More on Ferrit Quality

A little birdie sent me through the rest of the article (along with some rather serious complaining from a couple folk about the inadequacy of theline)

Some choice quotes

“Brayham believes the success of TradeMe will rub off on Ferrit. “TradeMe is probably one of the best training grounds for Ferrit,” he says. “

eCommerce should be lower barrier to entry than Auctions. With eCommerce we have to trust a retailer and a brand of product – both of whom we probably already trust. With auctions we have to trust somebody we don’t know selling something we have not seen.

Brayham… “says the company spends one third of its budget on IT and software development, one third on marketing and the other third on business operations.”

That is staggering, given the size of their marketing budget. This is a huge budget operation.

“After one and a half years in the market, Ferrit has 80 per cent brand recognition,”

and just what do those 80% think and feel about the brand? Can you publish that?

“The “shock price” factor is also integral to Ferrit. Recently, Ferrit sold 1000 iPod nanos in two weeks. Brayham says this was due to the fact they offered the product for $20 less than the rest of the market.”

That’s a $20,000 campaign (plus packaging), which is about the same as one or two weeks on the homepage  of a major site, or a tiny slice of a TV campaign. That’s good use of money as it drove people to the site and through a transaction. Given the lousy launch with no product, Ferrit is wise to use this as a promotions strategy. I’d stop the offline marketing campaigns entirely though, and focus on online spend and discounts.

“This “shock price” factor has proven its worth, with 280,000 unique browsers recorded last month, compared to Christmas levels of 250,000″

Well – that’s nothing to brag about really. I’d be more interested in tracking the number of transactions per week over time – the campaign post campaign analysis should be looking in particular at the retention rate of the folk that chased the bargains.