The question many online entrepreneurs agonize over is how to interact with and support customers – and it’s a quandary Mr. Rajan Shah of Backyard Bargain.com faces with personal action, sincerity, candor and proactivity. He reaches out – fast. A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to Backyard Bargain.com. The owner, Mr. Shah, contacted me [...]
How Not to Build the Ultimate Shopping Website
01/19/2009 By
A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless – not because he doesn’t want his name published but because I don’t want to cause him one nanosecond of embarrassment – declared that he had built The Ultimate Shopping Website a few months ago. He decided to sell everything from apple crates to zithers, from aquarium [...]
Really Really Really a Store
01/18/2009 By
Shopping mall or a tire manufacturing plant? Down here in real-world land, it’s nearly impossible to mistake a store for anything but a store. We walk in, see a store, see things to buy, and assume that we have walked into a place to buy things. It’s a pretty safe assumption. The same can’t be [...]
Three Conclusions While Rethinking Online Shopping
01/17/2009 By
Apologies for the protracted silence. I’ve been thinking, scribbling on my whiteboard, staring at the PSW family, and coming to conclusions about online shopping in general, and Perfectly Shaped World in particular. This peaceful process has not been without cause (although a persistent case of the winter flu bug has definitely helped keep me from [...]
Fashion vs Style, Marching to the Wrong Drummer
01/09/2009 By
In the other room, I keep a small stack of magazines. Not one of them is focused on fashion. This stack tells me more about personal wardrobe style than any collection of Vogue, People, Glamour, Cosmo, Elle, Harper’s, Marie Claire or any of the hundreds of other consumer fashion industry publications on the stands. [...]
Losing Baggage in a Positive Way
01/06/2009 By
So here we are at the beginning of 2009. Six days in, each of which has been unsurprisingly similar to the last six days of 2008. As the calendar pages flip and freshen, we are afforded the opportunity to look at our state of the union, evaluate what’s been working or not, make changes, vow [...]
Not-About-Fashion Posts on PSW Blog
In answer to a query I got a moment ago via Twitter (“What does this have to do with fashion anway? Yr blog is drifting?”): Every ounce of feedback is worth its weight in platinum. Designing and maintaining websites in a vacuum is a doomed venture. Since the Perfectly Shaped World stores themselves are not [...]