players.
The full article can be viewed here — http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7811481.stm
