Start Your Engine: Making Money on Ebay

by BBG

Broken Bells (more by Amanda Hatfield)

Broken Bells who recently lauched a 3D interactive video for "October", kick off a string of dates tonight (12/1) at Irving Plaza. The NYC show is part of the 101.9 RXP "Yule Rock Holiday Concert Series". The band will hit select cities from coast-to-coast, eventually landing in LA by the middle of the month. Updated tour dates are below.

And Broken Bells member Danger Mouse just wouldn't be himself if he didn't have his hand in another 10000 projects. His latest is "Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi present: ROME":

Brian Burton [Danger Mouse] and Daniele Luppi met in Los Angeles in 2004... Luppi, a composer from Italy, was receiving acclaim for his album An Italian Story, which revisited the cinematic sounds of his childhood. (He has also written music for the screen - Sex and the City, Nine - and later worked with Burton on arrangements for Gnarls Barkley, Dark Night of the Soul and Broken Bells.)

United by their shared passion for classic Italian film music, ... after an intense songwriting period - writing separately at first, and then together as the songs evolved - they travelled to Rome in October 2006. Luppi made some calls and they assembled the original musicians from films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West - including the legendary Marc 4 backing band and Alessandro Alessandroni's 'I Cantori Moderni' choir. Most of the musicians were in their seventies and hadn't worked together for several decades.

They booked time in Rome's cavernous Forum Studios - formerly Ortophonic Studios, founded, amongst others, by the great Ennio Morricone... Every effort was made to replicate the recording practices of the 1960s/70s golden age, recording live and straight to tape, with overdubs but no electronics, computers, 21st-century effects or studio trickery.

In addition, Jack White and Norah Jones each lend their voices to three tracks on the forthcoming LP, due in March 2011 via Capitol Records.

In other Jack White news, the White Stripes frontman/Third Man Records honcho is taking some fire for deciding to put up some limited edition Third Man material up for auction on ebay:

Paid subscribers of Third Man Records' The Vault were directed to an eBay page with open auctions for copies of the limited edition vinyl version of the self-titled White Stripes reissue. Within an hour, all 5 auctions were above $100 each, and a small shitstorm of comments began to erupt on The Vault, when, suddenly, Jack White joined the site's chatroom with a handbasket-gripping introduction of "See you in hell?" and explained, quite simply, why the hell there were people paying 500 bucks for a record you have to crack open to listen to: "Supply & demand.... nobody told them to buy it with a gun to their head."

...When a fan tried to argue that people with "more money than sense" were to blame, Jack retorted: "Or are they just paying what the going rate is?" White explained: "We sell a Wanda Jackson split record for 10 bucks, the eBay flipper turns around and sells it for 300. If 300 is what it's worth, then why doesn't Third Man Records sell it for 300? If we sell them for more, the artist gets more, the flipper gets nothing. We're not in the business of making flippers a living. We're in the business of giving fans what they want." -

Reggie Watts auction coming soon? And the attack on the eBay record microeconomy is on. All Broken Bells dates and a video is below.

This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Once a week, the program focuses on startups within the BizSpark program and what they’re doing to grow.

Consumer electronics search engine and review site Retrevo had the best traffic day in its four-year history on Monday. But unlike Cyber Mondays of the past, site visitors who were browsing the site’s comprehensive reviews also had the option to buy electronics without leaving the Retrevo site.

In the past two months, the company has been dipping its toes into e-commerce — an industry that it plans to dive into fully next year. The site’s long-time sources of revenue have been advertising and cost-per-click fees it collects by referring its users to electronic retailer sites. Since launching e-commerce components, such as its daily deals, it has more than doubled its monthly revenue.

To complement the new strategy, the company is launching a new search engine today that allows consumers to search accessories, the major portion of its product offerings, by entering a specific electronic device they wish to accessorize.

Taking this leap into e-commerce was something of a risk for CEO Vipin Jain. E-commerce is a decidedly different industry than review indexing, and there was a question of whether readers who trusted the site for information would also trust the site with their money (the answer thus far appears to be that they will).

class='blippr-nobr'>Mashableclass="blippr-nobr">Mashable recently chatted with Jain about making the transition that he says is likely to triple annual revenue.

Building a Strong Frame

Retrevo built a 6-million-unique-users-per-month user base for its search and review engine before it decided to start selling products itself. And although selling electronics is turning out to be much more profitable than recommending them, the four years that it spent refining this system were an important component in building the site’s e-commerce success.

For one thing, customers already trust the site. “We probably would not have had this much success with e-commerce if we had not gone through building the trust with the information and reviews and recommendations first,” Jain says. “I think that where we are and where we think the company is going to be, I think that is a result of having that belief in the recommendation and the advice we are giving them. It is easier for them to open their wallets and give us money to buy products.”

It’s also unlikely that consumers would choose to buy from the site if it were just another Amazon-like retailer. The comprehensive reviews, which make it easy for people without a lot of technical knowledge to pick out a product, is the reason that people will continue to visit the site. And, as Jain sees it, the commerce component is a way of completing this easy-to-navigate experience. Instead of sending customers to a third-party site that might be confusing, users can easily complete their checkout where they started their search.

Changing Course

Earlier this year, when Retrevo started planning for the switch, the staff didn’t have any delusions about what a drastic change the company would be making. Retrevo sought new talent from online retailers like Newegg.com and eBay to help its team think in e-commerce terms.

“We were the king of the hill in our old world (CE reviews and recommendations),” Jain says. “E-commerce is full of potholes, and we are going against big guys such as Amazon. Amazon can be very aggressive when it comes to pricing for items that they want to move.”

Instead of competing with Amazon down to pennies, Retrevo’s advantage needs to come from helping customers buy the best products for their needs and get the most out of them. The accessory search engine that launches today, for instance, helps customers find the right accessories based on what devices they have. If the accessory doesn’t work with the device, the company will accept the return with no questions asked.

It would seem that selling and recommending devices on the same site might be a conflict of interest, but Vain insists that it is no more so than when the review site has hosted advertisers like Sony in the past.

“I think we have established over the years that Retrevo is a trusted place and the reviews and recommendations that we give you have not been influenced by any business model or revenue model,” he says.

Because being a reliable source of decision-making information about products is the key to its e-commerce strategy, it seems like much of Retrevo’s success or failure will depend on whether this statement holds true.

Image courtesy of class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, Chuck “Caveman” Coker, Dean Terry

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Making Money on Ebay

Building a Strong Frame

Changing Course

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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