Chamber E-Commerce Successes & Updates
By Trevor | September 26, 2007
Well, thanks in part to the diligence and help that you have all provided, we’ve actually been seeing a nice growth spike in the registrations and memberships at the Chamber of E-Commerce, even though we haven’t even announced it. We’re averaging about 20 registrations a day (free sites, that is). While the memberships (paid sites) haven’t slowed or sped up at all since the last few months, we’re still glad to see that we’ve been getting registrations from what I assume is nothing more than word of mouth. Thanks to those of you who have been talking about the Chamber to friends or business associates.
The Chamber of E-Commerce appears a valuable tool to more than just us. We actually had a gentleman who’s been with the Chamber for over a year tell us, when he wanted a new domain for his paid membership site, that he didn’t want us to only charge him the price of the new domain; he would rather help support us by signing up for an entirely new account and paying the full yearly membership rate. I think it’s great that our E-Commerce program can build such loyalty in its customer base.
A side note, for those who have been having problems with our Live Support or e-mailed support on the Chamber of E-Commerce and our other products: we’ve replaced the employees who were handling the support. Dave, Manager of Operations, and Owen, Manager of Development, have both been working closely with anyone who needs support in the interim period, and we appreciate the understanding and patience of those few customers whose support needs were not addressed immediately.
In other news, I’m currently working a couple of business writers for various papers in Florida and in larger markets as well, hoping to get them to pick up on the story of the Chamber of E-Commerce. In addition to this, I’ll be prepping a press release and an e-mail to the Chambers of Commerce (the brick and mortar ones) that have opted in to receive e-mails from us to get them to mention us to their business members. Once that’s all done–which it should be before the week is out–I’ll just be waiting on Bill’s word to see if the supplemental marketing efforts that he’s trying to line are going to gel or not. Once he gives me the word, we’ll go with the PR push on that.
Thanks again to those of you who have pointed out bugs with the builder software, either on this blog, on our support site, or through an e-mail to me personally. Your contribution to making the Chamber the best that it can be is much appreciated. Please be sure to let us know if you find anything else.
–Trevor
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“30 Days to Launch” videos taken down
By Trevor | September 26, 2007
I received a letter from Jupiter Media that has revoked the rights to some of the songs that Web2 Corp purchased on their “Rock Vol. 1″ album of royalty-free music. Unfortunately, the three tracks that we can’t use anymore were the three tracks that I purchased the album for, and those three tracks saw a lot of use throughout the 30 Days to Launch videos. Se we’re taking the videos down for now until we can get someone to take the raw assets and re-render the video with different background music.
Jupiter Media has done a great job of being contrite about this, though, and has issued us a total of $200.00 store credit for a electronic album that only cost us $100.
I know that virtually everyone who comments on the blog has watched the videos; sorry that they aren’t available for watching anymore.
–Trevor
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The New Chamber of E-Commerce site is live.
By Trevor | September 17, 2007
We’ve put up the new Chamber of E-Commerce site live as a soft launch to see how it does over the next few days. Take a look and let me know if you like what you see.
A somewhat more in-depth post is due in a bit. I’ll post it as soon as I’ve got time to write it. 
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On Changing Horses in Mid-Stream
By Trevor | September 5, 2007
In October of 2000, James Hong and Jim Young founded a little start up called HotOrNot. It grew into a popular site with many visitors, and added a simple dating application to it which allowed the founders to directly monetize their site. Money rolled in and times were good, until the site began to stagnate and revenues dropped. Recently, as TechCrunch has covered, HotOrNot has completely restructured its business model, abandoning the paid dating service and making the entire site free. It’s been mentioned in a few places on the web as an example of a company adapting itself to the changing marketplace and succeeding admirably through considered risk taking.
That’s nice, you may say, but why should you care? Because Web2 Corp’s Chamber of E-Commerce is also undergoing a fundamental shift in its business model, one that should make the site more popular, but also one that involves a certain amount of risk. Like the founders of HotOrNot, we’re making a bold move to shake things up around here, and we’re doing so in the knowledge that it will change things drastically for this product. We’re changing the Chamber for the better, and I’ve finally gotten the go-ahead from Bill to talk with you all about it on the blog, so here goes:
The Chamber of E-Commerce is shifting to a free model that is supported by advertising revenues and—hopefully—partnerships. One of the problems that we’ve had with the Chamber has been converting people to paying forty or fifty bucks a month to use our service. While that’s a great price to pay for e-commerce hosting and site building, our target demo hasn’t responded terribly well. While most anyone can agree that every business can extract some kind of benefit from a website, convincing people that they will see more than $600 a year’s worth of benefits from a website doesn’t always work. Customers might not understand just how easy it is to create or customize a website with the Chamber, and our business model has, quite frankly, not been as successful as we would like. So, like HotOrNot, we change to reflect the market realities.
Joining the Chamber of E-Commerce is now free. No costs at all for a site, shopping cart, inventory management, hosting, builder, or bandwidth. If a business makes a successful sale, we take 1% of the price of the sale to offset the costs associated with running the Chamber.
How will the Chamber make money for Web2 Corp, then? We have three different methods that we will use to generate profit. First, at the top of every free page there will be a toolbar with a single banner advertisement from a sponsor. Second, businesses that wish to remove the advertising or who would like to have their own domain name will pay us 40 dollars a year. Third, we hope that the Chamber of E-Commerce, which is an awesome tool for small and medium businesses, will be able to partner with big name companies like Staples, Office Max, or H&R Block, offering branded verisons of the Chamber to their customers. Just getting a one line mention on the bottom of the receipt (“Build your business online with OfficeDepotSites.ChamberECommerce.com”) would be great for us, and we’re hoping to be able to get more out of a partnership than only that.
In addition to re-doing the business model, we’ve taken a lot of time and solicited a lot of user feedback to make the new site much easier to navigate and use. Here’s a side-by-side comparison with the old site on the top, and the new site on the bottom.
The new site’s not live yet—we’re still working out a few bugs in the development environment—but it should be in a few days. I look forward to hearing from you all about what you think that this development will do for the Chamber and Web2 Corp.
–Trevor
[[Edit: Couldn’t fit the images side by side in the blog post in the fashion that I had thought I could, so I had to change some text and layout stuff.]]
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Out of town
By Trevor | August 30, 2007
I’ll be out of town–out of country, actually–from today at about 4 until late Monday, so I won’t be responding to comments or e-mails for a few days.
See you all when I get back. I’ll have a new blog post for you when I return.
–Trevor
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