How to launch a GroupOn clone: Groupy Deals

A few of us* founded Groupy Deals earlier this year, and we went live over Queens Birthday weekend. It’s going really well. Check out the GroupyDeals business site as well. *Groupy Deals was founded by Scott Kitney, along with Andrew Hunt, Fay French and myself. Groupy Deals is following in the footsteps of Groupon – …

Place function before fashion – Mons Royale

Via Hazel Philips at NBR I read about local company Mons Royale – who make merino underwear aimed at boarders. Rather tellingly the title of the article was Fashion before Function. The clothing range is a good idea – practical merino underclothing with a bit of colour and splash, along with stying that appeals (hopefully) …

51 in the top 500 – what does it mean?

The latest Asia Pacific Deloitte Technology 500 results are out, New Zealand looks pretty good, with 51 companies making the list. It looks even better on a per-head of population basis – with New Zealand demonstrating real strength. I’d hasten to add that I do not really believe this result – as the sample is …

NZHerald’s shopping tab – it’s complicated

NZ Herald launched their new shopping tab yesterday, and as I dug into it the cast of players got larger and larger. It got so complicated that I decided that making a video would be the most efficient way to explain it all. After the experience all I can say is that Bernard Hickey is …

A reskinning is not a panacea: Dick Smith

Dick Smith just reskinned their site. Well they have at least since the last time I went there. My summary is that this is nice but will add little to their site statistics. The look has changed slightly but the real work has yet to be done. Here is the Australian one: and the NZ …

How not to launch an upgrade – BNZ

BNZ announces that their banking site is being refreshed. This brick wall advertisement appeared after logging in with my online banking number, password and that stupid netguard card: Problem is that after a little pause I got this: Which meant restarting Safari, re-entering my login and password and re-entering in some numbers from the stupid …

How consumers shop – some lessons

After a laughably dumb registration process (use fake data) you’ll find theĀ  ChannelAdvisor report on How Consumers Shop Online. Let’s start with a caveat – the sample size is 824 people from 29 states in the USA, but there is no information on how this sample was selected. We should probably therefore assume that the …

Let me pay my bill Contact Energy

I’ve been getting a number of letters from Contact Energy recently, so I decided to actually open one of them on Saturday afternoon. Turns out they are gas bills, and I’m well overdue. Time to pay the bill then. So off I went to the Contact website – contact.co.nz. <update http://www.contact.co.nz. The page fails completely …

Getting the basics right makes money – Ascent

Yesterday I went shopping for a laser printer. I went to Pricespy and Trade Me, along with Ascent where I have successfully purchased before. Pricespy sent me to a few stores, including Ascent, but I will pick on Computer Direct who came backĀ  as the cheapest. They have a good url, but they are not …