BatFlattery

I’ve been trying to find a decent theme for my LED lighting site for awhile now: I wanted something that’s easy to use from an affiliate perspective, and also easy to customise, so that it doesn’t look like a themed or template site! In the end I decided to go with the Thesis theme, as it’s very customisable just from the control panel, with additional customisations available with a bit of coding (such as the header graphic). I’ve ended up with quite a minimalist site, which I think goes well with the ultra-modern design of some of my lights.

I’ve also switched to using Skimlinks to find products for the site: using their Skimkit app it’s very easy to find products, and pictures and links are just a click away. Much easier than hunting through different affiliate programmes, getting the links right, etc, plus Skimlinks are just straight links to the merchant, so no weird-looking codes and stuff.

The only issue I have, and it’s not the fault of either Thesis or Skimlinks, is the way Thesis uses Wordpress’s thumbnail system to show thumbs on category and tag pages, and post previews. This only works if you actually upload the image to Wordpress. Since it’s much easier to just paste the link to the product image that Skimlinks provides, that’s what I do, but unfortunately this means no thumbnails. Anyway, it’s a small price to pay; image uploads are just too much hassle, and I don’t really like the idea of having any of my Wordpress directories writeable, I think Wordpress is insecure enough as it is! (I’ve found a brilliant solution to updating Wordpress easily, but that’s the subject of another post.)

So overall I’m quite happy with the site now; there’s still a bit of tweaking to do, but I think it’s coming along quite nicely!

You may have heard that Amazon are selling non-DRM MP3 downloads. I shit you not. Anyway, I decided to check it out. I’ve been thinking about buying Amy Winehouse’s album, but it was £12 at HMV (sod that) and it’s not in iTunes Plus on the iTMS, which means a lousy 128kbps file. But lo, at Amazon it’s a 256kbps, non-DRM MP3! And the whole album is like $9! Or £4.50 for those of you not up to speed with the dollar’s decline.

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So I ordered a few books from Amazon a little while ago. I chose the free delivery option, naturally, so it took a few days for them to arrive. Anyway, on Thursday the postman handed me the familiar brown cardboard boxy thing. But, despite having my name on the label, it didn’t have my books inside.

It contained instead six CDs that had, according to the packing slip, been purchased by another gentleman. Presumably his mailing label had been pasted onto my package, and he was enduring a similar revelation, or would soon.

So I logged on to my account, and found the returns page. There didn’t seem to be an option to say “I got someone else’s shipment” so I went through the page where they list the shipment, and you can say that you got something else for each item. Since I only had three books, I chose three CDs at random and typed one name in next to each book. Then I printed out the pre-paid return address label (quite cool), stuck it on the package, and dropped it off at the post office.

The surprising thing was getting the books Friday morning. So I only lost a day due to the whole mixup. That’s quite impressive.

So I got this fairly interesting email from Yahoo! sponsored search
(ie pay-per-click) support, about the “new” sponsored search they’ve
been threatening for some time now.

For those of you unfamiliar with Yahoo! (formerly Overture), it works
completely differently from Google Adwords. In the latter, you write
an ad, then pick a number of keywords that you want the ad to show
for, and it’s usually up and running within a few minutes, getting
clicks (and costing you money, of course).

In the Overture/Yahoo! universe, things are a lot less simple. First
you choose the keywords. Then you are supposed to write an ad for each
keyword. Now it’s true that there are buttons to copy down your first
ad to all the other keywords, but it’s still a bit of a pain to do.
And the user interface is really unresponsive and unintuitive compared
to Google. Plus, your ads don’t start running immediately. Oh no. You
have to wait anything up to three days for a human to “approve” your
ads and keywords. And if they don’t think your ads properly describe
your website, they reject the keyword. Seriously.

Anyway, it’s quite funny to see Yahoo! explaining the New Search.
What’s new about it? “Fast Ad Activation”, for one: ads online within
minutes! Wow! What a unique and brilliant idea!

But there’s more! ” Individual titles and descriptions will apply to
multiple keywords.” I see. For those confused by this, Yahoo!
helpfully explains that ” Titles, descriptions and URLs” will be
“known as “ads” in the new Sponsored Search”. Uh huh. And “Keywords
and ads will be organised into ad groups” – exactly as they are in
Adwords. And then “One or more ad groups will make up a campaign”. You
don’t say.

They could have saved everyone a lot of time by saying, “You know
Adwords? Right, that’s what the new Yahoo! Sponsored Search will be
like.” And about time too.

At the risk of the blog turning into “what I’m doing workwise”… (but then again, why not?), I’ve been doing some affiliate marketing for a little while now, with varying degrees of success. But one area that has been quite successful is magazine subscriptions.

I started promoting magazine subscriptions via a new website, Discount Magazine Subscriptions, from late November last year, and I must say it went quite well, making a tidy little chunk of cash from all the people buying subscriptions as gifts.

Quite surprising were the top sellers for me: by far and away the most successful was Woman and Home subscriptions, although Good Food Magazine subscriptions, National Geographic subscriptions, Red Magazine, New Scientist, The Economist, and Delicious Magazine also put in good showings. Oh, and Gardener’s World.

Things have obviously quietened down a bit in the new year, but there’s still some activity. I’ve got a few other things on the go, though, will talk about those a bit later…

I came across a disclaimer on a website recently, part of which read as follows:

“This Agreement shall all be governed and construed in accordance with
the laws of United Kingdom applicable to agreements made and to be
performed in United Kingdom. You agree that any legal action or
proceeding between [site name removed].com and you for any purpose
concerning this Agreement or the parties’ obligations hereunder shall
be brought exclusively in a federal or state court of competent
jurisdiction sitting in United Kingdom.”

According to the footer, it was generated free by a company called
PriorityDigital.com. They have an invitation on the bottom to get your
own free disclaimer.

PriorityDigital have obviously taken a boilerplate disclaimer written
by a lawyer in the United States, and replaced every reference to a
state or a country with the country supplied by the person who wants
the disclaimer. In this case, the phrase “United Kingdom” was
supplied.

Now here’s the problem. There are no laws applying to the United
Kingdom as a whole. There is a legal system that applies in England
and Wales. There is another legal system that applies in Scotland.
Businesses that operate in England or Wales (or both) normally opt for
their agreements to be governed by the laws of England and Wales.
Opting for a legal system that doesn’t actually exist, and that
betrays your ignorance of the laws applicable in your own country, is
probably not a good way of achieving legal certainty in your affairs.

There’s another problem as well. There are no “federal or state
courts” of any jurisdiction, competent or otherwise, sitting anywhere
in the United Kingdom. In England and Wales there are county courts,
crown courts, high courts, courts of chancery, and probably others,
but no federal or state courts. England is a monarchy, not a
federation, nor a member of one, and is not a state in that sense. So
where exactly are you asking for your action to be heard?

This is an example of getting ripped off by free: using a free service
like this could end up being very expensive indeed. And I am sure that
the disclaimer that PriorityDigital had drawn up to protect themselves
from liability for use of their free service, has been very carefully
and very specifically drafted to protect them.

Here’s another of those “why didn’t I think of that?” sites: whether the guy will get to the million, who knows, but I then I doubted Alex Tew would, so what do I know: Link Experiment

Well, the ones in America, anyway. They argue that big sites like Google get a “free ride” on the networks, making money from users that they don’t share with the ISPs. Some free ride. I’d hate to have Google’s monthly bandwidth bill. But as Vint Cerf points out, the real issue is with the users: the ISPs have contracted with the users to provide Internet access to the whole internet, ie any website the user chooses to go to. Now they want to say “Well actually, you can only go to Google and Yahoo if they pay us money to let you.” They are breaking the basis of the deal.

And best of all, they are doing it because they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the internet: all this talk about “prioritising streaming video” means they are trying to re-create a video network on the Internet. But that’s now how people use video on the Internet:

[I]f you’re paying any attention at all to Tivo and iPod and other fairly modern communication services, you’ll find people downloading things and then listening to or watching them later. And if you are no longer watching the video as its being delivered to your hard drive, then you no longer need for it to be delivered in realtime in a viewable form. The broadband providers seem to be reinventing the cable and satellite television service model for the Internet. What mystifies me about this is that they are therefore going after an already hotly competing-for market with a finite revenue stream. So the best they can do is a share of that market. Their entry is not going to increase the market, in my view.

So they’re breaking the contract with their users to go into competition with satellite TV. What a good business decision. Must be a few MBAs involved there.

I’ve been using Amazon’s DVD rental by post service for a while now, and it’s really been great to catch up on some of the classic movies I’ve enjoyed before, plus ones I never got round to seeing before for some reason or another (like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense).

Usually when I go to a rental store I wander around for ages, trying to remember movies that I might like, but with the Amazon rental list, anytime I think of a movie I just add it to my list. The web interface lets me change the order of the DVDs at any time, and for less than ten quid I get four DVDs a month, two out at any time (as soon as I send one back, they send the next one on the list, unless the monthly limit has been reached). Plus you get a discount if you buy any DVD from Amazon.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, just click on the banner:

I’ve used eBay on and off for the last few years to buy and sell various odd bits of mostly computer-related hardware, and, apart from one buyer who never made contact, have had no real trouble. So I tended to discount the reports of rampant fraud that I occasionally heard from those I condescendingly regarded as less experienced than myself, being the possessor of 14 whole positive feedback points.

Came last week and I commenced an auction of an 02 XDA smartphone, quite a valuable piece of kit, and easily the most expensive item I have ever auctioned. Functioning rather like the bloody chum that shark fishermen throw into the water to lure the sinister beasts, the XDA attracted some very unwelcome attention indeed.

All seemed well at first, there were the usual questions that a careful reading of the item should have rendered unneccessary, some reasonable bids, and then.. (cue sinister music) The Question. A chap in the US (let’s call him The Buyer, since it ends up appearing that he is the winner of the auction) emails me to ask if I would mind shipping the item to Australia, seeing as it’s his friend’s birthday. He seems to be alright, with reasonably good feedback, so I say fine.

He bids, and his bid turns out to be the winning bid. I send the PayPal payment request, adding on a generous amount to cover the extra postage, which I hope there won’t be arguments about. The next day, a payment notification arrives from PayPal. All seems to be well: in fact another £15 postage has been paid on top of what I requested, reason being urgent delivery required to meet the birthday deadline. Very nice. Or is it?

The first nagging question to squeeze past the sight of all that money and come knocking on the door of my attention, is this: the person who sent me the money via PayPal (let’s call him The Payer) is not The Buyer! Or doesn’t seem to be. The PayPal verified name of The Payer is not the name of The Buyer as supplied to me by eBay. The name of The Buyer appears together with an address under the heading Unverified Address in the PayPal advice, but it most certainly does not appear under the heading Verified Sender: that heading has a completely different name.

The second nagging question appears in the Notes section of the PayPal advice, where The Payer has, inter alia, given me the address of his friend in Australia. He has also advised me that he is paying for an eBay item. However, the item number given is not the number of my item, and the description doesn’t match either.

Quickly entering this number into eBay brings up a similar item to the one that I believe I have just sold, and sure enough, The Buyer is the high bidder and the auction is completed. And in the question section is a request for the seller to ship the item to a friend in Australia, as it is his birthday….

Further research on eBay reveals that The Buyer has been quite busy recently, buying up a lot of stuff and asking for it to be sent to his friend in Australia, as it’s his birthday. (For those items where this is not apparent on eBay itself, I emailed the seller: “Did the buyer ask you to ship the item to Oz as a birthday present?” “Yes, how did you know?”)

In the meantime I get several emails from The Payer, begging me to send the item off to Australia with all due haste. I demur, and instead invite him to explain why he is not the person who actually bought the item, and also why he or his alter ego has been buying so many presents for this most fortunate of Antipodeans, his alleged friend. To this I get only more urgent requests to dispossess myself of the item in question.

At this point I phone PayPal. As I hear myself explaining the situation to the young lady on the other end of the line, I realise there isn’t the slightest chance that this transaction is on the level. Still, having called her, I ask her what I should do. “PayPal recommends that you only send the goods to a verified address. If you do that our Seller Protection Scheme will protect you.” Hmmm, not only is The Payer’s address unverified, I’m not even sending it there. “If I send this to Australia, and [The Payer] contacts you and says his friend never got it, what will you do?” “Reverse the payment.” Yikes! OK, XDA, put away the sunscreen: you ain’t going near Oz, mate.

One more question: why is The Payer’s address unverified? PayPal Lady isn’t sure: it’s not required to have a verified address. Playing around with my PayPal account, I discover I can add any address I want to my account: it’s obviously unverified until I link it to a credit card, but it’s there and I can use it to make a payment. Hmmm…

OK, so it seems obvious The Payer is gaming PayPal by getting me to send the item out to a completely non-verified address so that he can reverse the transaction (no wonder he was so free with the postage!) But why the difference in the names? Using a magical tool that I have at my disposal (it’s called Google) I conjure up a phone number for The Buyer, and call him in Minnesota. He’s surprised by my call. No, he hasn’t bought anything from me: he hasn’t used eBay in over a year, although strangely enough, he tried to use it a few days ago, and couldn’t log on: eBay wouldn’t accept his password…

The Payer included a telephone number on his payment advice. The number has a Florida area code. I call it. There’s no answer, so I leave a message explaining the situation. Someone calls back. No, he never bought anything from me. He thinks someone may have copied his credit card number while he was Christmas shopping. Hmmm…

Shortly thereafter PayPal send me an email. They are placing a temporary hold on my account while they investigate whether a payment I received was unauthorised. Twenty minutes later, another email. The payment has been reversed, as that “was determined to be the appropriate action”. Gone, baby. Like it was never there.

Here endeth the Lesson: Shalt though never sendeth an item to an Unverified Address, lest the wrath of PayPal be aroused, and smight thee mightily. Yea, for howsoever thou might hast thoughtest thy buyer be genuine, yet canst thou place thine trust only in the PayPal Seller Protection Scheme. (And cold, hard Cash On Delivery, of course!)