I’m not suprised to see a major correction in this business.

I’ve never used one of these stores. I don’t get it myself - I buy a few supplies at Sams club and throw the boxes in my trunk for drop off at UPS store. I keep my money. I know I’m not their customer, and this blog is always my opinion.

It goes like this. People who don’t want to deal with boxing and shipping stuff for their eBay auctions were going to drive across town (right past the UPS Store and the Post Office,) drop them off, and pay another percentage of the sale to a store to list their item.

Okay, to sell on eBay you need to be able to:

• fill out a web form that describes your item.
• use a digital camera to photograph something, and a tool like Picassa to grab it.
• pack up a box.
• stick tape and a sticker on a box (with your ship stickers on it)
• Drop off the box at the UPS Store or DHL Counter.

Some of the major complaints of these centers are:

• Unfair on shipping supplies (300-500% mark-up)
• 25-30%+ commissions (Selling an item for $75 sometimes nets you $45)
• Aggressive Upselling Tricks for worthless and confusing add-ons.
• Store-favoring tactics if the item didn’t sell.

The franchisees are loudly complaining of their pain.

• Lack of corporate support (franchisees always expect more than they get)
• Software problems.
• Franchise Start up of $70-100k (that’s a lot of knick-knacks to sell.)
• Ebay fees are going up all the time, and rules are getting stricter.
• There are no real volume advantages on ebay (except perhaps for feedback.)
• Lots of time spent fighting negative feedback, often from rival franchises.
• Franchises are faced with big problems in their models …model? hmmm.
• More regulations are surely coming as these stores become the “new pawn shop.”
• Scrutiny of each store as a potential fencing-point for stolen property.
• If you have an hour or so, you can read more here.

If you read some of the posts on these links, you’ll come away thinking the $100k for a eBay Drop-off franchise would be vastly better spent elsewhere (oh yeah, don’t forget about the monthly royalties.) I do realize that there are millions of people out there who want to sell items and don’t want to muck with eBay.

But isn’t it logical to assume there are going to be fewer of these people all the time, as broadband and computer/internet penetration grows, and as everyone has a digital camera in the drawer. This generation of folks is not going to want to plunk down $30 of every $100 on somebody with a tape gun.

http://www.google.com/igoogle now redirects to http://www.google.com/ig … does that make it official?

When Google Personalized Results (iGoogle) are turned on, the results you see in your search reflect your own personal preference, geographic location, and possibly “gadget influence”. So, if the new gadget maker is so easy to use, will we see a big proliferation of gadgets that make searching easier for people (e.g. expectant mothers information?) Could it become a “search results in a box” type system, with the results inside packaged like the the “finds” system on prefound.com.

Perhaps we’ll start thinking about the user, not the results list. You’re talking about a specific customer at a specific point of consideration. Rather than talking about #1 in Google, we’ll need to talk about things in terms of engagement and hooks.

Content is going to need to get a whole-ton better. This is a good thing, but it’s going to be hard for website owners to swallow. The offers on a web page for genuinely helpful information, targeted to the consumer at a specific moment in time, are key to conversions.

Optimization of content for the customer and their consideration cycles is going to need to be built in to design and development. As much as the “pure designers” don’t like SEO/SEM types, we’re going to need to get along now. CMS-based sites are going to skyrocket in popularity, as are blogs-as-sites.

It’s still unclear how many will build Gadgets, but what I see is a proliferation of hundreds of different little Googlettes, doing their own things based on rules. We’ll have no control over what the users see on their screen. They may see search results float over their screen like soap bubbles or fall over like dominos. We just won’t know. But one thing is clear, you can’t do SEO on an individual Gadget….

5/1/07: Update: Now that I’ve tried the gadget maker, I’m underwhelmed.

Chris Sherman wrote about Google’s plan to surface government information got me thinking about what kinds of things were going to happen once Google gets into our public records.Â

First off, let’s admit. Public records are “public” in a legal sense, not in a practical sense. It’s too damn hard to get to them in many cases. While one could make a fuss to get your state official to dig up Box 2421-B-325 in Archive Building 3132 so you could see a certain document, how many actually do?  How would you know to even ask?

 I’ll bet many things are crawling around in the deep dark archives of government. And I’ll bet there are many out there that would like it to stay that way. Just like the digization of many books exposed plagerism, it’s my prediction that the increased crawling of state-stored public records is going to expose many nasty things that have heretofore been hidden. The friction that one encounters to do a obtain any document, let alone establish relationships between multiple documents, could have prevented it from becoming apparent.  If Google makes it easy to hunt in the nooks and crannies, a whole new breed of hobbiest detectives might pop out of the woodwork and create watchdog mashups like never before. This could be fun.

Google’s indexing and linking will feel more like “poking around” I mean, check out Google patents…. it’s fun (and sometimes emotional) to pop around and discover relationships this way. Before you know it, we’ll have some pretty amazing mashups developed on top of this data, so maps, searches, cross-references, and mobile services will let us mine data about our locale.

If Google goes any more local, say, to the city government level, they’ll have their work cut out for them.Â

If you’re a local business, and you’re not in Google Local now, I must admit, possibly living in denial. Google 411 (1-800-GOOG411) is amazing, and I am just blown away that so many businesses haven’t taken the time to insert their company into the Google Local Business Center. We couldn’t find our favorite pizza restaurant through it tonight. Paid 411 is dead.

Another thing that’s apparent is that names not easily pronounced phonetically are going to be at a disadvantage without human assistance. Puccinis Pizza (pronounced Pooch-ee-nees) for example, will lose to simpler names such as “Mad Mushroom Pizza.”

The other thing I’m looking forward to is the ability to send the google results to my phone via text - and for attached coupons to come with the text into the phone (codes, hopefully, that the restaurants, etc. will accept over the phone.)

Who knows if the aquisition of DoubleClick is a good economic move for Google, but I think it’s a bit like capturing a multi-billion dollar “specimen” to examine under the microscope while they perfect CPA models. We as search marketers need to get used to the whole CPA solution that Google is brewing, and those of us working in Ecommerce need to embrace Google Checkout even more openly. What does this mean for Yahoo Stores (an area I work in a lot) where GCO is not possible. Hmmm food for thought.

I first blogged about Google’s Pay Per Action marketing back in June when they really started to look like they were going down the CPA route pretty seriously. And now it’s happening.

There are two types of franchises. Brand franchises and Business Model Franchises.  I don’t really know anything between the two. With a brand franchise, you buy the use of the name, and that’s it. These are not very common anymore, but they used to be (Ace Hardware, Sherwin Williams Paint, etc.) Business Model Franchises are the ones that work today - started and perfected by people like Ray Krok. These are the ones where systems and operations manuals are painstakingly worked out through repetitive motion and the results are then used to build better copies of each franchise. These franchisees feed the “mother ship” and the mother ship makes better babies. The owners of these businesses concentrate on getting customers, not the systems of the business.

But what happens when business model franchises break from the pack?  Chaos and unhappy customers! The owner of the franchise wanted a brand franchise, in a certain sense, but that being unavailable they bought a business model franchise. They then decide what parts of the franchise model they want to buy into and what to ignore. The system breaks.Â

I ran into this today returning a movie to Blockbuster here in Lexington. Even though the ads for Blockbuster’s new On-Line Netflix competitor “Blockbuster Online” have been filling the airwaves (good franchise marketing at work) I found this posted on our neighborhood store. Earlier, the same franchise didn’t participate in their “keep as long as you like” program.  So essentially any brand manager wanting to take advantage of the program designed to keep these brands relevant in today’s movie-at-home and download-to-watch era are being shunted. Okay, I don’t know the whole inside story, and it may be due to a problem that the Corporation has caused rather than the franchisee, but as a consumer, I see only the words “NO!” So the competitive advantage that Blockbuster had over Netflix (return and get a new movie) has been removed.

Sorry for photo quality, my phone cam sux.

In my opinion this is one of the reasons that franchises should build into their models compliance penalties (and bonuses.) If a franchise refuses to adopt a proven system-wide program, they are charged a non-compliance fee on their royalties. This would give the corporation the ability to control the brand and customer experience.

Yeah, I know that most promotions say “at participating ____” but isn’t the whole point of franchises to, er, participate?

Franchises aren’t designed for the independent-minded. They depend on a by-the-book execution of a business plan, adherence to time-tested systems and a willingness to follow directions.

“A franchise is still a business,” Lawrence “Doc” Cohen, owner of 24 franchised locations, including five Mrs. Fields Famous Brands LLC Pretzel Time outlets, and a former chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based International Franchise Association told the Wall Street Journal “It’s not a guarantee of success. The worst thing a new franchisee can do is say to his franchiser, ‘You guys don’t know what you’re doing,’ ” says Mr. Cohen. He likens that to someone taking over a McDonald’s restaurant and deciding not to put sesame seeds on the Big Mac buns. Making sure employees are properly trained and executing according to the rules is vital. After acquiring a struggling Great American Cookie outlet, another brand of Salt Lake City-based Mrs. Fields, Mr. Cohen discovered why the store was ailing: The baker was going home at 11 a.m., leaving the store without fresh goods to sell the rest of the day. At another store, cleaning and maintenance had obviously been ignored. Following a thorough scrubbing, the location, previously in default for lack of business, now does nearly $600,000 in annual sales.”