The Power of Digg, Sell Products Faster
05.31.07 - 09:46pm
I found this rather interesting, a commercial form of the “Digg Effect”. Browsing through the front-page of Digg.com as I do on an hourly daily basis revealed a link labeled “Coolest Earrings for a HTML Girl [ Pic ]” that took me to Etsy. Etsy in itself is a rather interesting website. The actual product being highlighted by the Digger was a most creative combination of jewelry and nerdiness! There were a set of sterling silver earrings with the HTML head and /head tags. If I saw a girl wearing these on the street AND I was observant enough to look at her earrings I’d surely have to introduce myself and strike up a conversation.
Now I could leave it at that and be happy but why would I want to do that? Let’s take a look at the potential sales that were lost by this particular seller. I’m just going to go out on a limb and say there weren’t but maybe a dozen or so in stock. Digg can easily attract 20,000 to 30,000 hits in the course of a day, just tricking 0.5% of that traffic into purchasing these would have been huge for this guy. That puts you at 100 to 150 sales which equates to $2000 to $3000 in sales. Considering how those are probably cheap sterling blanks and the stamping process would be rather simple, it probably costs under $5 to make these things. So suffice to say, lots of money lost by not having enough stock, not having a warning and not taking back-orders. If I wasn’t single I’d buy these just for the laugh even if the girl didn’t really work with HTML. Now back to working in the garage.
Interesting post. Those are our earrings. I wish I had had 1000 pairs made. They were basically a one off joke earring that I never thought would sell more than one or two pairs. I just spent the last 3 hours making 15 pairs (5 pairs an hour).
While they look like I stamp them on a prefabricated blank, and that is what I would do if I were going to mass produce them, they are actually made almost on demand using my small CNC milling machine. So I load a diamond engraving tool in the mill, run the toolpath for the text, then load an end mill to cut the periphery and the hole for the ear wire. They still involve a bit of hand deburring as well (which I have to do once I have the tape that holds them to the mill table soaked through with solvent, freeing them).
We are taking back orders for them, but Etsy doesn’t have a mechanism for that so it consists of people convoing us through Etsy and asking us to make a pair.
While I could take the glass half empty look and see the sales we lost, frankly we’re happy with the orders we’ve got and the exposure. I am very glad that it was served by Etsy, if the post had linked to a privately hosted page, Digg’s traffic probably would have destroyed it.
Anyway, thought you would find that interesting.