Ebay Copyright Violators

I think that there are flaws with the current copyright law. I do believe that those who create, deserve to get credit and compensation for their work. A common problem within the counted cross stitch industry is the proliferation of people who use the artwork of others for profit without proper accredidation. Fair use allows for non-commercial personal use but not for resale. Ebay, IOffer, and other auction sites have this problem. So let me share my most recent experience.

I found this seller on Ebay, selling charts based on artwork by Carrie Hall. What struck me immediately, was that the titles of the pieces were changed and that there was no artist recognition. I smelled something rotten. I sent an email to Carrie asking if this person had the right to sell the charts. While waiting for a response from Carrie, I decided to contact the seller as well. The following is the exchanges of email verbatim, including my poor typing. (warning: unprofessional language follows)

Dark Lilac: who is the artist for sea witch, winter watch and Sian?
Seller: cross-stitch-charts: why?
Dark Lilac: No problem. I found them. They will contacting you shortly.
cross-stitch-charts:good for you
cross-stitch-charts:whats your problem.
cross-stitch-charts: DID YOU JOIN JUST TO BE AN ASS?
OR HAVE YOU AL;WAYS BEEN THIS WAY?

I think the defensive attiture of the seller is indicative of guilt and ignorance. I feel particularly sorry for the buyers of this material who have been duped. Normally this would have set me off. But I was in a good mood after chatting with other stitchers on the HAED BB who cheered me up. I sent Ebay an email complaint about the seller.

Carrie did get back to me and said that this person did not have the right to sell her stuff and she would be contacting them. I'm waiting to see what Ebay does. At this time, the autions are still live with bids.

Yahoo Feed

The error message that caused the product images not to show up on yahoo's product feed was "Include a valid image for these product(s) by populating the "image-url" field". After I fixed the retail price to display double zeros for round number prices (9.00 instead of 9), then the images were picked up. Apparently an invalid image is a euphemism for something completely different. A couple of the products are still not showing images, but I'm giving up here and calling it good. Is accepting XML instead of tab delimited plain text too much to ask?

Product Comparison Feeds

I've done several product feeds for darklilac.com and here is a breakdown of each:

Froogle:
Froogle from the fine folks at Google is free. Due to the low cost, all the products on the website are uploaded. It takes a tab delimited plain text file via ftp upload. I wrote a shell script that is called by a cron job that does the ftp upload for me. It would be easier to just have Google do a periodic download from the website. Froogle is a must for every ecommerce site. If Google can add the ability to track consumer feedback, Froogle would be a direct competitor to eBay. Ebay does two things well, search across sellers and feedback. If Google gets their act together, they could do some very good things for the ecommercesphere. I have not yet figured out a way to do keyword optimization on froogle yet. Which is probably a good thing.
http://www.darklilac.com/frooglefeed.jsp

Bizrate (shopzilla): Bizrate has been around for some time and charge on a per click basis. They take a tab delimited file but don't require an ftp upload. Since they charge, I only allow a subset of products to be displayed. Only allowing targeted products (about 50) will decrease the daily charge. Bizrate is a difficult partner. They advertise on adwords and overture. Sometimes they will have the top 2 (two!) spots bid on for themselves. They do this to match whatever keywords are in their system to drive revenue. Because they compete on keyword bidding, they drive up the costs against their own partners. To combat this, my account is limited to a low monthly charge. I don't have a lot of faith Bizrate. The reasons involve the extra competition on adwords and overture, inflexible bidding (too high!), difficult to manage categorization of products and the delay to bring up pages. I'm guessing that the Bizrate IT staff had to pay an early adopter penalty to setup their system, which is why it needs a splash screen.
http://www.darklilac.com/bizratefeed.jsp

Dealtime (shopping.com) Dealtime is weaker than bizrate. They also generate fewer sales but don't compete on adwords and overture as much. They also don't require an ftp upload but put a requirement on the file extension which has to be .txt. This required me to tweak my webserver settings to treat .txt files as .jsp's. Also, the feedback for errors aren't as good as froogle or bizrate. Their categories are confusing like bizrate but the site response time is better. They also have inflexible bidding that is too high.
http://www.darklilac.com/dealtimefeed.txt

NextTag: I tried NextTag and couldn't get the upload to work. I haven't checked lately, so maybe they have fixed it.

Pricegrabber: They were not interested in carrying Dark Lilac's products.

Yahoo: I'm working on the Yahoo feed right now. Yahoo was late to the market and haven't done much to improve on their competitors. They also require an ftp upload like froogle or you can use your web browser to do it manually. Their bidding is inflexible, the error messages aren't clear either. The reposing time is good though. The jury is still out on Yahoo, but it isn't looking good so far. I'm still trying to get the product feed structured right and I can't tell what is wrong. I have some practice at doing this, so I'm guessin' it is not all my fault. Also, they require the filename to be data.txt. I find this fixed name requirement to be annoying as my dynamic files are served as .jsp. I know I could do a url rewrite, but that is more work than I am interested at the moment.
http://www.darklilac.com/data.txt

Their is a big space in this market that someone will fill. It's a big hole and a very profitable one as well. The key elements seem to be:

• Allow cross vendor searching by keywords like froogle
• Allow RSS style feeds that are sucked right off the vendor website
• Allow a configurable url for RSS feed
  
• Allow presentation values in the feed for display on the comparison site
• Allow flexible bidding
• Allow fixed price or auction style purchases
• Consumer feedback system for all vendors like eBay has
• Keep the keyword trickery to a minimum like froogle (but don't be random)

There was a problem with the cross stitch chart generator that I just uploaded a fix for. The code that reduces the number of isolated pixels is very cpu intensive because it needs to sort the regions according to the number of pixels in them. Then the regions with a number of pixels below the threshold are merged into the closest neighbor. The sorting after a merge was too slow, so I added code to only resort the list of regions when the next candidate for removal has also been a closest neighbor. I just uploaded "Ducks" as a test and the performance was tolerable. For images with too many regions, sorting after every merge is just too slow.
I also added code to make the removal of isolated pixel regions more robust. I added a check to do one last resort before bailing out of the loop. I couldn't prove that it was a problem, but just in case there is something else going on, I thought it best to be safe. I also added a call to reduce the number of isolated pixels after the mapping to DMC floss happens. So now the pixel regions are merged before and after the mapping method call. I may change this code again later if I can prove that the mapping to DMC floss won't ever create an extra isolated pixel.

Dark Lilac has a blog!

Welcome to the Dark Lilac blog. I have been toying with the idea of doing a blog for some time and always found something else to do. We recently had an outage with our ISP that knocked our site out during the day while they moved our server. This prompted me to begin a way to communicate with our customers better. So you may have noticed that a newsletter was sent out last night. We sent it to show off our new paint by numbers from Crafthouse and Dimensions. Also we wanted to show off some more of Heaven and Earth Designs. I noticed a significant amount of traffic from the newsletter in the morning but then settled down the rest of the day. Hopefully nobody was put off by the slowdown, and we apologize if anyone had any difficulty.