To offer, or not to offer…

Dear AmazonEtsy, and other marketplace product managers,

You should consider taking a page from Poshmark and eBay‘s playbooks and enable sellers to quickly make offers to customers that have wish listed, saved for later, or abandoned products in their carts.

Aside from cart price change notifications, there are few options to nudge me to buy the hundreds of products that I have earmarked as possible purchases on your sites. If I “add to watchlist” or “like” something on eBay or Poshmark respectively, I am likely to receive a discount – sometimes within minutes – incenting me to buy NOW!

Also consider turning the table to enable customers to make offers to sellers, which can help to signal that their price is too high; but, be sure to complete the sale automatically if the offer is accepted.

I hypothesize that increased timely interaction between sellers and customers will lead to more sales at lower prices, leading to more stickiness on your marketplace.

As Jeff Bezos said in his 2017 letter to shareholders: “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.”

Don’t rest on your laurels, customers won’t have it!

I hate replacing remote control batteries

SONY DSCIt’s not like remote controls are in constant use. They lay on the coffee table all day and night, waiting for the 60 seconds a day that you actually want to use it. It is really frustrating when the batteries are getting low on their charge. I go out of my way to contort my body to ensure that I am pointing the remote directly at the IR sensor of the cable box. I press the button harder in case that helps deliver more juice to the transmitter. When that doesn’t work, I see if the TV remote has batteries that work — darn it, that one takes AAA batteries. Now what? I get up and walk over to the junk drawer in the kitchen that contains a bunch of C batteries, a single D battery, two 9-volt batteries — I put one of them on my tongue to feel the metallic shock like I used to when I was a kid — and a couple of loose AA batteries from different brands in the bottom. I grab those and come back to the couch and replace both batteries. Nothing. Now I take one of the old ones, and one of the ones from the bottom of the junk drawer. Nope. Now I switch them around. Nada. You get the point, by this time it would have been so much easier to get off my butt and walk over to the cable box and change the channel. Read more of this post

Have Coupon, Will Travel.

I am known for being a bit of a bargain hunter.  Not crazy coupon lady kind of stuff, just if there is a way to get a better price on something I am going to purchase anyway, why not use it.

One of the best ways I have found to save a few bucks, is to sign up for e-mail newsletters at the stores that I routinely buy stuff from. What I am really after are the “percent off” coupons within those e-mails such as this 15% off coupon from Dunham’s Sports.Dunham's Sports 15% Off Coupon Read more of this post

Dear Blockbuster Mobile Product Manager,

First off. I love Blockbuster Online. Many others have embraced your competition and given up local movies altogether for online only queues and streaming services or they prefer to stand in a line on a Friday night at the RedBox in their grocery store. I’m old school. I prefer local. So do millions of other consumers just like me. You are only horse in the race of  multichannel home movies, so OWN it

Since there is nothing that crosses the chasm between local and online like mobile, this Open Product Design is for you Blockbuster Mobile Product Manager. Sit back, open your composition notebook, grab a cup of coffee, and listen to the ramblings of a fellow Product Manager who has watched 243 movies using Blockbuster Online.

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