#stickers I’m not sure are worth it cos the shipping fee will surely be way more expensive

[timethehobo]

Still really like these lil sitting buddies (and silly Rook). May clean them up to make charms / standees.

Would folks be interested maybe? Hm.

[gta-5-cheats]

Inside ‘Fin,’ the elite human/AI assistant

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/inside-fin-the-elite-human-ai-assistant-2/

Inside ‘Fin,’ the elite human/AI assistant

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“I have FOMO for the future”, says Sam Lessin. That’s why his startup, Fin, is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter.

For $1 a minute, 24/7, Fin gets your digital chores done. Message, email or speak a request and a real person will snap into action, augmented by a machine intelligence toolkit built from all the tasks Fin’s tackled to date. Sure, it handles research, scheduling, commerce and customer support calls. But it also learns your habits, negotiates for you, and conquers complex jobs like creating a website.

Now after two years and funding from top investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Fin is opening up to more customers and press. “We’ve really intentionally talked to no one,” says Lessin, a former Facebook VP who sold it his file sharing startup Drop.io.

That’s a vastly different approach than most boisterous AI startups have taken. “There’s been this crazy hype cycle,” Lessin tells me. “‘Everything’s a bot. Bots are awesome. Everything’s an assistant.’ All these things fucking suck.”

Converting money into time

Fin was determined not to suck, even if that meant staying quiet. Lessin and co-founder Andrew Kortina have tinkered and tested Fin since mid-2015. “I had done Venmo,” Kortina says, downplaying his co-founder role and its sale to PayPal, “and was then doing nothing. I heard Sam was also doing nothing and that piqued my interest, as he’s an old friend.”

Brainstorming led them to the thesis that “the internet is broken as an information machine,” Kortina tells me. They saw a greater destiny than entertainment, distraction and big enterprise. So in Fin’s first incarnation, the duo swapped neglected memos and to-do lists, and tried to find what they could get done for each other. Plenty had been falling through the cracks.

“I’m okay about doing menial things for colleagues but I’ll just let all that stuff in my own life slip,” Kortina admits. “I wouldn’t go to the dentist for years. I didn’t have health insurance after college for 10 years. My credit score was terrible because I had some bill I wouldn’t figure out how to pay.”

Most people have similarly boring tasks they loathe spending time dealing with. You could call the cable company to fight a price hike or research restaurants and hunt for a reservation. So could Fin. And thanks to Uber we’ve grown accustomed to being able to trade money for that time back, sidestepping slow public transportation or looking for parking when we’re in a rush.

Fin co-founders Sam Lessin (left) and Andrew Kortina (right) in front of the flag of Finland

While it’s easy to imagine Fin as merely a first-world luxury for the lazy, and it’s great at that, it’s also a productivity tool that can let people achieve more of what only they can do. Kortina talks about Fin as a way to “instantly offload” chores.

Even if you could power through a task faster than Fin could second-hand and keep the dollars, “It’s not just the cost of doing that thing yourself. It’s the context switching,” Kortina explains. “It’s so hard for me to get into a really good state of concentration and flow and creativity, and when I get into that state I don’t want to be interrupted.”

Reverse-engineering science fiction

Fin’s far from the only personal assistant startup trying to save you time, but many of the others fail due to hubris, relying too heavily on their own code as the answer to every question. “The mistake is looking at machine learning and thinking we’re so close to this general intelligence,” Lessin insists. Replacing humans outright isn’t the answer. “The future is people helping people.”

Competitors that can go AI-only are restricted to narrow sets of tasks, like x.ai for meeting scheduling. Traditional and virtual assistant services can be inefficient. Facebook’s M assistant also uses a combo of humans and AI but is free and hasn’t been opened up to the public.

One service similar to Fin called GoButler was forced to pivot to solely automated assistance, and eventually sold as scrap to Amazon. Fin’s most remaining direct competitor is Magic. It’s cheaper at $0.59 per minute but only takes requests via text message. Lessin moonlights as a partner for Slow Ventures, which participated in Magic’s $12 million 2015 Series A, which raises some concerns about conflicts of interest he wouldn’t comment on. [Update: More examples of competitors were added to this paragraph.]

But wait, isn’t AI supposed to take everyone’s jobs? Lessin envisions a new industrial revolution instead. He cites cobblers making a few shoes while waiting around the shop for customers, struggling to match fluctuating demand. But with steam and electricity “you had a new source of power. It’s not like power stopped work. You had humans doing what they were good at, tech doing what tech was good at, and you had way more shoes.”

Shop On SecondCovers

With Fin, though, Lessin’s vision involves a team of round-the-clock operators equipped with AI and processes for similar tasks can snap into action even after-hours, rather than a full-time dedicated assistant being “paid for showing up being on YouTube” and then going off the job, Lessin says. Even if it’s expensive at $1 per effective minute of work, Fin is exceedingly convenient, and you don’t pay for down time.

To use Fin, you just pop open its minimalist black-and-white desktop site or iOS app, then type, speak or upload a photo of your request. If you’re unsure what you could ask for, there’s an anonymized feed of real examples from other users to spark your imagination.

“We can execute any task that doesn’t require hands in your city,” says Lessin, noting how hard it is for some startups to get local scale and capacity nailed down. “I have incredible respect for Instacart.” He also points out that “there are types of specialized knowledge we can’t currently do for you. Ask us some PhD physics problem and it will either take a long time or we won’t do it.”

Usually, though, you get messaged back almost immediately by a Fin human who collects any necessary details and gets started. I felt an instantaneous sense of relief upon outsourcing my responsibilities. Along the way, your task gets updated with progress and requests for secondary decisions. When possible, it just pulls things like addresses and airplane seat preferences from your onboarding survey, and payment information or online passwords from the app’s Vault. You get a detailed statement of exactly how Fin used your time and how much you owe.

“Our job is to mix the best tool or person for the job in a way to deliver an experience that’s better than you can get from working with a single isolated individual, or a piece of pure software,” Kortina declares.

That’s where the name “Fin” comes in. “Like ‘the end’ in French films,” Lessin reveals. “This is the interface and the ways things will work in 50 or 100 years.” While technology will get more and more adept at a wider range of tasks, he imagines that in the end, it will still be humans sending requests to computer-human teams.

The unevenly distributed future

The hardest part of using Fin is getting over the mental hurdle of relinquishing control while paying for what you could do yourself.

“I think that’s the real competitor,” says Lessin. Even factoring in what your time’s worth and the context switching overhead, Fin can produce some serious sticker shock. That’s accentuated by our idealized predictions that underestimate the time required to do things. “How long does it take to book movie tickets?” Lessin jokes. “30 seconds? No!”

Fin’s team

I was charged $80 to deal with having a mis-shipped iPhone X refunded and a new one bought and sent. While I was thankful not to have to deal with customer support, it was some pricey peace of mind. Getting a holiday restaurant reservation originally cost me $150, which is completely absurd even if it took several loops to find the right time and get me to sign a credit card payment form for the prix fixe dinner.

Luckily, I was refunded that $150 after submitting a complaint through the app, which is easy to do through Fin’s thumbs up/down buttons on each request. “Most really heavy users escalate / ask about something every month or two,” Lessin admits. Fin uses internal benchmarking tools to track if certain assistants take too long on a task or routinely do too much research in a category. Still, Fin sometimes goes overboard so users shouldn’t be shy about contesting any charges that seem ridiculous. You can sign-up through this link for TechCrunch readers to get a discount on your first tasks.

Fin initially launched in beta with a $120 per month subscription fee. But Kortina gripes that “all we were learning is how people could arbitrage Fin to do way more than $120 worth of service.” He seems to be having bad acid flashbacks to before Venmo started charging a 3 percent credit card fee in 2012, when people would just send money back and forth to hit minimum spending limit or earn points while Venmo ate the fees.

With the switch to per-minute pricing, “We’ve set ourselves up for the long haul by really focusing on unit economics,” says Lessin, in contrast to many on-demand startups. That surely delights Fin’s investors John Doerr at KPCB, Sameer Gandhi at Accel, and Saar Gur at CRV. While Lessin won’t reveal exactly how much Fin has raised, he calls them “good capital partners,” noting the startup has enough cash to “be able to do this for a long time.” Fin now has 20 employees on the technical side, while it’s climbing toward 100 when you include its full-time operators.

Not subsidizing the service is a healthy choice for Fin, but that means “Unfortunately it’s not at a price point that everyone on Earth can afford.” Whether through economies of scale, AI advancement, or human training, Fin may need to bring the price down if it wants widespread adoption. “The future is already here” sci-fi author William Gibson once said, “it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

The premium price tag begets premium service that makes Siri and her cohorts feel like mere calculators in comparison. “The message is you should demand a lot more out of assistant services than cooking timers and Google search lookups,” Lessin concludes. In an era when technology is designed to soak up the maximum amount of your time, Fin lets you buy it back. We’ll each have to decide how much it’s worth.

[listiqueblog]

Amazon Selling Pitfalls Even the Savviest Sellers Forget [Infographic]

So you’re up and running as an Amazon seller, and you think you’ve figured out the Amazon marketplace. The good news is, if you’ve made it out alive (and profitably) through your first holiday shopping season, you’re doing well.

But, there are a number of issues that even large or long-term Amazon sellers don’t figure out.

Selling on Amazon is endlessly complex, with traps that even veterans fall into.

I’m pleased to unveil the pitfalls to you now –– but like a child who thinks she’s figured out how a magician does a trick, you still will need to work hard to avoid the common problems many sellers encounter when they start selling on Amazon.

Knowing these will at least set you up to be more aware of where those pitfalls might be hiding. Use the infographic to help visualize the issues and read through exactly how to solve them in the article below.

Tax Setup

It’s a little shocking how many sellers never set up state tax collection options on Amazon, thinking that Amazon somehow automatically takes care of all sales tax issues from sales on the Amazon marketplace.

It turns out nothing could be further from the truth.

While Amazon is happy to collect state sales tax for you (for a small fee), it’s up to every seller to indicate in which states it wants Amazon to collect tax, and to manage the remittance of the taxes to the appropriate tax jurisdictions across the country.

There are many tax remittance services available for online sellers, but the seller ultimately has the responsibility of paying its taxes.

Here are a few services that can help:

Taxjar.com

Avalara.com

Taxify.com

Vertexsmb.com

While a seller may choose not to collect state sales tax (choosing to absorb that as a cost of doing business), the responsibility of remitting the tax is not optional.

A seller can designate its account to collect state sales tax in particular states.

Unfortunately, however, Amazon’s default when setting up new listings is to designate each SKU as having a no-tax label, which can overwrite the seller’s general request to collect state sales tax across all of its catalog.

Set your taxes up right the first go around

My advice is to, immediately upon signing up a new seller account, go into the Settings –> Tax Settings, and designate not only in which states you want Amazon to collect state sales tax, but also set the “Use default Product Tax Code” setting to “A_GEN_TAX.”

Amazon typically defaults to A_GEN_NOTAX, where no tax is being collected.

While the seller may offer products that warrant a slightly different tax rate, that level of tweaking can follow later.

If the seller is using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and isn’t proactively collecting state sales tax in all of the tax-collecting states where Amazon has fulfillment centers, it won’t be long before the seller accumulates tax liability from having incurred tax nexus by way of FBA inventory being stored – even briefly – in these states’ fulfillment warehouses.

Pro Tip

Each FBA seller should invest in a tax consultation with an online seller tax consultant to understand the responsibilities and potential liabilities of using FBA.

Profitability

Too many sellers focus on top line sales numbers rather than bottom line profits.

“I want to sell $1MM/year on Amazon” or “If only I could get to be a $10MM/year seller on Amazon.”

Honestly, other than ego and maybe a few volume discounts, there isn’t much long-term benefit to being a big, but not particularly profitable seller on Amazon.

Focus on bottom growth and account for all costs upfront

I’d much rather see any seller grow its bottom line profits year-over-year much faster than its top line sales.

That typically requires a SKU-level understanding of profitability, incorporating overhead and indirect costs into each SKU’s profit calculation.

This includes certain less than obvious Amazon fees, and product write-downs/write-offs.

While I’ll discuss this matter much more in a subsequent chapter, it’s important to focus on those parts of your catalog that make you money and shed those parts that don’t make you money.

Stop averaging everything out, and looking only at your overall sales numbers and margins.

Start thinking about every SKU you sell on Amazon as having its own P&L, its own market forces, and its own level and types of competitions.

Such an approach has helped many a seller rationalize its catalog, focusing on bottom line growth ahead of all other financial goals.

Fulfillment by Amazon

Fulfillment by Amazon – commonly referred to as FBA – is exactly what it sounds like. You send your products to Amazon’s warehouses and they pick, pack and ship your items to meet their strict shipping and delivery timelines.

The Issue with Co-Mingled SKUs

There are a number of problems here, and I’ll start with the use of co-mingled “stickerless” SKUs.

As mentioned in a previous chapter, a seller has the option of sending product into FBA without having to provide SKU-level stickers on each unit.

Such stickerless inventory has the potential to get mixed in with the inventory of other FBA sellers of the same SKU.

Then when a customer places an order from one FBA seller, Amazon pulls the most convenient inventory, even if that inventory isn’t actually the inventory that the seller sent into FBA itself.

And, if other sellers have sent in counterfeit product or used condition product that they are trying to pawn off as new condition product, now the seller with this new sale may get itself into trouble with Amazon for selling problematic product to a customer.

Amazon responds when customers complain about product quality –– and the heavy lifting falls on the individual sale-level brand.

At roughly $0.20/unit for Amazon to sticker items or whatever a seller’s own warehouse costs are, we see the costs of stickering FBA units as far lower than the implied cost of having one’s seller account suspended for apparently selling counterfeit co-mingled product to a customer.

Stickerless v. Stickered Inventory

The other complicated issue around stickerless vs. stickered FBA inventory is when a seller designates its account to be stickered.

By default, each new FBA account starts off as stickerless.

When a seller creates a shipment of product to send to Amazon’s fulfillment centers, that stickerless designation will be applied to the seller’s SKUs and will remain forever going forward with that SKU.

So, if the seller wants it’s FBA product to be stickered, the seller has to change the default setting before creating its first shipment to FBA.

Otherwise, the seller will have to create a duplicate stickered offer on the same product listing.

We’ve seen many sellers not get this sequencing right, leading to situations where they think they changed their account to stickered, only to discover that certain SKUs remain stickerless because they were initially sent to FBA before the whole account got switched over to stickered.

If in doubt, flip everything to stickered (not co-mingled) immediately upon turning on FBA (but before creating the first FBA shipment). Or. contact Amazon Seller Support to get clarification if any SKUs in your catalog are unknowingly stickerless.

Bottom line: when you start off, make sure you read up on how to sell on Amazon FBA so you don’t fall victim to these pitfalls.

Repackage Unsellable Customer Returns

Next, Amazon defaults every FBA seller’s account to enabled for “Repackage Unsellable Customer Returns.”

This means when a customer returns an FBA order, if that product’s packaging is damaged, Amazon may apply its own packaging to make the unit resellable.

Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for customers to see this Amazon repackaging as potentially an identifier of counterfeit or used product, resulting in a customer complaint or even an infringement against the seller for selling used condition product as new condition product.

Unless you sell your product in a generic polybag or generic cardboard box (with no logos on the packaging), I suggest turning off this repackaging feature immediately, and handling all repackaging yourself to ensure only the highest quality product (with proper packaging) is presented to Amazon customers.

The Amazon Seller's Solution Provider Directory

Optimize your return flow by connecting with an Amazon solutions expert. For a full list of recommended experts, visit our Amazon Solution Provider Directory.

Listing Optimization

There are a number of sources of data available within Seller Central that can be used to improve the listing quality of your catalog.

For many sellers, the process of building and optimizing listings is a one-time deal, as they understandably turn their focus to other operational matters.

1. Use the Sponsored Product Ad campaign reports.

A significant opportunity, however, lies in using the reports from the Sponsored Product ad campaigns.

In these reports, you can see the exact keywords that were connected to Amazon customers buying your products.

By examining these reports periodically (specifically for automatic targeting campaigns), you’ll find that there are keywords leading to sales that you never anticipated being effective.

Lifting those terms directly into your generic keywords will improve the SEO discoverability of your listings.

I encourage sellers to repeat this process every three months to make sure that customers’ behavior specific to certain words haven’t changed.

And with the generic keyword capacity for words now much larger than ever before, there is room to add many more keywords and get click benefit through SEO rather than paid efforts.

2. Include answers to previous product inquiries on your product page.

It’s also worth paying special attention the inquiries that you get from Amazon customers.

If customers are asking product specific questions, newly addressing these issues in your product detail page content is likely to improve customer conversation over time.

For too many Amazon sellers, the customer inquiry process doesn’t include an indexing of questions and answers back to specific SKUs, thereby causing a seller to lose out on known product clarifications or embellishments that are needed.

3. Ask for the category listing report.

I’m a big fan of the “Category Listing Report,” a report available in the Inventory Reports section, but only when requested through Seller Support.

This report will recreate your product listings’ flat file, making it much easier for you to identify any data gaps in your listings (including missing bullet points, generic keywords, improper tax codes, etc.).

While you request this report for only a finite period (i.e., seven days, 30 days), it’s worth pulling this report at least quarterly to make sure your product listings contain all of the necessary data you believe they should.

Boost Your Product Rankings

Read our chapter on optimizing Amazon Search to get more tips on boosting your product rankings.

Operations

And now the biggest category of all.

Managing the operations of an Amazon seller business is the most time-consuming part of every seller’s day.

Too many sellers don’t focus on the right activities, leading them to work too hard to make Amazon money.

1. Returns.

Do you have a clear process for handling returns efficiently?

Do you have a way of testing or grading returns, upgrading packaging where needed, and recovering as much revenue as possible by making these items sellable again on Amazon (or some other channel, as needed)?

For too many sellers, handling returns is something done at the end of the month when they have time, rather than something that is managed strategically through analytics and continuous improvement.

Yes, returned products aren’t likely to be 100% recoverable as new condition products.

However, if you carefully track the return rate of each SKU, the recovery rate of each SKU (i.e., what proportion of expected new condition revenue you actually recover from each SKU), and which products are most likely to be returned damaged by customers, you can identify which products you need to remove from your active catalog.

You’ll also identify with which products and brands you may need to negotiate a returns allowance with your suppliers/distributors/brands.

Once you have this data in hand, you’ll likely be surprised to discover just how much financial loss you incur because of high return rates and high write-down/write-off costs.

Some of the best sellers on Amazon know, for each SKU, exactly where to sell returned products to get the highest recovery rate.

It’s worth talking with other sellers to figure out if you are unknowingly leaving a lot of money on the table by mishandling returned products, or if you are appropriately managing returned products as a core part of your overall seller business.

2. Duplicate Listings from competitors.

Duplicate listings on Amazon can be an effective way for competitors to divert traffic away from your product listings back to theirs.

It’s worth, at least once a quarter, to search the whole Amazon catalog for duplicate listings of your items.

If you find other listings of the same products, consider filing tickets with Seller Support to get duplicate listings merged.

And, if the duplicate listings were created maliciously by sellers using incorrect data (e.g., irrelevant UPCs or incorrect brand names), it may be worth also filing tickets reporting violations against those sellers.

I have seen far too many sellers confused about why their sales are dropping on top-selling items, only to find that the sales are being diverted to a duplicate listing newly created by a coy competitor.

3. Inventory management skills are required.

Inventory management skills require constant refinement on Amazon, whether it’s actively addressing soon-to-be stale inventory or rebalancing products based on changing customer preferences.

While I see most sellers ramping up inventory levels for the holiday shopping season, few sellers stock up enough products to cover most of January as well.

Often this leads to unnecessary stock-outs caused by higher than expected demand in December or inadequate time to replenish in early January when your suppliers are closed for the holidays.

Either way, I like to see sellers planning their holiday shopping inventory levels in such a way that they potentially overstock a little bit for January and February, thereby giving themselves a little bit of breathing room in December, January, and February.

Such an approach is especially relevant for products that are expected to continue to have some meaningful sales after December.

4. Test-buy your competitors.

Test-buying your competitors’ products on Amazon is a very easy way to figure out what your competitors are up to, regarding how they package product, how they follow up through email to customers, and how they handle customer returns (if needed).

While you and your competitors may be selling the same products, there are likely some aspects of your competitors’ overall offering that you can learn through periodic test buys.

5. Plan for Pricing and Procurement.

Finally, with so many changes to competitors and prices on Amazon, I have watched too many sellers be slow to plan how to evolve their catalogs over the next three to six months.

Sellers should, at least once a month, focus a few days on the procurement of new selection, as some portion of their existing catalog will likely become unprofitable or below an acceptable margin threshold, leading to a need for better use of capital on other product selection.

This is particularly the case for resellers that don’t have exclusive sourcing relationships.

It’s only a matter of time before some competitor with a lower margin threshold starts selling the same product, and makes your offers unsellable.

While a brand may think it has decent control of its distribution, Amazon is a very efficient marketplace for gray-market or diverted product to surface, leading you to find that you have to cut your prices just to match some new entrant.

For private label sellers on Amazon, remember that that your product sales successes on Amazon are an invitation for the next private label seller to copy your product and make a lower priced version; so keep evolving and stay nimble.

The active catalog you have today isn’t likely to be as profitable or relevant in 6 to 12 months from now.

Want more insights like this?

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Amazon Selling Pitfalls Even the Savviest Sellers Forget [Infographic] published first on http://ift.tt/2wGG0YJ