Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

I discovered a site today called CrowdSpring, which is a fantastic community based design site based right here in Chicago. The concept behind Crowdspring is this:

1. I have a project I want designed (logo, website, t-shirt, etc.)
2. I post it to Crowdspring with some information about my project and a prize. Most of the prizes I saw were around a few hundred dollars.
3. Designers submit their designs and the community and myself (the buyer) choose the winner.

The designs that I saw were pretty amazing for $150. I really like the site and wish them well. I think they have enough of a first to market advantage to get some steam.

So I continue to get twice daily emails from Performance Bike. I know they are trying to do good, but the volume and inability to unsubscribe only angers me more. As I have noted in the past, it only takes one email communication to upset a customer enough to turn them off completely to your brand.

To further the situation, the “Report Spam” feature in Gmail doesn’t seem to care what I do. If I hit “Report Spam”, it moves that message to Spam and then the next day I get two more. I think we’re approaching a CAN-SPAM violation here.

Taken from the CAN-SPAM website:

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor’s email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it’s illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

So what is my recourse here, send in a report to the FTC? They say to email spam@uce.gov, but I can imagine how inundated with spam that email address is on a daily basis. Shame, shame on the FTC as well for not obfuscating that email address on their own page.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Want to know what you are getting for Christmas? Amazon will tell you. I recently told a few of my relatives what I would like for Christmas via my Amazon Wishlist. Today, I checked it and found a few items missing. What happened? Well, the Amazon wishlist defaults to “Unpurchased” items, however, when I went to the “Purchased” tab it shows me the missing items.

I guess you can figure out the rest from there. I’m not 100% sure who bought me what, but it appears that you can use your Amazon wishlist as a way to get an extra secret peak into Santa’s bag.

How should Amazon handle this?
Well assuming they are going to try and keep things “under wraps”, they should allow a user (Gifter) to purchase an item at any time and also keep it on the list for the original person (Giftee). If another Gifter arrives and wants to purchase the item, it should tell them “This gift has already been purchased for Jeff. Do you still want to purchase it?” And allow the Gifter to decide at that point. Although this still allows for me to run through my list of items and try to “purchase” them, it adds an additional layer on top of the Wishlist. Or maybe Amazon just doesn’t care since they make money either way
Any other ideas? Post your thoughts in the comments.