Software Channels

Folks, we had a little server problem on one of the frontends just about 10 minutes ago. Let me give you a short update this way:

One of the frontend webservers failed and dispite our efforts to redirect the traffic automatically the redirection partly failed and we had some problems delivering pages on one of the cluster nodes. That could effect a few sales, when notifications from Paypal ended up without response on exactly this machine.

We are investigating right now, what happened. The traffic is now redirected to our other servers while we dig through the error logs. The platform is back at 100% delivery and the outage was only partly effecting the site for less than 30 minutes!

Sorry for that, we do our best to improve!

Update: everything back to normal, server back in operations!

We are currently preparing around 3 Mio. new products for our catalog on tradebit.com/.de - this ridiculous amount of additional files will put up some extra load on the system and we have to be careful with that. Excuse us, if we are a bit slow in responding to your emails at the moment, there is a lot of work involved with the new setup and all the files to handle!

Also: Martin will fly over to the Paypal developer conference (www.x.com - that is a darn cool domain they got there!) in San Francisco on the 3rd and 4th of November and will be in town for a few days to catch up with some webmaster friends in the valley. If you have ever wanted to meet our chief coder and you are in California - let us know so we can arrange a meeting in the Bay Area early November.

We want to finish the big import by mid-next week, because right after Martin I will be flying out to Boston and Las Vegas on the 7th next month. So to maintain the site stability we need to test and finish the major changes until then.

The amount of new products is pretty amazing and we are very excited about that new partnership which we will reveal when the products are online - I guess you will like it!

The past weeks we have been very busy with minor updates, illnesses and some projects we had to finish for our clients. Now these projects are done and we are back on track to make your life on tradebit easier!

The first thing I will work on is the download manager. We still get a lot of support requests, because the downloads of larger files still fail or the download codes land in the SPAM filters. Trust me: that is as annoying for us as it is for you and I will try to improve that process a bit.

Further there are some glitches on the pages with IE8 which are not major, but get on my nerves since I updated to Windows 7 and actually use that browser now. I think with the release of Windows 7 and the enforced update Microsoft is rolling out, we should look nice on that browser and not just OK. More and more people will use it as they also use more Bing these days!

Another part is IMHO also crucial for us: the affiliate codes.

With now over 10 Million files on tradebit it is almost impossible to find the top-sellers quickly. Affiliates really do want to promote us and that is not the way I want it to be. So there will be a top-seller recommendation and an improved Wordpress plugin coming soon. The major steps should be taken before I head out to Vegas for Pubcon in November, where I also want to sync with some of the merchants who are selling on tradebit.

So: we are on it and prepare more content for you. Have a good weekend!

I got around 20 SPAM mails today, claiming that my email settings have changed. These fraudulent phising emails came to all sorts of accounts I have and it also looks like these scammers use our sitename as the sender!

We do not send out links to any other site than tradebit. Please be careful with these “notifications” - I took a look at the destination and it offers you a SPYWARE!

If you have the google toolbar installed or if you use the safe browsing capabilities of Firefox, you will be warned by these tools. Do not fall for that crap or your computer will be under control of someone else!

Tonight Paypal changed their IPN API a little and all our sales went south. We have found the changes and implemented a fix. We are sorry for the inconvenience of that incident. We are currently registering the missing sales and will be finished in a few minutes.

If you bought something from us you may waited now for 8 hours to get your download mail and we are sorry for the delay! All systems are back to green now!

For all the paypal developers out there, who were (like us) not following any update notifications from paypals side and got into problems with the IPN: the IPN call URL changed from non-ssl to ssl only!

There is a lot of chat in the SEO community going on about “social media” optimization and how the activities in facebook, YouTube, digg, twitter, etc. are important in your online marketing mix.

One of our merchants (asgussow) is selling a lot of video tutorials here on tradebit for a few years now and I saw that most of his traffic is coming either from his own domain or from the videos he has online on YouTube. So I thought we start a little test and upload product videos to YouTube, which link back to the detail pages here on Tradebit and see, how many of those 1 billion visitors stuble upon (:-) our videos and come over here:

Visits from YouTube Oct. 2009

So we created around 200 videos of 2-3 minutes length and published these on YouTube over the course of the last 4 weeks. So far I am not very impressed by the traffic amount coming from these videos, but there is more to it:

The traffic from YouTube is highly targetted! That means: the users find our videos there for specific keywords and if they are interested in the product itself, they come over and are much more likely willing to buy than our average user:

Visits from YouTube count

So these users are converting at a 1.7% conversion rate into buyers. That is a crazy figure. I am proud of our 1.15% average conversion rate site wide, but YouTube is sending over a real interested crowd, willing to spend a dime on content.

Yet the work involved to produce quality content videos and posting those on YouTube is heavy. We have tried software titles, music, sounds and some other topics. From what I have learned: not all areas are worth the effort, but now that the videos are uploaded and there: they will bring more traffic over time and including YouTube in your online activities as a publisher can be a real benefit!