Go try it out! (you must be logged in)

I welcome reports of how it works in other browsers and operating systems. If you have any problems with the new uploader, please let me know right away! Use the contact form.

Cheers!

Starting June 1, the fee per sale is increasing from 5% to 9%, and the flat rate increases from $0.30 to $0.35 . Oversize and international currency fees remain unchanged.

The fee change will take effect some time on June 1, after the payout is processed. All documentation describing our services will be updated on June 1 as well.

When Scubbly was launched in 2009, the fees were calculated based on the costs and requirements of the time. The core e-commerce engine and secure distribution cloud were was designed for use by one seller for personal use, then other people asked to use it so it was expanded so several other sellers could sign on. Then it was released to the public in August of 2009. The fees were calculated prior to August 2009, with costs “averaged out” so the income generated would be enough to pay all the PayPal transaction fees, pay for the web hosting and cloud storage, and break even.

Throughout 2010 and 2011, we negotiated with PayPal, optimized our technology, and figured out ways to be more efficient, so we could continue to offer the service to more sellers while still breaking even.  We cut corners. Did everything as cheaply as possible. But eventually, running Scubbly on dirt-cheap commodity hardware wasn’t good enough – the site was crashing often, and needed some serious upgrades. We learned the hard way, when Scubbly.com experienced a catastrophic failure as the web server and all our backups got wiped and had to be painfully reconstructed from incomplete archives. Drawing on personal investments, we upgraded everything to new machines that could handle the stress.

Accounting for 2012 shows that for the past three months, Scubbly has been running at a loss.

So we’ve analyzed all our costs, projected our future growth, formulated some long-term plans, and determined what reasonable fee will cover costs for now and in the predictable future. The answer is: 9%+0.35 will keep that line on the graph from dipping below zero.

This is just a heads up.

We hate doing this. We set our fees back in 2009, so low that they were just barely high enough that the amount collected per sale covers the cost of running the service. But recently, some of our technology costs – particularly storage, hosting and bandwidth – have increased, and Scubbly is no longer breaking even. In fact on average, Scubbly is losing – on average – a few cents on each sale.

So, on June 1 we will be increasing the per-sale fee. The amount hasn’t been chosen yet; it will take some accounting work to figure out what percentage will need to be added to bring Scubbly’s fees up to a point where we can cover all our costs.

I’ll announce the fee increase more formally in the next few days, once we figure out what it will be.

Please be assured that we’re not doing this to be predatory. We’re still devoted to offering the highest return possible to sellers, and I’m sure even with the increase Scubbly will be more profitable than our competitors, and far more efficient than managing a bespoke e-commerce solution.

Congratulations to all the sellers who reached and exceeded the $50 threshold. Keep up the good work!

The new contact form is finished and ready to launch.

Messages, as you know them now, are going to disappear from the Scubbly web interface in 12 hours. Please, if you have any messages in the system you want to save, go find them and archive them right away.

It works, and it’s robust and well-constructed… but to be frank, no one is using it. In the entire history of Scubbly since 2009, there have only been 216 messages sent. Total. And 109 of those are messages from a Scubbly Administrator to a seller.

No one’s using it. So it’s on the chopping block in the next version of Scubbly’s bespoke software.

Why is it not being used? There is one overwhelming reason we can see from analyzing traffic patterns on the site:

To send a message, you need to be logged in. Well, in the initial version of Scubbly you had to be logged in to BUY anything, so it was already convenient for someone to be authenticated in order to start a conversation. But last year we enhanced Scubbly with “Instant Purchase” and now – no exaggeration – 95% of all purchases are made by non-authenticated buyers. We can see that many people who click the “Contact this seller” link on an item detail page go “back” when they see the prompt to register or log in.

So here’s what’s going to change.

The current messaging system, with the conversation view and all, will be gone. The speech bubble icon in the navigation bar will also disappear.

In its place, will be a single “send a message” form, which will allow a potential buyer to send an email message to a seller. As a seller, instead of receiving a notification from Scubbly that a message is waiting, you will receive the message itself, to which you may reply directly to the potential buyer.

This change will be finished in the next 2 weeks. If you have messages in the messaging area you would like to keep, please go and get them now since all the old messages will be deleted soon

Cheers

The major initiative right now is an ongoing upgrade to all the JavaScript components all over the website. The entire corpus of UI components are being translated from MooTools to jQuery. I originally thought it might take a couple of months – it’s a huge job – but I drastically underestimated the amount of effort it would take, and overestimated how much time there would be to work on it. So, it’s taking longer than expected. There are major feature enhancements that can only be started once this job is done, so unfortunately those are going to be delayed. For example, the new widgets were being developed simultaneously, but now those have hit a roadblock as they require the JavaScript upgrade to be finished before they can progress any further. Busy times!

The new server environment is still working great. Since moving the scubbly.com site to RackSpace Cloud in February, there has been no downtime. Sales are increasing, gradually, as several dozen new sellers signed on in March along with hundreds of new products. The April 1 payout is likely to be the largest one ever, but hey I say that every month. Growth is good!

http://www.scubbly.com/tos/

The content of the ToS has been shuffled and reorganized with headings. Some sentences were edited for brevity, and in a few places edited to remove duplication. No new clauses or stipulations have been added, so there’s no need for anyone to re-agree to it; if you are a seller who already agreed to the ToS, you’re still OK

To see the tutorials, go here:

http://www.scubbly.com/help/tutorials/

Of course, this only happens if a buyer purchased more than one thing, and this was one of them. Since the overwhelming majority of sales at Scubbly are one-off purchases, not very many products have any stored association.

How it works

It’s powered by a simple “association matrix”. Product A might be associated with Product B, and that association has a “strength” or “score”. Associations between products can be visualized as a 2-dimensional grid or matrix, where the number of potential associations between products is ((n^2)/2 – n), where n is the number of products at Scubbly. With over 50,000 products currently being sold at Scubbly, that number is an astronomical 1.25 billion. If two products are associated, the score is greater than zero. The more times a product is purchased with another product, the higher the associated score between them.

Using an ingenious algorithm invented by Scubbly, these suggestions are compiled in real-time. The moment a purchase is made, its anonymized details are propagated into the association matrix. It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.

Enjoy!