Having done ecommerce work myself I have been somewhat following this issue. For those not familiar with it here is whats going down. In New York they are working on forcing e-commerce sites that have affiliates in New York to charge sales tax to all New York residents. Doesn’t sound bad right? Well lets break it down using Amazon as its the biggest.

Amazon does NOT have a business in New York meaning right now they do not charge sales tax to customers in New York. What they do have is affiliates that exist in New York though. So the NY government wants to charge tax since the affiliates are in their states. Thats like saying Sitepoint.com would have to charge sales tax in Michigan because I have an affiliate account with them. Its not even if they go through the affiliate in state, its across the entire catalog regardless if someone used an affiliate or not. To me it makes no sense.

I have an idea in mind for Amazon however at a business aspect its bad, but on a “stick it to the man” aspect it fits. Since I do not sell products online I say this with ease but am still undetermined if I were to have a business selling online. I would boycott sales to the state of NY, and draw up a big controversy over it so the people of NY would get upset and call their elected officials. Hopefully getting them to realize its a bad idea. However in reality it won’t happen.

Amazon has been trying to stop this from happening by suing saying that they were specifically targeted with this tax. When it first came up they were claiming that it was being called the Amazon Tax (I am not clever enough to make that up) by officials meaning it was targeting Amazon.com for this. A judge has recently shut Amazon down with this case. ArsTechnica Link

There is what I am calling a new kid on the block of music sharing. I am not sure when they started but what they are doing is cool. Spotify is a new startup that streams music to your computer for FREE. Yes there are others that do this such as Last.FM and Pandora however Spotify comes with a nice iTunes like application (though it is MUCH faster than iTunes). The music also starts installing playing like it was playing music stored on your hard drive. The way they also get the music to your computer seems like a new concept for a business model. Not only to they serve the music from their servers but also p2p (peer to peer). You know, how you stole that latest Katy Perry track last night.

Unfortunately at this time it is not available in the United States. That does not mean I have not used this application. Hopefully I will get some invites to share.

Spotify Screenshot

So today I was picking up some Christmas presents and one thing I needed was a movie. Do you know how hard it is to find 1 particular movie. The first place I was at was BestBuy. Oddly they had the biggest movie selection of the three stores I went to. I spent a good while searching through the comedy section to come up empty handed at least with movies I was. So after I couldn’t find the movie I decided to go across the street to Walmart. Surely Walmart would have it.. So I thought.. Walmart had a terrible selection and it was quite small. I spent some time searching then hopped on the handy dandy iPhone to see if it was in stock. Acording to their website its only available online so I was out of luck again. After being 0 for 2 I decided to try Meijers. For those of you who don’t know what it is, think of it as a smaller version of Walmart. This store had even less movies than Walmart and I didn’t have good cell phone reception so I left after spending only a few minutes looking. In the end I bought movie on Amazon.

I have ranted several times on the local grocery store and its horrible categorization. This is why I hate traditional stores and have been working on building the ultimate eCommerce solution which I am expecting to be out later this year.

So Sears has impressed me this holiday season. How so Jeff? Well they are doing this thing for the deployed troops and their families. Whne you register you family gets a gift card and Sears splits up donated money across them. I was expecting the one my mom got to only get like $15 however I thought it was still very nice of them. When the card came it had $100 on it and they haven’t even dispersed the donated money yet. $100!!!!! Now to some that might not seem like a lot, however I find it a great gesture and thank Sears for that.

Then, today my mom received an email (from my dad I believe) with another gift card of $100 for military families to spend on Christmas stuff at a Sears store. Need decorations? No problem Sears to the rescue. During the holiday season there are many places taking donations and the one that effects my family and I the most are those that do donations to military families. While my family may not need this stuff, there are those that do, and it brings joy especially to the kids of those families.

To which I say thank you Sears and those who made any donations to give family members of deployed soldiers and the soldiers themselves a better christmas. Thank you.

In my mind I would much rather have someone be themself than be super professional. What I mean by that is, if I walk up to a business owner I don’t them to use big words to impress me. I want them to talk to me like they talk to their friends and family. You can still come off as professional while being more human like. If they “cuss” I don’t care, as to me that makes them seem a bit more human as long as they don’t go way overboard. If they don’t “cuss” it also doesn’t bother me as some people just don’t.

I know several business owners that will talk to me about what they offer and what a competitor offers. They tell me that they would be more then happy for me to buy from them but if I don’t its no big deal. This alone makes me feel good about dealing with the company. I have been up to SASS a few times and the way they have talked to me, I don’t mind driving the hour there to buy from them even though there is a competitor shop 20 minutes away. A marketing style newsletter I get, if they recommend something and use a referral link they tell me they will get a kick back on it. It seems both these companies care about potential clients trusting them.

Then there is DreamHost. These guys crack me up. If you haven’t checked out their blog I recommend you do so. Even when they had that huge screw up with their billing they were pretty funny with their blog posts.

Now, for what inspired this post. Simply a blog post over at the 37Signals blog.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1351-1-who-the-fuck-designs-this-shit-and-2

“1. Who the fuck designs this shit? And 2. Gotta love the white remote.”

I have to agree with thim. That cd player is hideous. That post inspired me to write this post because on a company blog I would not expect the words “fuck” and “shit” from an employee of the company. To me, that being allowed on their blog, says they could be a fun group of people to work with. I am much more inclined to go with a company that seems to be fun or laid back compared to a company that seems upity. Hell the company I use as a web host has this up.

So, to all of you that own a company, there are people out there who want you to be yourself and be able to sit there and bull shit (talk about stuff) with them. Show that you are on a level with the person looking at buying your product. Yes you know more than I do about your product(s) but you don’t have to make sure that I know that.

I imagine at this point I am just rambling on about something. To that, farewell.