Dog walked, wordpress installed, tutorial read, Yahoo Small Business

Agenda:

1. Dog walked
2. WordPress Installed
3. Theme Tutorial Read
4. Yahoo Small Business vs. Amazon.com

1.  Dog walked.

Walked the smaller of the two dogs around the neighbor.  Looked at a foreclosed-on property at the entrance of the neighborhood, but couldn’t see anything significant expect a lock box on the door knob probably had a key inside, password protected.

2.  WordPress Installed.

Used this link to install MAMP (LAMP for mac) and WordPress.  Easy!  Not public or anything yet, but installing WordPress on your own machine / server allows you to customize it with plugins for SEO, Twitter, and Adsense.

3.  Theme Tutorial Read

I wasn’t really happy about the free themes I found online.  I thought:  it couldn’t be too difficult to make your own theme.  I was correct!  Here is a link to a good tutorial if you want to make your own theme.

4.  Yahoo Small Business vs. Amazon.com

I wanted to make a point about internet small business using real-world examples.  I wanted to see how Yahoo Small Business worked.  They don’t link to many (any?) real-world examples that I could easily find, but they did provide a promotional video from a woman who runs Kazoo Toys, a toy shop in Colorado

Kazoo Toys Timeline
Started in 1980 (brick and mortar store).
Bought in 1998 by Some Lady
Online in 1999 by Yahoo Small Business (a decade old example?  yegh.)
On Amazon in 2006.
Signed contract with military in 2008.

So a question:  Where does Some Lady sell most of her toys?

http://www.kazootoys.com/kazooinnews.html

“Sales at the brick-and-mortar store have grown 2 percent to 3 percent annually, while online operations, including Amazon, the military and kazootoys.com, have grown in the triple digits annually since 2005.”

Sales, not profit.

“Kazoo’s growth has not only been online; the store in Cherry Creek recently grew from 9,600 square feet to 13,000 square feet.”

A quick search on amazon.com for kazootoys yields this product:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0963679600/ref=dp_olp_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1234999936&sr=8-1

$19.95 w/ free shipping from Amazon if you buy enough crap.

$18.87 + $6.95 shipping if you buy it from Kazoo.  So with Amazon, the best they can do is try to undercut the website in pricing.  I’m sure Amazon has higher than Kazoo’s 92% satisfaction rating.  People choose Kazoo because they are cheap, not because they stand out among all of the competition (17 different competing sellers for this particular product, some cheaper than Kazoo with higher satisfaction ratings).

Amazon has a social network via the product reviews.  Kazootoys.com has no such network.  The best they have is a blog:

http://kazootoys.blogspot.com/

which seems rather political and has 0 comments.

I can’t see why I would buy from her online rather than someone else.  So even though Yahoo Small Business is trumpeting her as a success, I don’t see how it’s true.  Her website isn’t differentiated.  It looks to have the same design as the bait and switch scam technology stores.  Just seeing the site design makes me want to avoid it.

So my guess is this woman doesn’t make her keep from Yahoo Small Business.  She probably has more sales through Amazon.com, because it’s easier for people to find her that way.  She said she even got the military deal through Amazon.com, and the online customer the article mentions also bought through Amazon.com.  But I bet her money is mostly coming in through the brick and mortar store, where she has a local community that she’s good at keeping up with (since she isn’t web savvy enough to host a forum).

And my conclusion is that Yahoo’s Small Business web customers aren’t making much money from these sites.  Eventually, the small business will realize that.  Yahoo Small Business missed the Web 2.0 bandwagon because they don’t act like Amazon.com — with Yahoo Small Business, consumers don’t get choice.  I think Amazon.com has the right idea, and I think their sales figures for this year reflect that.  So if your are looking for a business model to emulate, I wouldn’t choose Yahoo Small Business.  On a Google News search, the only article I can find about Yahoo Small Business is written by someone who’s trying to promote it.

The Internet is getting so big that promoting your business on Google doesn’t work that well unless:

(1)  You’re the biggest player in a big market
(2)  You’re in a niche market.

All of the medium players get lost on page 3 or 4.  So what’s happened is that everybody who wants to buy crap goes to Amazon.com, and then you have to duke it out via pricing w/ 20 other competitors.

The point is that — if you’re going to start a business that enables smaller businesses to get online with something, you need to invest a lot in many types of statistical, intelligent, and social interfaces.  Creating a business website for businesses isn’t trivial anymore.  Amazon and EBay have raised the bar — a cart isn’t good enough anymore.  I think you’ll need some smart people and a significant investment of resources to be competitive.