LetsBuyIt Blog

The latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet shopping habits has revealed that more than 85% of the world’s online population has used the Internet to make a purchase in the last two years.

Turkish top the tally with 91% of the online shoppers using credit cards followed by 86% of the Irish shoppers and on third place are the Indian online shoppers with 84%.

“ Among Internet users, the highest percentage shopping online is found in South Korea, where 99% of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK, Germany and Japan with 97% each with the US eighth, at 94%.” (Source: Livemint)

These are the most popular categories purchased on the internet: Books (41% purchased in the past three months), Clothing/Accessories/Shoes (36%), Videos / DVDs / Games (24%), Airline Tickets (24%) and Electronic Equipment (23%). Clothing / Accessories / Shoes have increased by 20% to 30% in the last two years and books by seven per cent.

TeleBid, basically, works like Ebay in the sense that users bid for products and the highest bidder wins the auction. On this website, however, users can follow life auctions in real-time. This means a clock is displayed below every product counting minutes and seconds, and users can bid until 1 second before the end of the auction. Once a bid is made 20 seconds are added to the clock giving it the feel of a life auction.

Now the big difference to Ebay is that on TeleBid, every bid costs 0.50€ and has to be pre-purchased. Additionally to making single bids manually, users can set up a BidButler to make bids for them when they do not have time to bid themselves. The BidButler can be set up to only bid between a pre-determined price range and users can also select how many bids the program can make; keeping in mind that every bid is charged with 0.50€. To bid strategically, however, TeleBid advises its users to use a combination of manual single bids and the BidButler.

Another difference to Ebay and other auctioning websites is that users can bid via telephone. The 0.50€ per bid will then be added to the phone bill.

Also, users can only bid on products set up for auction by TeleBid. Users cannot sell their own products.

The next generation of dog-lovers is here. Like Facebook or Studivz, www.hallohund.de is a social networking platform for everyone wanting to present the world his or her fourlegged friend on the Internet. Here, Users can find out everything they is to know about dogs.

They can get beauty tips, information about their dog’s proper diat, post photos and even meet other dog owners to go for a walk with. In the categories Hunde-Basics and Hunde-Welt, people can read user letters and get informed about upcoming activities. Dog experts and vets give advise, and in the Hunde-Market you can buy anything to do with dogs; all the way from books to four-poster dog beds.

The best part is that as a registered user, you also have the option to individually design your and of course your dog’s own profile, write a dog diary, and ask dog experts questions. I am starting to ask myself who the dog is here?

The word Social Networking takes on a whole different meaning with www.hallohund.de. It is now not only target towards humans to keep in contact with friends and family but also at their K9 friends. Now Burda has really managed to link the print media with the online world!? I am very curious how that is going to work out!!

Working with large amounts of data such as categories and product feeds, certain tasks require manual labor, which can be extremely tiring. However I was kissed by Fortuna to discover the power of excel once more. If you think Pivot Tables, Replace, Trim and Concatenate Functions are exciting wait until you have discovered the magic of Vertical Search or “VLookup” (Thank you Pauline!!).

Take a very long list of items, each with their unique ID, and take another list of items with their unique IDs. Now you try to match the IDs of two identical items of both lists (I guess it feels like alphabetically sorting CDs in a Virgin Megastore).

This is how it is done: Sheet 1, Column A you put the data and Column B the respective unique ID. Sheet 2, Column A you put the other data that you want matched and Column B the respective unique ID. Now you perform a vertical search in Sheet 1, Column C to identify whether the data in Sheet 2 contains the same items as in Sheet1. If there is an identical item it will put the ID of the item in List 2 next to the item in Sheet 1, Column C otherwise “Empty”.

Believe me that it saves a lot of your time: =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A2;Sheet2!$A$1:$B$100;2;FALSE);”EMPTY”)

The whole LetsBuyIt team wishes you a fantastic New Year!
We will now be back online in a few more weeks, with a brand new website we hope you’ll enjoy a lot!

Sorry for the past weeks inactivity on the blog but you all know how busy the pre-launch phase is. We are now back on the writing!

Best Wishes, LetsBuyIt team.