Tag Archives: Google

The Joys of Online Shopping

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Why visit stores?

I have gotten to the point where I do about 75% of my non-grocery shopping online. I’m willing to bet that a good portion of the folks who read this are in the same situation. The rest of you might wonder why.

The Shipping Cost Argument

Most people use this as their argument against online shopping: if you shop in a store, you don’t pay shipping.

Okay, this is true. But I still have to get to the store. That takes time and costs money for fuel.

While I’m more concerned with the value of my time than the cost of fuel to drive to a store that has what I need, I won’t deny that I probably would have to drive at least 80 miles roundtrip from my Wickenburg home to find the item I’m looking for.

Let’s do the math here.

First, my time. Suppose I have to drive 80 miles round trip to get to a store that might have what I want to buy. Suppose I can get to the store in about an hour and that it takes me a half hour to find what I want to buy and pay for it. Then another hour to get home. That’s 2-1/2 hours. But what if the store that I thought had what I wanted didn’t have it? Then I have to go to another store, which may or may not be nearby. Let’s estimate 30 minutes for each store I visit. Now let’s estimate 2 stores per item I need to buy. So if I have to buy something as simple as a pair of jeans, I might be spending about 3 hours to get to the store, find them in my size and color, buy them, and get home. In 3 hours, I can write a how-to article for publication on a Web site that pays me several hundred dollars per article. So I’m potentially losing out on several hundred dollars of income.

Okay, so suppose I wasn’t planning on doing anything else that day. For the sake of argument, let’s assume my time is worthless.

But let’s look at the fuel costs. Suppose I drive that in my Honda, which gets about 20-25 miles per gallon highway. There’s some highway driving and some nasty “city” driving in terrible traffic where I usually shop. To make the math easier, let’s assume 20 miles per gallon. That’s 4 gallons for the 80 miles. Fuel prices for premium (which this little car takes) have ranged from $1.50 to $5.00 per gallon over the past year. We’ll use today’s price, which is about $2 per gallon. That’s $8 in fuel alone.

How much is the shipping cost for that pair of jeans?

It’s Not Secure

What? Get with the program. If you shop smart online, your transaction is secure.

In fact, it’s probably more secure than handing your credit card to a waiter in a restaurant where it’s all too easy to copy down credit card information before running a charge for your meal. Or reciting it over the phone, in a place where it could be overheard, or to a company that may or may not have honest employees or good intentions.

What’s risky is entering credit card information in unsecured forms online. Look for the lock icon on the edge of your browser window to ensure that a form is secure. You can also look at the URL; it should start with https (note the all-important “s”). Another thing that’s risky is putting your credit card information in an e-mail message. There’s no reason to do it, so don’t.

It Doesn’t Support the Local Economy

Well, that’s certainly true. But neither does shopping at the mall. Or at Wal-Mart.

And neither does hiring staff in India or China or Pakistan to provide telephone support or make products.

Let’s not go there, okay?

Today’s Purchase

Simply said, online shopping is fast, convenient, and affordable. Here’s an example.

Chef PantsI just bought 3 pairs of the “chef” style baggy pants I like to wear. (And no, I didn’t buy them with this crazy pattern — although you have to admit they look pretty funky.) As I was buying them online, my husband pointed out that he knows a place in Phoenix that sells “those kind of pants.” But do they sell the brand I’m wearing right now? The brand that seems to be cut perfectly for my middle-aged body and relatively long legs? And how much do they sell for there? These are all unknowns. There’s a chance that I could track down the store he knows and spend 30 minutes in there only to find out that they don’t have what I want. That my time wasted.

I found an online retailer that sold the pants I wanted by doing a Google search for a brand name. I immediately saw a store I’d bought from in the past, as well as a bunch of other online stores. Within about 10 minutes, I confirmed that the store I’d used before had the colors I was interested in at the best price. (You want to buy your own pair? The pants are from Five Star Fundamentals and the online store is AllHeartsChefs. These a great pants.) The entire shop-and-buy transaction took 15 minutes of my time as I sat at the kitchen table, enjoying my morning coffee.

Shipping on these three pairs of pants was a hefty $12.50. That’s a lot more than the $8 of fuel that I use up on a Wickenburg to Peoria shopping trip. But guess what? There was no sales tax added to my purchase. That saved me about $4.50. Oddly enough, when you add the cost of fuel to the sales tax I saved, it results in exactly $12.50 for this purchase. So the net savings was just my time.

And I’ll continue to argue that my time is of value to me.

The Death of Brick and Mortar Retailers

Online shopping is going to put a lot of brick and mortar retailers out of business. It’s sad, but is it such a bad thing? Don’t you think we have enough strip malls in this country? Aren’t you sick of seeing “big box” stores popping up all over the place, causing traffic jams during the day and blotting out the night sky with their parking lot lights?

Yes, there’s a loss of jobs. Or maybe it’s just a shift of jobs from malls to warehouses.

The benefits — as far as being green go — are real. People argue that when you buy online, the item has to be shipped to you and the shipper has a carbon footprint. That’s true, but don’t I have a carbon footprint when I drive my Honda down to Peoria and back to buy a single pair of jeans? The UPS guy, in contrast, is bringing goods for dozens — if not hundreds — of Wickenburg residents every time he comes to down. He’s doing the driving for all of us. And the more online shopping we do, the more driving we don’t have to do — while his driving remains almost the same.

This is the same argument the railroads have been using lately to say why shipping freight via rail is more green than shipping via truck. They’re already making the trip; adding more items doesn’t substantially increase the carbon footprint.

Personally, I’d like to see malls go away. I’d like to see downtowns revitalized. I’d love to be able to go to downtown Wickenburg and shop for things like clothes and shoes and books and music. I’d love to sit at an outdoor coffee shop with friends in my own town, with shopping bags at our feet while we discuss the bargains we’ve found. None of that kind of shopping is available in my town or anywhere near it.

Just as malls are killing downtown shopping, online retailers are killing malls.

And the way I see it, I’ve wasted enough time and money shopping. When I want to buy, I’ll buy it online.

What do you think? Use the Comments link or form to share your thoughts.

Cataloging Video

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Didn’t I pay someone to do this?

A few months back, you may have read various blog posts and tweets from me regarding a video project I’m working on. October was the big film shoot and I the guys I hired and an enormous amount of money to do the project shot about 10 hours of raw video footage all over Arizona.

At the conclusion of each day of the shoot, I was assured that they shot “awesome” footage and that the final product would be “mind boggling.” I assumed (silly me — when will I learn?) that these guys knew what they were doing, so I didn’t micromanage, as I sometimes do. I then sat back and waited for the promised hard disk full of footage (my copy) and the shot log.

When You Want Something Done Right…

I waited a long time. Weeks. What I finally got was three sheets of paper with print so tiny I couldn’t read it — even with my cheaters on. There was virtually no usable information and the list of scenes didn’t cross reference to any video clips by name or any other identifying information. In other words, the catalog was useless.

So it looked as if I’d have to do it myself.

After all, I needed a catalog so I knew what video I had to work with. I needed to know what video was good and whether anything needed to be reshot. I needed a reference I could consult to write my script and make sure I had footage to illustrate everything I wanted to talk about.

I also got the raw video on a 500GB Seagate drive. I assumed (dumb, dumb, dumb) that it was neatly organized and that all the clips would be in some kind of order. But when I plugged it in, I discovered that there was no rhyme or reason to the organization on the disk. Files and folders were randomly named and there were backups of some files on the same hard disk — resulting in duplicates. Video was in multiple formats, some of which simply could not be read on my Mac with the tools I had. I spent two days hunting down conversion software that would enable me to open video files in formats that included MTS, M2T, M2TS, DV, WMV, AVI, and MXF.

This is what I had to catalog.

And that’s what I’ve spent a total of 3 work days doing so far. I’m about 1/4 done.

The Nitty Gritty

Sample MOV FileTo give you an idea of what I’m working with and how I’m dealing with it, consider the screen shots here. The first shot shows a frame of a movie I’m reviewing. I converted its original high definition format to QuickTime for easy viewing. The movie was shot from my helicopter while flying over Lake Powell. It shows a particular stretch of shoreline. I need to know — at least approximately — where on the 135-mile long lake this shoreline is.

Enter Google Maps. I displayed Lake Powell in a big browser window and, based on my knowledge of the lake, zoom in to an area I think the footage might correspond to. This is made slightly easier by the fact that most clips are in named with numbers corresponding to the order in which they were shot. So if a specific piece of shoreline falls between two easily identified canyons, I can usually find the shoreline on Google Maps.

Sample on Google MapsHere’s the same place on Google Maps. And yes, I’m sure it’s the same place.

Then I whip out my handy Stan Jones map of Lake Powell, find Google Maps location on the map, and use a FileMaker Pro database to enter the corresponding lake mile marker as part of the clip’s description. I add some other info about the clip, including its time, a rating on a scale of 1 to 5, and a screenshot of a representative scene.

I only have to do this about 1,000 times.

There are several problems with this technique:

  • The water level determines the appearance of the shoreline. Google Maps has the highest water level and Stan Jones has the lowest. Our video is right in between.
  • Google Maps uses satelite images. Those images point straight down. In most cases, our video is shot at an angle to the scene, at various altitudes.
  • On Gootle Maps, north is always up. On our video clips, north can be any direction.
  • The direction we’re flying and the videographer who took the shot determines which shore I’m looking at. I have to think back to those October days to remember what we did and when, including what time of day.

So matching things up isn’t as easy as you might think. And if you think it’s easy, come on over and give it a try. You can buy the drinks when you give up.

And no, I really didn’t expect the videographers to catalog clip locations right down to the mile marker. What I expected was something like “Bullfrog Area” or “Near Escalante” or “Downlake from Rainbow Bridge.” That would have been a starting point, something for me to work with.

Anyway, I spent all day today doing this and will likely spend all day tomorrow and most of Wednesday. I need to get through all the Lake Powell aerial clips by then. I make good use of my two 24 monitors for this job, putting the QuickTime, FileMaker Pro, and Finder windows on one display and Google Maps in a big browser window on the other display. The thought of doing this on a 15 inch laptop pumps up my blood pressure. The sooner I get it done, the sooner I can move onto other things.

Seven Mistakes to Avoid When Using the Internet to Market Your Products

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Why is it that some companies just don’t get it?

Over the past week or so, I’ve been doing some research into coffee carts. You know what I mean — those movable carts you might see in office building lobbies or airports or malls that sell espresso and other hot and cold beverages. I’m working on a business proposition where I might just need one, so I’m been trying to see what my options are.

Trying is the correct word in the previous sentence. I’ve been trying hard to use the Internet — including Google, of course — to find businesses that manufacture or sell the kind of cart I want. What I’m finding, however, is that very few companies that make or sell this equipment have a clue about how they can use the Internet to make information about their products available to the world 24/7.

Why This Really Irks Me

Putting Your Small Business on the WebYou have to understand my frustration with this. After all, back in 2000, I wrote a slim book for Peachpit Press titled, Putting Your Small Business on the Web. I wrote it primarily to help small business owners understand how the Web could help them so they wouldn’t be victimized by unscrupulous Web developers. Back in those days, the Web was relatively new and people simply didn’t understand how to take advantage of it. My book explained what the Web could and couldn’t do for them and provided advice for making the most of what the Web offered.

Please understand that I’m not trying to sell anyone on this book. It’s old and terribly out of date. One of these days I’ll revise it and release it as a ebook or possibly a print on demand project. If you really want it, you can find used copies of it on Amazon.com. (That’s where I found this picture of the cover; I’d discarded my old scans of it.) My point is, I wrote a book about this eight years ago and I’m still finding people making the same mistakes I told them to avoid.

But They Just Don’t Get It

One of the things I advised was putting all of your product information on the Web. Photos, descriptions, dimensions, and yes, even pricing. This is the information people want when they’re shopping for solutions. Having complete information helps people decide whether to take the next step — which might include buying the product.

Yet in my search for coffee carts — and yes, I did use all kinds of appropriate search phrases in Google — I did not find many companies that provided the information I needed. Instead, the search results included companies that made one or more of the following mistakes.

  • They didn’t sell the product I was searching for. Yes, my search phrase was one of the phrases that appeared in the site’s meta tags or in page content, but that’s not what they sold. They sold vending carts that might or might not be used for coffee. Not what someone serious about building a coffee business wants. In this case, they’d used their meta tags to enhance search engine results in their favor, thus wasting the time of people who pulled up their pages. Just another example of SEO gone bad.
  • Blurry CartThey didn’t include images of their products. In this category, I’ll include companies that included blurry — yes blurry, as shown in this actual image from a site — images of their products and companies with a lot of broken image links. And how about a company with an embedded movie that simply wouldn’t play? I’d say 50% of the sites I brought up had insufficient illustrations of their products. Because I’m very interested in how my coffee business might look, these sites wasted my time.
  • They required you to fill out a form fully describing your business before they’d give you any information at all. WTF? Needless to say, I didn’t waste much time there because I certainly wasn’t going to provide that kind of information just to see what solutions they might have.
  • They provided vague information about some products but required you to contact them by e-mail or phone to learn more. So much for 24/7 information. I’m the kind of person who often does research at 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning. Will someone be answering the phone when I call? I don’t think so.
  • They listed so many products that it was hard to distinguish between them. One site, for example, offered eight different 7-foot coffee carts. I couldn’t tell the difference between them. There wasn’t enough information about any of them. And since the same company listed over 100 vending products, I started wondering whether they had any coffee expertise at all. Surely a coffee cart has different features than a hot dog cart.
  • They forced you to go to a different site — or multiple sites — to get complete information about a product. One site, for example, showed a blurry image of a coffee cart and listed specifications, then listed three individual Web sites where you could get pricing. Why three? Why go elsewhere at all? Of course, when you got to one of those sites, you’d have to search it for the product you were interested in. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time or patience to waste chasing information.
  • They have bad links on the site. For example, “Click here to get manufacturers specifications.” When you click “here,” it takes you to the home page of another site that lists hundreds of products — not the specifications you expected to find. Yes, it’s yet another way to waste my time.

I did find one company that had PDFs online that could be downloaded for specific products. The two-page PDFs had good photos and were relatively clear about the product’s specifications. They did not, however, include pricing. To get pricing, I had to e-mail the company. They responded quickly with yet another PDF. My question: Why wasn’t the pricing PDF also on the Web site?

Good Information Results in Sales

The result of all this is that after spending about two hours searching for a product that might meet my needs, I found only one company that makes a product I’d consider buying. I don’t know about those other companies — there wasn’t enough information on their sites to convince me that they knew the business and made a quality product I could rely on and afford. The company with the good information is the one I’m seriously considering doing business with.

What companies don’t understand is that their Web presence is almost like a storefront. If its shabbily maintained and doesn’t deliver the information people expect, that reflects on them. (I wrote about that in some length in the book, too.) By failing to make the most of their Web presence, they’re just adding more useless information to the Web — branded with their name.

Cherry Drying on Google Earth

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Putting the tracks on a satellite image.

I had my handheld GPS (a Garmin GPSmap 60c) running while I was drying cherries and the GPS tracked my movements. Today, on a whim, I saved the tracklogs and downloaded them to my Mac. Then I brought them into Google Earth and looked at a few of the orchards.

The tracks are not very accurate. They show a zig-zag motion that appears to cross diagonally across the rows. In reality, when I reached the end of each row, I moved to the side and turned to go down another row. So rather than pointed endings and diagonal tracks, an accurate rendering would show squared off endings and parallel tracks.

But I still think it’s interesting to see how I moved over the land. Take a look and see for yourself. These are the tracks from my flights on July 4.

In this first example, I’d flown past the orchard on the south side from west to east, then circled back. I made a wide clockwise circle of the orchard to get my bearings, then came in on the south end, near a white single-wide mobile home. There was a woman there, waving happily when I arrived. She’d left the door of her house open and I blew a bunch of leaves into it. (Oops.) My track took me back and forth up the triangular orchard. Although the track makes it look as if I had a short row near the top, it’s just another inaccuracy in the track. I departed the area with a clockwise circle to the west.

Cherry Drying Tracks

Here are two others representing three dries. I went to the lower one first, passing it by on the south from west to east. I circled back, then came in on the southwest corner. I went back and forth from west to east, then broke off. It started to rain so I repositioned to the airport, which was less than a mile away. I read for a while, then got a call with a new list of orchards. I started back up and took off, returning to re-dry the lower orchard in this image again (hence the double set of track lines) after doing others a bit farther to the west. I did the upper orchard about an hour later, coming in from the northwest and departing from the southeast side back to the west.

Cherry Drying Tracks

Here’s a sloppy looking one that really wasn’t this sloppy. I did the lower orchard first, coming in from the southeast and departing out the northwest. I then went directly to the upper orchard, beginning the dry at the southwest and exiting at the northwest. The pair of diagonal lines going across the bottom of this screenshot represent overflights of the orchard on my way to or from the ones in the previous screenshot.

Cherry Drying Tracks

This is the first orchard I described in some detail in my “I Dry Cherries” post. Again, I really didn’t fly a zig-zag pattern in the main orchard. and I’m certain I flew at least two more rows (one in each direction) in the smaller orchard. But the GPS doesn’t seem to pick up all the points when it makes its tracks. The two other straight lines near the bottom right of the image are overflights to/from other orchards. That’s the Columbia River/Lake Pateros in the bottom right corner of the shot.

Cherry Drying 4.jpg

These are just a few of the orchards. You get the idea. Next time I fly, I’ll use my new geotagger. It can save up to 600,000 waypoints (I think) so I have a feeling the pictures it draws will be a lot more accurate. If they are, I’ll show them off here again.

We all know what a geek I can be.

Google Feedback

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A black hole.

Today, while trying to find a solution to a problem I’m having with iCal 3, I did a Google search. Among the search results was a page that looked like it might have information that could help me. I clicked the link and wound up on a site called Experts Exchange. It had a question from a user, followed by a number of “Expert” and “Author” Comments. In each case, the comment text said:

All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only. Sign-up to view the solution to this question.

So basically, Google had steered me to a site that requires paid membership to view information.

While I don’t have any problem with Google doing this — if some sites feel they must charge a fee to display content to visitors, that’s their problem — I would like to be able to exclude this site from future search results I get while logged into Google. I thought that would be a good suggestion for the folks in Mountain View. So good, in fact, that I wanted to go on record.

So I followed the links on Google.com. Follow along with me:

  1. About Google displayed a page full of links about Google organized by topic. This seemed to be the right path so far.
  2. Contact Us (with a subtext of “FAQs, Feedback, Newsletter…”) seemed like the right link. After all, I did want to provide feedback. But all it resulted in was a list of Specific Inquiries, none of which included Feedback.

I poked around a few of the links. None of them were right. So although the Contact Us page leads one to think that Feedback is an option, apparently it is not. Google apparently isn’t interested in what its users have to say.

Of course, the Contact Us page does provide a telephone number and fax number. I’m toying with the idea of submitting my suggestion by fax. But will it be read?

With all the bad press Google has been getting lately, I’m left to wonder — as many other people have been wondering — does anyone at Google really care?