Well it's been a long time coming, but in the background of Iconico.com has always been our consulting business. We've kept it quiet, working with exclusive clients to produce some high-end, expertly made websites and applications, but time's come to get the word out.

ICONICODE

We're happy to talk to your business about how we can build your next website or application. We've got a wide technology background, so whatever language you want your code written in, then we can speak it.

We're also experts at usability, so if you have a website or application that just isn't working right, and want to fix more problems than just the visual design then give us a call.

We're happy to announce that starting Monday we'll be running two deals every day on BitsDuJour.com. If you have not stopped by before then take a look, we sell exclusive software titles at huge discounts, sometimes up to 90% off, but you have to act fast, the deals disappear in 24 hours.

For some time now I've had various pieces of artwork and projects online at Iconico.com. This was never really a good home for them so I'm happy to have finally found them all a permanent home at the new NicoWesterdale.com.

If you take a look you'll find various paintings that I've worked on over the years, art projects and some technical art installations. I hope you enjoy.

There's been a lot of talk on this blog, and in private emails about using XML formats to standardize the e-commerce industry. I posted a while back about the call to draw some common ground between the fractured web based systems that have grown up that don't talk to each other, and don't have any similarities from one to the next.

Time's come for a change!

The current state of technology is simply setting our industry back, and so here's the call: For all of you out there that have thought that you'd like to contribute to a better way of doing business then join us in the working group ESIX: Ecommerce Standard Information eXchange.



To set things up I've started a Facebook group so there's a forum for us all to communicate on. There's no agenda other than doing for e-commerce systems what PAD did for software listings.

Join the ESIX Facebook Group here

At BitsDuJour.com we promote software written by a wide variety of developers. We run a 24 hour discount on the software and some developers see a huge uptick in their sales for the day, but some don't, so why do some promotions work, and others don't?

The first answer is down to the software, great software sells, and poor software doesn't, but you can help your chances. We've seen that a discount of 40% or more creates a change of perception in the mind of the customer, moving the promotion from "interesting" to "must have". Given that we run the deal for only one day the large discounts really help to push the sales through in a short time.



We get asked time and time again by software vendors running promotions with us about the best way to help promote a one-day software deal. The answer I always give is that the first and best place to promote is with your existing customers.

The fact of the matter is that if you send out an email to your existing customers saying you have a one-day sale with us, and ask your existing customers to tell their friends and families you will get more sales. In some cases much more. Existing customers have already made the decision to purchase your software, and if you ask them then more often than not they will be keen to pass on the good news about a product that they already like.

However, there is often a little hesitation in doing this. The savvy developer thinks "Hey, I could do this all myself, and I wouldn't have to pay a percentage of the sales to BitsDuJour".

Yes, you could set everything up to run the promotion and mail them. However the fact of the matter is that setting this up will take a significant amount of time on your part, and we have all the tools you need to run a successful promotion for you, RSS, notification emails, a professional write-up and layout, so either you pay in your time, or you pay in your percentage of the sales.

The fact of the matter is that Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) don't set up and run their own daily deals. I monitor a lot of discussion boards and I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard of people doing this themselves. So if you resign yourself to the fact that you're not going to, then why not run a promotion through us and promote to your existing mailing list. In many cases ISVs never email their customers at all so yes we're getting a cut, but a cut of sales that would have never existed.



One last point. We have offered for some time now a way to place all our daily deals on your website, totally seamlessly branded with your pages. If your store generates a sale we give you 50% of the commission. So if you set up a store, and promote your product directing people to your store you'll get back half of the commission that you pay to us, which is typically 30%. So basically that's only 15% that you pay to us *after* the discount and any e-commerce fees are applied.

Put another way, if your product usually costs $30 and you ran a 50% off promotion you'd pay us a little over $2 per sale for all the professional features and tools that you need to run a daily deal promotion. I hope that's finally a strong enough argument for why you should promote to your mailing list as well.

Details on our partner stores are here:
http://www.bitsdujour.com/partnerStoreInfo

Again thanks to all of you who have promoted with us.

If you're a fan of the social networking site LinkedIn you might be interested to learn that we now have our own LinkedIn group for BitsDuJour.com. If you're a software vendor, or just a fan of what we do, then we'd like to welcome you to join and network with others in the software industry.



Join the Group Here