Seth Godin, the godfather of modern marketing, has written many books on what it takes to get your product or services noted in today’s market. Considering many markets today are saturated, some veering more toward flooded, his insights are extremely helpful.

What stands out from his very readable book, Purple Cow, is whether a new product is “remarkable” or not. And in this case “remarkable” can be taken to mean - is it worth remarking on? The Purple Cow reference come from his analogy that as we see cows all the time and due to their common place appearance we virtually ignore them. If one day we drove past a cow that was purple it would more likely grab our attention and prompt us to remark on it... or make us crash the car.

Here’s a video of the talk he gave at the prestigious TED talks - which gets big thinkers together to share their ideas.

My point in sharing this with you is because I’m building up to the question, “Are eBay listings for particular products like ordinary cows?” And if in some cases that is true, what can be done to make the listings more remarkable?

Posted by Online Herald at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We’ve had lots of feedback from our users, visitors, partners and investors which is always hugely appreciated. (Good and bad.) One of the reoccurring themes we’ve encountered is “Why not use YouTube?”. A good question and one I’ll use this blog post to answer.

YouTube is a brilliant website; a phenomenon really. Highly entertaining and built for that purpose, it’s a joy to use. vzaar, on the other hand, has been built for eBay users. Both serious and casual sellers alike, with your commerce interests in mind.

YouTube isn’t tricky to use, however vzaar is a cinch in comparison allowing you to embed video into your listings in just 2 clicks after you have uploaded. This also means that there is no need to alter or insert any html code as our engine does all that for you.

In addition to the ease of use, the vzaar video player contains vital info for the buyer; sellers feedback, bidding time left on the auction and the ever crucial “Bid Now” button - a call to action that encourages sellers to bid on the item at any point when watching the video.

As we all know, one of YouTube’s core strengths is that it is excellent at promoting other videos - allowing you to remain entertained for many hours by other videos...much to the anguish of employers the world over. However we believe this isn’t ideal behavior for a user watching YOUR sales video - you want them to stay with you and your business, not go to a competitor. Your vzaar video encourages watchers to view only your other videos on vzaar, ensuring the customers attention remains with you and your business.

YouTube is free... and so is vzaar. We have developed further functionality that will allow you easily manage your large numbers of videos, add them to multiple listings in one go, search your listings, use smart templates with video and these services will be available at a reasonable upgrade fee.

There are many other reasons I would personally chose to use vzaar over YouTube. The look of the player, the advanced management tools, the listing and selling advice and the eBay templates name a few. However the joy of the internet remains in the availability of choice and I’d like to conclude by saying whichever site you do choose - video is definitely the next step in selling online.

Posted by Online Herald at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)