At first I thought it was pretty funning. You can read all about it here:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/blog/2010/06/officially-our-bestever-cease.html

After reading the entire thing, however, I now believe it was a viral marketing campaign. It's purely genius too. Make up a story like this, and then post it on tech news sites like Reddit, Slashdot, and Digg. This quickly made it to the front page of Reddit, and Thinkgeek probably received hundreds of thousands of unique visitors instantly.

Now, this could be totally legit, but even if that is the case, this is still an amazing marketing gimmick. This is how you get rich on the internet. You have to draw attention to your site, and then monetize that extra boost in traffic.

ThinkGeek using viral marketing is a post from: SupremeTechs

I recently started a class on e-commerce. We are actually in our first week of class still, but one of the first discussions has centered around a diagram that lays out the steps involved in a typical e-commerce setting. Looking at it has led me to realize that e-commerce is much more complicated than it should be.

I have a prediction for the next decade or so. There are some forms of e-commerce which have already emerged as forerunners of a new type of system. People don't want to go through a 12 step process to make a purchase online. We make purchases online because they are convenient. I would much rather go shop, when I'm trying to decide what I want to buy. However, if I know what I want to buy, I would much rather purchase it online.

Online purchases are more convenient, offer more selection, and are less expensive due to the more globally competitive marketplace. It's not as timely in regard to actually receiving the product. One has to wait for the product to arrive through shipping. Today, shipping has been streamlined to the point where it's almost not a good argument. I would much rather wait for a product to ship to me than fight the crowds at the stores.

Think about a trip to your local Wal-mart. They have fifty checkout lanes but only five are open. They could handle a massive amount of people, yet you almost certainly have to wait in line every time. This is, of course, unless you are like me and only go at 3am. At 3am there is only one lane open, lane 17 next to the cigarettes.

The point is, no matter how many customers there are in the store through the day, there are always lines at ever cash register. These lines keep people in the stores. It makes them spend more. The longer you are in Wal-mart. The longer they have to convince you to buy something else. They do this, not through pushy salespeople, but through subtle subliminal advertising techniques that deal with your senses of sight, smell, and hearing. They've found that the best way to get someone to spend more money, is to make them stay in the store longer, and at the end of the visit, they put you in tight quarters with many "must-have" items. They also put things like candy and tabloids there for you to grab while you wait.

This technique is being tested within e-commerce itself. Let's dig into this more and discuss how people make money online.

Making money online is dependent upon one thing...Traffic. Traffic is THE major factor in making money online. If one has traffic, the rest is pretty easy actually. Some people will tell you that you have to have targeted traffic or a certain type of traffic, but that is non-sense. The only real requirement is TRAFFIC. With traffic, you can find a simple way to make money.

That's what these sites are thinking when they make the checkout process so difficult, and this theory probably holds a lot of weight. It most likely does create more income for the sites. If they customers spend more time browsing your site, they are more likely to buy more stuff. Here's one thing to consider though. How annoyed with your site does the average customer become after a given amount of time.

Apple has done one thing completely right over the past decade. Some people think that Apple is great because it made such a great media device when it created the iPod. You may feel that the iPhone is simply the best phone ever made. All of these are mere opinion. All of these are things you would hear fanboys of Apple spout.

I disagree that the iPod is not an amazing product in the personal media device category. It's merely a mediocre product. The really amazing product in this situation is the iTunes store. Now, along with the AppStore and the BookStore, Apple has created a digital marketplace that is superb. These stores don't offer the typical e-commerce atmosphere. They make the buying process a one-click process. THIS is why the iTunes and AppStore is better than most others. They meld their hardware products such as the iPod, iPhone, iMac, Macbook, and Mac Mini to their stores of digital products.

Their version of e-commerce takes a 12 step process and turns it into a three step process. Those steps are browse, buy, and use. They have found that the faster a users gets through the buy step, the faster they can get back to the browse step.

In the future, we will see a lot more marketplaces like this. Others have already appeared, such as the Playstation Network.

This is the new way to sell things on the web.

Streamlining e-commerce is a post from: SupremeTechs

Now, on the outside, this appears to be a good thing. It should lower the amount of dishonesty on the internet, right? The answer is "yes and no". It will limit Americans from doing this. Americans make up about 5% of the Earth's population. Did you know that there are more people in China that speak English than there are people in the United States total? My point is, this regulation, along with many others, promotes outsourcing.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for an American to stay afloat in this world. I know, many of the non-Americans out there will say "but you guys have had it good for so long." I agree, we have. We've had it so good because we used to rely on freedom more. Our country could once pride itself on being free. We still have a lot of freedom, don't get me wrong. The fact that I'm still able to write a blog post like this reflects that I still have freedoms. They are just much more limited now when compared to even 50 years ago.

I may sound like a broken record but corporations run this country. We are losing our country.

Why Internet Laws are Detrimental to Americans is a post from: SupremeTechs

OPEN OFFICE PRO 2007/VISTA/XP FOR MICROSOFT WINDOWS NEW - eBay (item 260364170325 end time Feb-24-09 14:29:46 PST).

Someone sold a "retail licensed" version of Open Office for $52. Two of those a day and you have a decent payday considering that Open Office is completely free. Hell, I may try selling a few copies of it myself.

I've seen people sell Linux and Open Office on eBay before, but I've never seen one of them go for that much money. That's pretty expensive for a free piece of software. Of course, there are some that will argue that yes some people don't have broadband and may actually benefit from these auctions. Well, that may be the case but that isn't the type of people they are marketing to.

They are fooling people who don't know any better. They are making them think that they are getting a dang good deal on some software. It's actually pretty genius.

I'll be off burning some Open Office disks.

Amazing eBay sale is a post from: SupremeTechs