Your Shipwire account just got a whole lot easier to use. On your next account login, you should notice a number of changes, including:

Updated Dashboard - This re-designed dashboard makes it infinitely easier to find the key information you need to see in your account right when you login. Color coded “pods” break up the information into logical chunks that are easy to digest: covering account usage, alerts, and order activity. Your order activity is conveniently summarized in tables that provide quick visibility on shipping order activity, back-ordered inventory, etc. Click on the screen shots to zoom in and have a look.

Warehouses View - How many times have you wanted to have a quick look at your business activity by warehouse? The new Warehouses view now gives you that, providing you with a detailed breakdown of all open orders by warehouse – for example: it includes a quick snapshot of all orders on hold, by type of hold. It also provides a convenient point of access to other warehouse-related activities such as reviewing inventory levels, uploading orders, or sending more inventory. You can get to the Warehouses view right from your new Account Dashboard, or from the navigation under ‘My Accounts->Warehouses’.

Preferred Warehouses - One small change you’ll notice is that the new Dashboard and Warehouses interfaces (including where you send inventory to Shipwire) will now only show ‘active’ warehouses, and not all of the warehouses in the Shipwire global warehouse network.  If you want to see all warehouses, or activate a specific one, simply go into your Shipping Preferences(Ship->Preferences), and check additional Preferred Warehouses.

In addition to these very visible changes, we have introduced a number of smaller enhancements with this latest release. Please spend a few minutes and let us know how these changes look to you and where you’d like us to continue improving the platform.  Thank you in advance for taking a few minutes to share any feedback.

The Shipwire Team

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Shipwire was nominated and became a finalist for the Stevie Awards; put on by the American Business Awards.

We’re nominated in the category for e-commerce; which makes total sense.  However, it appears that the ABA doesn’t do a platform award, like our Codie by SIIA (Software Industry Association of America).  The Stevie category is actually for advertising, who would have guessed.

You might ask, what the heck is a “Stevie” and why does the statue remind me of a Pink Floyd album cover?  From the Stevie Website  Stevie is taken from the name Stephen, which is derived from the Greek for “crowned.” Stevie is approximately 16 inches tall, and is hand-cast and finished in 24-karat gold.  The crystal pyramid held aloft by Stevie represents the hierarchy of human needs, a system often represented as a pyramid that was developed in the 1960s by psychologist Abraham Maslow, who observed that after their basic needs are met, human beings seek the esteem of their peers.

Updated on June 30th:  I guess it wasn’t a surprise that I wasn’t called to give an acceptance speech as GoLite won for best e-com advertising campaign.  Makes sense given that Shipwire is a software and services platform,  we power the global expansion of a bunch of e-commerce sites like GoLite, and we didn’t spend millions on a site redesign and relaunch; we did it ourselves.  I like to think we trounced AT&T who was also nominated in our category.  Congrats to GoLite and all the Stevie award winners.  Congrats to the Shipwire team for becoming a finalist (and for trouncing AT&T).

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The steady increase of Asian manufacturers - Looking for New Markets

Last week the Wall Street Journal posted a really interesting graph on the front page that shows the size of the China manufacturing sector.  WSJ subscribers can read the entire article here.  The graph speaks a thousand words.

I don’t think it comes as any big surprise that Chinese manufacturing is increasing at such a huge rate. A walk down a Walmart aisle or a trip to the Apple store is about all the proof that you need.  Add to that the ongoing TV, blog and news commentary related to China’s recent moves to allow the Yuan to appreciate against the dollar.  Will it lead to a surge in U.S. manufacturing or a decrease in the trade deficit with China?  (Yuan is a unit of the Chinese currency the Renminbi) Only time will tell.

Being a a global e-commerce and global logistics blog, I’m less interested in discussing the trade deficit and more interested at looking at the major trends for trade routes and where all these Chinese manufactured goods are going, who is buying them and where are they being sold.  I also think there are a few new trends developing that people should be aware of.

• Asia to LA/Long-beach trade route will continue to grow.
• Asian manufacturers will enter the U.S. market.
• The middleman will be redefined.
• The difference between International shipping and cross-border e-commerce.

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"Source" "Wholesale Sales" "Consumer Sales"

Yesterday some big news was announced by Alibaba.com, an Asian B2B Supplier sourcing platform, and its wholesale marketplace arm (AliExpress).  They bought U.S. company Vendio.  (Personal note, congrats to our Bay Area friends at Vendio, looks like we’ll be seeing some interesting things from you guys in the future). Vendio is has been around in one form or another since the go-go Internet craze of the dot.com.  Today Vendio is a merchandising and online store platform that includes auction management tools that they picked up when they bought Andale (formerly Auction Watch) in 2006.

Auctionbytes covered the Vendio acquisition yesterday, as did the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and bloggers of all shapes and sizes.  The Auctionbytes article by Ina Steiner is a great read and has some back of the envelope calculations on how much Vendio raised and how much was previously raised by Andale.  While most of the industry analysts and  many commentators are focusing on Alibaba’s core business as the rationale for the acquisition – Get Vendio merchants to source product on Alibaba or close the transaction for wholesale buying on AliExpress – Ina’s article looks at eBay data as one of the main points of the acquision.  Alibaba stated it was all about driving more transactions off Alibaba and AliExpress in the Alibaba press release.  I for one, think it’s part eBay data, part opportunity to drive transactions to AliExpress and mostly to help their core customer base of manufacturers and suppliers learn how to sell in major marketplaces in the U.S.

Some of the interesting tidbits I’ve gathered from various sources: (see trackbacks)

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It’s summer time.  Time to get out of the warehouse.   If you find yourself stuck in a warehouse on the longest day of the year  it’s a great time to consider ways to get out of the warehouse and get outside or get back to growing your business.  Perhaps Shipwire can help you get your life back.

In one of the last rainstorms that passed through a few weeks past we had a rainbow over Shipwire.  Our VP of Products, Phil,  snapped an awesome camera phone image and put n a few Shipwire additions.  You may find the graphics familiar if you are a visitor to the Shipwire shipping blog.

Thanks to Phil for creating the great image!

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Last week the super search brains at Google pushed out a new version of their industry leading search engine.  Nicknamed “Caffeine”, the rational for it was that content is exploding with the advent of the real-time web (Twitter, microblogging, video and location based services to name a few).  Google’s old engine reindexed the web every few weeks; but, it wasn’t fast enough.  So they jacked up the Caffeine load and sent it spinning on its merry way.  I for one was a bit nervous about this release for Shipwire’s SEO and did test it in the test Sandbox a few months ago.  I think results may actually be better for us with it’s release; but, only time will tell.  You can bet we’ll be trying to get as many inbound links as possible over the next few months.

If you know anything about SEO, read this and spend a minute commenting on this post and tell online retailers how to stay current and quickly post fresh content.

What does this mean for the small business online retailers? Candidly, I’m not entirely sure; but, I’m willing to take a few guesses.  As with all things SEO the impact will be felt depending on your level of SEO intelligence and your website’s capabilities.  The big change to the search algorithms has everything to do with Google being able to index new content faster and faster and make sense of the proliferation of content being generated by micro-blogging and shortened links.  I ask myself almost daily, what is the value of this twitter feed that flows like a river.  Do I pay attention to any of it other than which is directed @shipwire?  Some people I’m sure manage their RSS or Twitter feeds much better than me, so it looks more like a babbling brook (bad analogy on purpose) and less like a unfiltered river of nonsense.   If I’m wondering of the value, think about Google, they need to find value in this real-time web data, make sense of it and provide it to searchers.  When an idea or webpage “goes viral” Google can’t wait two weeks to give it relevance; they want to give it relevance much sooner.

Retailers, its time to get fresh.  What this means is that fresh content is going to mean more and more.  So, blogging and micro-blogging will likely become more and more important to keeping your website fresh.  For some retailers that are constantly updating their product catalog, then they may be at an advantage.  If your product catalog doesn’t turn over much or you don’t update any pages of your website with much frequency; then perhaps it’s time to look for simple ways to do that.  If you really like all that free organic search traffic from the great Google water-hose, then it’s time to think of fast ways to get fresh.  Here are some thoughts.

• Product videos:  Google owns YouTube, you can bet that it will be indexing the bazillions of new user generated videos pretty often.  Even if your product videos are utter crud; probably good to get them up there.  One of my favorite e-commerce bloggers is John over at ColderICE (Internet Commerce Education).  He has a hilarious story of getting over 100K views on a video about folding a bandana.  The video is pretty bad; and he still got 100K views.  That to me is fantastic and proves the point that you need to be on the interwebs like YouTube
• Blog your deals. Blogging is easy and keeps your website fresh.  put your blog in a subdirectory (http://www.shipwire.com/blog) of your website not a subdomain (not http://blog.shipwire.com) to increase relevance.  Don’t have time to blog with a traditional blog like Google Blogger, Wordpress or TypePad, then set up a Tumbler account and just e-mail some content in once in a while.  Generate fresh content and link to your own products to keep them “fresh”
• Tweet already.  Set up a twitter account and just tweet your deals or your favorite website links.  Even if you don’t have followers, you can bet that Google is indexing Twitter more and more now that they spent something like $25M to get access to the Twitter post stream.
• Forums and community sites.  Find a few forums that discuss your product vertical, or put up a forum on your website.  In Internet years these may seem pretty old school; but, the Google release on Caffeine specifically mentioned forum content as something that is fresh, relevant and they want to index faster.  Before you go nuts in a forum though learn the etiquette of the community and just respond to a few recent forum posts.  Don’t embed lots of links in it; just give yourself a respectable link or two in your signature if the forum allows it.
• Photos.  Not sure about this one; but, I’m betting that if Google is indexing video then they will likely be trying to also index all the public photos on locations like Picassa (Google owned) or Flicker.  Maybe your products could use their own photo album with lots of links to your site?  I know that I for one do search for Images in Google about 5% of my searches.  (Where do you think all our snappy blog images come from).

Geek out on Caffeine.  The Google team put out some metrics on what Caffeine will index.  It’s pretty impressive.  “Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”  Wow!  100Million GB in one database,  that is a lot of tweets.

What do you think? Add a comment if you have another quick thing that online retailers can do to quickly keep their website content fresh and stay up on Caffeine.

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