home | back issues | who is dylan? | contact Internet business news and analysis by Dylan Tweney  16 August 1999   Still waiting ... As I wrote last week, my first experience with WebVan was less than ideal [1]. I still haven't succeeded in getting a WebVan delivery -- each time I've tried to place an order, the next available delivery window was three or four days out. (Annoyingly, you don't find that out until *after* you've gone to the trouble of filling a shopping cart.) And WebVan still hasn't refunded me the money they charged for the groceries I ordered a couple weeks ago, which they never delivered. Clearly, WebVan has run into larger than expected demand in the Bay Area -- I see their trucks everywhere these days, so someone's getting their food. I turn to reader Becky Waring for a detailed review of WebVan's effectiveness at actually delivering the goods: "I ordered the $50 minimum for free shipping. [It] arrived about half an hour later than the promised delivery window, but in great condition due to the sturdy stacking bins. Much better than paper bags. Refrigerated items were in one color-coded plastic bin, rest of the order in another. ... "In general, comparing prices to Safeway/Lucky, all prices were somewhat higher, sort of "full retail." More significantly, NOTHING was on sale. Typically when food shopping, especially for produce and meat/fish, one buys a lot of sale items. Or one stocks up on staples when they happen to go on sale. No such capability here. Also, the brands/sizes tended to be the premium ones. "When I put away the order, I happened to notice that the cream cheese I received in early July had expired three weeks before, in June. In contrast, cream cheese I had bought a month earlier at Lucky was not due to expire till September! Thus alerted, I looked at expiration dates on other items which I had duplicates for from Safeway or Lucky, and in every case, expiration dates were much earlier, although nothing else was expired. I complained about all this to customer service, whereupon they credited me for all the items I mentioned. "[That put] the final price of my order about where it would have been had I gone to Safeway, and [I didn't save] much time since I had to hang around for the delivery person, navigate the site to find items (was difficult to find light bulbs and batteries!), and then deal with the expired items. In all, a service that is not there yet. I won't be using it again any time soon, although I buy most everything else on the Web. " [1] Webvan delivers logistics lesson to online vendors EASY SEARCH came to Tweney.com this week, thanks to Searchbutton.com [2]. This service, which debuted last week, gives the operators of small Web sites (like my own) a simple, free way to add a search tool. Searchbutton indexes your site and serves up search results for free. The search results page carries Searchbutton's banner ads, but clicking on one of the hits takes you back to your own site, naturally, so it's not especially disruptive to the user. I signed up using Searchbutton's registration form -- giving it my name, email address, and URL. Twenty-four hours later I got an email back saying my site had been indexed and was ready to search. Searchbutton.com provided me with some simple HTML code to paste into my site (I tweaked it, of course, but you don't have to). Using Searchbutton's site, you can make some minor adjustments to the look of the search results page for your site -- by adding title and background GIFs and by specifying colors. You can also get reports on what people are searching for on your site -- a useful feature. And, if you want to get rid of the banner ads, you can pay Searchbutton an annual fee, starting at $300 and going up depending on how many extra features you want. I like the service so far -- although Tweney.com only has a few dozen pages, it's already getting hard to find stuff there. Searchbutton is an easy, effective way to solve that problem. What else could I add to my site for free? Well, banner ads (LinkExchange), commerce (any number of affiliate programs), chat, forums, and there's no doubt a whole crop of other free site services available. With all these freebies, will there be anything left for me to actually do *myself*? More importantly, if I add all this stuff to my site, will you still be able to find the content? [2] Searchbutton.com E-I-E-I-O: This week's Net Prophet column (below) may poke fun at all the e's and i's in company names nowadays, but the last laugh may go to those companies. A recent Purdue University study entitled "A Rose.com by any other name" discovered that renaming your company to something Internet-y has immediate beneficial effects on your stock price. The study, which looked at 52 companies, found that a company's stock price rose by an average of 125% when the firm renamed itself to something that includes ".com," ".net," or some variant on the word "Internet." [3] [3] "Dot com" feeds the attention-starved NET PROPHET: The "e"s have it: learning to spell the new economy from the August 16, 1999 issue of InfoWorld It all started innocently enough. "E-commerce" was an understandable, pronounceable abbreviation for "electronic commerce." But then people started adding the "e" prefix to one damn thing after another. ... click for more ... ~ Back issues ~ What's in a name: General incompetence surrounding DNS; AOL steps up the pressure on Microsoft; Amazon.com and the Times settle; Webvan delivers logistics lessons (8.9.1999). Taxing issues: Fritz Hollings proposes a national Internet sales tax; Yahoo rumored to buy ExciteAtHome; vicious online pet competition; the password shuffle (8.2.1999). Chatter, chatter: AOL and Microsoft battle over instant messaging; beaming money via PalmPilot; Sidewalk sold to CitySearch and the agonies of local merchants over e-commerce; the need for data 'garages' (7.26.99) The whole dang archive... Search Tweney.com: Help on searching		Sign up for the tweney report, my free weekly newsletter! Just enter your email address in the box and click the button: Email: Optional - your name: More about the tweney report / how to unsubscribe / privacy policy Links worth clicking web informant David Strom's Internet insights cluetrain.com Net market manifesto - read it! tbtf Tasty bits from the technology front ditherati Deflating industry bombast daily posthoc.com Upfront guide to San Francisco - way cool!
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