You may have noticed that there is a "Store" link in the blog's menubar now, i have added an Amazon aStore so please feel free to buy some stuff! My music blog also has a store and i might add a few more too, its pretty easy to set up to be honest.
The question of course is, will anyone actually buy anything from them? I've tried Amazon Associate links for a couple of years now and no one has ever bought anything using them so far! Maybe you should buy something and be the first, you won't get any prize though.
I am no stranger to e-commerce though, in fact i wrote one of the first e-commerce websites in the UK for Software Warehouse back in late 1995, that was just a few months after Amazon went live. I had to hand write pretty much everything in Perl and it worked well generating well over a million pounds worth of orders i believe. However while Amazon became a multi-billion multi-national business i am still pretty much where i was so i'm not sure what went wrong there.
Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Friday, February 8, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Musical musings (2) : HMV
The collapse of HMV into administration unfortunately is not unexpected. The music and media retailer has been struggling for some time. The internet (and especially Amazon of course) will be blamed for their demise but i think its a lot more complicated than that. Supermarkets are never mentioned in the High Street's woes but they have expanded away from groceries over the last decade. All big supermarkets now sell CDs and DVDs as well as electrical goods. The Tesco near where i work sells TVs, cameras, Kindles and accessories. Each pound spent in a supermarket on a CD or a camera is a pound not spent in HMV or Jessops.
The internet is a big factor of course but HMV's mismanagement did not help. The stores should have moved away from trying to compete on the mass market years ago. They should have capitalised on the key place a store like HMV has in youth culture : a meeting place. When i was young places like HMV were frequently a place you met your friends outside (and usually went inside). HMV should have improved the in-store experience to make their stores a youth destination.
How about a cafe, sell comics, have some micro-units for funky local fashion designers, accessories? They also should have reduced their stock of chart music and improved their selection of more youth orientated genres like indie and urban. They also should have gone into downloads early. They could have had a key advantage in digital music. Imagine being able to go to a store and listen to a huge library of tracks and then pay and download the ones you liked to your mp3 player in-store?
Well its probably too late now. These things should have been done over 5 years ago. The company has been run down by mismanagement at the top. The previous CEO was at Comet and the current one was at Jessops before now. Makes you think doesn't it?
The internet is a big factor of course but HMV's mismanagement did not help. The stores should have moved away from trying to compete on the mass market years ago. They should have capitalised on the key place a store like HMV has in youth culture : a meeting place. When i was young places like HMV were frequently a place you met your friends outside (and usually went inside). HMV should have improved the in-store experience to make their stores a youth destination.
How about a cafe, sell comics, have some micro-units for funky local fashion designers, accessories? They also should have reduced their stock of chart music and improved their selection of more youth orientated genres like indie and urban. They also should have gone into downloads early. They could have had a key advantage in digital music. Imagine being able to go to a store and listen to a huge library of tracks and then pay and download the ones you liked to your mp3 player in-store?
Well its probably too late now. These things should have been done over 5 years ago. The company has been run down by mismanagement at the top. The previous CEO was at Comet and the current one was at Jessops before now. Makes you think doesn't it?
Friday, April 22, 2011
Good Fridays and sabres
Not been writing a great deal on here this week have i? Not a lot has been happening i guess but anyway Good Friday today. I went to the city centre early, too early in fact as i forgot shops don't open until 10am on a bank holiday. Its an ill-wind as coffee shops are open before 10 so i could wait for the shops over a nice cup of filter and a cinnamon swirl.
I always have a very methodological approach to shopping. I know what i want to get, i go in hard, achieve objective and get out before the flack starts flying. SAS shopping in other words. I needed a few model making supplies including some new varnish to complete the Sabre project and the result of that project is so:
And very nice it has turned out too! I also bought a couple of t-shirts as the temperature is steadily rising and my collection of stripey jumpers will soon have to be put away for a bit.
I bumped into a colleague in town as well which was nice but always slightly weird when you do that as it so seldom happens, but then again it is a big place. The world.
I always have a very methodological approach to shopping. I know what i want to get, i go in hard, achieve objective and get out before the flack starts flying. SAS shopping in other words. I needed a few model making supplies including some new varnish to complete the Sabre project and the result of that project is so:
And very nice it has turned out too! I also bought a couple of t-shirts as the temperature is steadily rising and my collection of stripey jumpers will soon have to be put away for a bit.
I bumped into a colleague in town as well which was nice but always slightly weird when you do that as it so seldom happens, but then again it is a big place. The world.
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