idaconcpts » Shutterfly

Shutterfly’s Wink Brings Your Photos to Life

Damian Davila — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:15:10 +0000

During December 2009, while playing the iPhone app, Words with Friends, it was not unusual to find an ad promoting another iPhone called Wink.

What is Wink?

Wink is a great iPhone and web app developed by the guys and gals of Shutterfly.

This photo app truly brings back your pictures into your life by not limiting itself to one single platform (it works both on the iPhone and on the web, and they are currently working on apps for other smartphones) and by playing well with your photo collections on Facebook, Flickr, and, of course, your own computer. The best part about Wink is that it offers a tangible reward within 2 minutes after you play it: a printed photostrip™ that you can mail to anybody anywhere in the world for just $2.50.

Screen Shots of Wink for the iPhone

Both the iPhone and web interfaces of the app are really intuitive, offering templates for printed photostrips™ with 3, 4 or 5 photos. Here are some screen shots of the iPhone app from AppShopper:

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Finally, here is a screen shot from Wink’s web interface:

What is Shutterfly’s Wink Doing Really Well

1. Wink offers a tangible, immediate, AFFORDABLE reward that is great for techies and non-techies alike.

This is not a secret: people want something in return for their work. Wink offers a printed photostrip™ using pictures from your phone, camera, and social networks like Facebook and Flickr. It takes you about 2 minutes to create one from scratch, and BAM! you get to see it right away. Eventually the work becomes play.

While photobooks go for $20 and up (not including shipping), I can mail anybody, anywhere in the world a nice printed photostrip™, now how cool is that?

Finally, forget complicated slideshows with fancy blows and whistles, a printed photostrip can be enjoyed as well by a 3-year old as by a 80-year old.

2. Wink trademarked its key component.

One sees this way too often: a startup has a great idea, spends a great deal of time and money to develop it, launches it…. and a giant crushes the startup by cloning its unprotected, un-patented idea.

Why do you think I’ve been including the trademark sign all along? This simple detail saves Wink a whole bunch of trouble.

3. Wink provides OUTSTANDING customer service.

Wink’s customer service rocks!

It really does.

Remember that I mentioned that I saw an ad for the Wink iPhone app on Words for Friends on December 2009?

I downloaded the app because it had an offer for 3 free photostrips.

After making my order over the holidays, I got a bit impatient about the status of my order because the iPhone app does not offer an order status update. So I contacted their customer service at customerservice@cs.shutterfly.com and they responded my e-mail right away. What was so great about this customer service?

1. I am a non-paying customer: I didn’t pay for the iPhone app and I didn’t pay for the photo strips (remember I got 3 freebies!)

2. The customer service e-mail is not a do-not-reply e-mail, which means customer service ACTUALLY wants to hear from you.

I e-mailed Skyler at Wink’s customer service a total of 4 times and he was super cool, heplful, and friendly. By the way, he runs Wink’s Twitter account.

(Note: the web interface does offer a status update but I found that out a couple days later)

Conclusion

Shutterfly’s Wink is a great app that truly brings your photos back into your life by a tangible, immediate, affordable reward that is trademarked and backed up top notch customer service. Try it for yourself at http://wink.shutterfly.com.

Photo Sharing Websites

Damian Davila — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:19:44 +0000

The top question that people ask me when people find out about my online marketing and web analytics blog, is how I came up with the name idaconcpts. I really like words that are similarly written and understood in several languages, and ideas and concepts are two of them. I played around with different variations of these words, until I realized that what my blog was truly about was putting ideas and concepts into e-commerce. Therefore, putting these ideas and concepts would be put to work into commerce, or would put the “e” in e-commerce. Hence, idaconcpts.

One of the best things of writing at idaconcpts.com is that I have a passion for analyzing photo sharing websites and my readers seem to share that passion with me.

Over 34% of the readership at idaconcpts follows the posts about the BIG 5 of photo sharing: Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide. Please note that I am limiting myself to websites (as opposed to desktop apps such as Picasa). At the same time there will be debate about:

why I am not including Myspace and Facebook (which obviously have major photo sharing activity),
if I include photo printing services such as Shutterfly, why I don’t include major online photo printing services like Walmart and Costco, and
if I am not including Picasa Web Albums, why am I selecting Slide, which obviously is not a photo sharing website, but rather a widget generator like Sprout Builder.

And my answer is that they are all great questions that I will tackle on future posts to come!

In the meantime, let’s continue the analysis of the BIG 5, which started back in November 2008 with the post Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly and continued with the follow-up post Revisiting Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly. In this posts we analyzed the traffic to these photo sharing websites through Google Ad Planner and Google Trends. Today we will take a look through another great web analytics called Compete.

Compete is an awesome cloud computing web analytics tool that allows you access website activity info from any website. The first killer feature of Compete is that it allows you to compare 5 websites side by side. Even though Google Trends and Google Ad Planner do offer this service, Google Trends‘ information is quite limited, and Google Ad Planner’s information is limited to a handful of websites.

Here a couple snapshots of Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide using Compete:

The second killer feature of Compete is that it allows you to take a look into the subdomains (finally!) of entered websites. Google Trends does not (as of 05/29/2009) allow that feature, it only allows you to take a look at the web analytics of the home page.

Remember point 2 above? With this tool I can finally tap into finding out how much traffic from walmart.com goes into photos.walmart.com:

Finally, Compete allows me to post these simple little graphs, which previously I had to take a snapshot using Skitch and upload to my blog. I still love Skitch, but this saves time!

What about an updated analysis of Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide using Compete?

Dear reader, you already have a start with the post Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly and its follow-up post Revisiting Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly. Now with Compete, you can slice and dice the data in no time!

Best of luck in your research!

Revisiting Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly

Damian Davila — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:03:38 +0000

The response to the post:

Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly

has been great! Thank you very much for reading it. Here is a breakdown of the number of daily readers provided by WordPress BlogStats

I am really happy that my Spanish colleague, Gemma (who writes a great web analytics blog in Spanish called ¿Dónde está Avinash cuando se le necesita?, a great tribute to Avinash Kaushik) found some inspiration to use Google Trends (one of my personal favorite tools!).

Another great tool for broad research is Google Ad Planner (currently in Beta, so you need an invitation, mine took about a week to arrive).

Let’s take a look at the BIG 5 (Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide) of online digital photo sharing using this tool:

Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly: using Google Ad Planner

Google Ad Planner provides much more in-depth information on a monthly basis (the figures for unique visitors and pageviews are on a 30-day basis). The reach is for the United States. As discussed on the previous post, Photobucket appears to continue to have the upper-hand over Flickr.

What I found really interesting is that if I was to theoretically put ads on these 5 sites trying to reach everybody in the United States, I would reach 31 million or have a country reach of 13% or have 660 million pageviews.

Do you think that is a lot? Wrong! Take a look what would happen if I just select Facebook and Myspace:

That’s 90 million unique visitors or a country reach of 39% or 20 billion pageviews!

Does that mean that advertising on Facebook and Myspace is better than advertising on the top 5 of online digital photo sharing?

If your objective is to monetize on printing services, I would dare to say no.

Why?

Take a look at the age and income distribution of the audience at Myspace using Google Ad Planner:

Compare it with the demographics of the audience at Shutterfly:

Obviously Shutterfly has a more mature audience with more spendable income, so they would be more prone to spend on printing services than a younger audience with a tigther budget.

Of course, you could argue against this hypothesis.

Let me hear your thoughts.

Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly

Damian Davila — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:25:41 +0000

An important part of my job is to understand the trends in the online photo sharing industry and I wanted to provide a couple of insights to my readers using Google Trends.

Daily Unique Visitors of 5 key players in the online photo sharing industry.

For the period May 2007 – September 2008, Flickr and Photobucket compete for the highest number of daily unique visitors worldwide out of the five selected online photo sharing: Flickr, Snapfish, Shutterfly, Photobucket and Slide.

Take a look at the latest performance of Photobucket and Flickr:

What caused that there were more daily unique visitors at Photobucket than at Flickr?

Photobucket is capturing more daily unique visitors than Flickr in the top photo sharing market: U.S.

However, Photobucket should not rest in its laurels, because Flickr is ahead in the second most important photo sharing market: India.

What about Slide? Slide enjoyed an important spike in the last quarter of 2007, but its number of daily unique visitors is coming back to previous levels. What caused this?

2 reasons: hi5 and England.

Worlwide, people who search for the the term “slide”, also search for:

As you can see, hi5 appears several times and it different languages!

This is relevant because hi5‘s daily unique visitors worldwide dwarfs that of the top 5 players in the photo sharing business (note: I drop Snapfish, because Google Trends only accepts 5 websites at a time).

Plus, Slide did pretty good during that period in England!

Finally, what about Snapfish and Shutterfly?

They depend on each other because:

People who search for “snapfish” also search for “shutterfly”.

And people who search for “shutterfly also search for “snapfish”.

In conclusion:

Markets outside of the United States DO matter! Increased demand in important markets (e.g. Slide in England, Flickr in India) can generate a lot of views, which potentially means increased ad revenue. Just ask Dave McClure, web analytics guru and blogger at Master of 500 Hats.
Despite all the hype about international markets, the leader must keep its focus on the top market, the U.S.
Keep a close eye on the SEO tactics of your rivals and copy what seems to work (Shutterfly and Snapfish).

idaconcpts » Shutterfly

Shutterfly’s Wink Brings Your Photos to Life

What is Wink?

Screen Shots of Wink for the iPhone

What is Shutterfly’s Wink Doing Really Well

1. Wink offers a tangible, immediate, AFFORDABLE reward that is great for techies and non-techies alike.

2. Wink trademarked its key component.

3. Wink provides OUTSTANDING customer service.

Conclusion

Photo Sharing Websites

Best of luck in your research!

Revisiting Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly

Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly

Let me hear your thoughts.

Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly

What do you think?