JessesGadgets.com is profitable!

I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that JessesGadgets.com is profitable. After a few sales recently I've covered all of the overhead of this operation. By overhead I mean web hosting fees. Everything else for the rest of 2007 is pure profit.
How did this happen in under three months? I'd like to thank Froogle and Google Base for listing my items and Google AdWords for generating impressions of my products to customers in Colorado, Arkansas and beyond. Revenue targets for the summer are pretty high but I'm confident JessesGadgets will exceed them given the extremely high demand and limited supply of Yankees tickets.
What does this prove? Well...it proves a few things. Most importantly it proves that the market for selling used products online is FAR from saturated thanks to Web 2.0 products like Google Base and Froogle. Why would anyone pay to list their items on Ebay when Froogle offers so many different ways to list them for free? Now that Google Checkout is catching on with Froogle customers and merchants I would be very worried if I were Ebay!

Proposal for new Google Product: Chowgle

Are you like me? Have you ever been frustrated with MenuPages.com or CitySearch? I don't think many people would disagree that there isn't a single food directory repository on the Internet that is unbiased, reliable and anywhere close to comprehensive. I'd like to propose "Chowgle" as a solution to people like me who love to visit new places solely for the purpose of trying the best local fare. I'd like to be able to enter the search term "Boston's Best Burrito" and see "Anna's Tacqueria" as the top result or "Fair Lawn pizza" and see "John's Pizza" as the top result. Kudos to the braniancs who purchased other domain names I would have chosen including Foodgle and Chewgle.
Chowgle will be sort of a hybrid of three existing Google products; Google local search, Google News and Froogle. It will thrive off user submitted content and have an intelligent contextual search tool.

There are three main principles which Chowgle should follow:
1. Chowgle will accept restaurant menus as XML feeds and spreadsheet uploads directly from restaurants (similar to the methodology used to upload product listings to Froogle.) This task will be fairly easy for restaurants, especially ones with websites that show their menus already. In addition to restaurant submitted menus it would be interesting to see if some kind of restaurant website crawler could accurately compile menus.

2. Chowgle will use a ranking algorithm, "FoodRank", to rank search results. Similar to Google the public won't be privy to the details of how FoodRank works but some kind of combination of user submitted reviews, food blog reviews (e.g. Burrito Blog), Zagat ratings etc...

3. Chowgle will of course will use contextual search and suggestions (Ajax) like Google search.

I proposed this idea to Google as a business venture last week. As of March 13th I haven't heard back. I'm guessing I'll hear back any day now!

JessesGadgets.com First Sale!

Yesterday was a huge day for JessesGadgets.com. Someone purchased my old XM satellite radio which is officially the first sale to a person who doesn't know me or Jesse! I'm not 100% sure but I would guess the buyer found the radio by searching Froogle. Thank you Google!

JessesGadgets.com update: More items posted...Froogle listing etc...

Now that the functionality of JessesGadgets.com is done my focus has shifted to listing gadgets on the site and on Froogle. Since JessesGadgets sold an item with Google Checkout it's now listed as a "Google Checkout Store" on Froogle which will give the site a little credibility. JessesGadgets is also indexed by Google so our search rankings are improving daily which is great!

I added a few more items into the gadget database this weekend. Hopefully I'll have a bunch more up there soon. Jesse started to write blogs on the JessesGadgets blog site. Things are progressing very nicely. Look out for some "homegrown" web gadgets, like my Rent Calculator program, which will be posted on the site in the coming weeks.

JessesGadgets.com update: Listings searchable in Froogle and Google Base

Last night I switched over from Google Checkout sandbox and went live with JessesGadgets.com. I also listed my items on Froogle and Google Base. Check out the JessesGadgets store listings:

Froogle

Google Base

Jesse's Gadgets Ready for Production

I made a few touch-ups to the checkout process and the Blogger feed and now JessesGadgets.com is ready for production. I changed the customer experience slightly to a smoother checkout process. I'm basing my changes on the assumption that each user is only looking to purchase one item at a time. After an item is added to the shopping cart the user is redirected a page which lists the items in the shopping cart. The user can either checkout (using Google Checkout) or continue shopping. I was able to get this functionality working using forms that posts hidden values to a php page which updates the shopping cart. I also added some text next to the "View Cart" link on the main page which shows the # of items currently in the shopping cart. This week I'm going to delete all of my test data and load some "real" gadgets that we're going to sell. Once I do this I'll switch out of the Google Checkout Sandbox environment into production. At that point JessesGadget items should be searchable in Froogle (and Google Base once I add them.)