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Dateline: 8 December 1999 All Day Edition Read Yesterday's Edition
Editorial
I've got quite a few URLs to share with you but one local e-tail site was
disproportionately represented amongst the recommendations that I received.
A lot of the emails referring to this site came from writers outside New Zealand
and they were pretty consistent in their opinions so I don't for one minute
believe that all these people just happened to, coincidentally, be regular
Aardvark readers.
Now I may be wrong, but I suspect the operator of this site fired off a quick
email (they have regular emailed newsletter) and said -- "look at this", or maybe
even "why not tell Aardvark about us?"
What do I think of that? Is it cheating? Should I hold this kind of behaviour
up to ridicule.
Hell no! My whole-hearted congratulations go out to Richard, whose
Cranium site,
while not the most visually stunning piece of Webwork -- has the killer
advantage that it is clearly providing exactly the quality and value
that his market demands.
It also sounds as if Richard is the kind of Net-savvy entrepreneur who has
realised that selling product requires a whole lot more than just building
an all-singing, all-dancing website. The very fact that either a significant
number of his overseas customers are also Aardvark readers, or that he was smart
enough to encourage them to contact Aardvark, shows that he understands how
to leverage the Net to best effect.
Not surprisingly I received no recommendations from or for any of the
"big-name" retail sites. Nobody within these organisations was even half
as smart or pro-active as Richard -- and obviously none of their customers
felt moved enough by the levels of service or value they received to bother
flicking off an email on their own initiative.
This huge difference between the smart, alert, Net-savvy smaller operator and
the slow, cumbersome, Net-ignorant big-name brick and mortar retailers who
simply throw a fistful of money at a webdesigner and say "make it so" is
the very reason we've seen e-tail sales dominated by so many previously
unheard of traders.
Now I rolled along to Cranium for a look-see and was surprised to see that
this is quite a specialist site -- clearly working within a well-defined
market -- no sign of your favourite Steps or Venga Boys CD here (thank God).
This is not another Sounds or CDNow kind of site. It's not polished,
it's not slick -- but it clearly works and generates the two most valuable
commodities a retailer can have -- sales and satisfied customers.
This makes the obvious success of the site (at least in the eyes of its customers)
even more impressive.
So... it's a big hats-off and congratulations to Cranium. Hey, while you're there,
why not buy granny a nice piece of symphonic/neo-instrumental progressive music for
Christmas?
Now before my mailbox crashes under the strain -- please don't anyone else
encourage their friends to email me and say how much they love
your (or your favourite) site. Richard's kudos come, not so much for perhaps
doing that, but for actually thinking of doing that before anyone else.
Tomorrow I'll list some of the other local retail sites that readers have
recommended.
If you have a favourite online shopping site,
tell me and I'll publish a list later this week so
hopefully we can save ourselves some time and money without having to spend
needless time and money upgrading and reconfiguring our PCs first.
Oh... I just have to give the NZ Herald
the "headline of the year award" for something completely unrelated to the Net
but extremely good:
GREENS JEANETICALLY MODIFY COALITION
Brilliant!
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27 August 99
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Aardvark Daily is a publication of, and is copyright to, Bruce Simpson, all rights reserved
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