philip immirzi's dashboard

Thanks for your question. And apologies for the longish response.

1. First up, we are not a conventional shop but a reward programme that works on a referral basis. So, retailers advertise their products with us and we pass on a part or all of any commission we receive when you buy a product.

We don't currently have a shopping basket, as the transaction part is done entirely by our retail partners (they all do it differently - a bit of a challenge). But maybe this is an idea that you could submit and we could chew on?

2. To "save" things for later there are several mechanisms.

Without registering you can use the SHARE button to bookmark or save a product to any number of external services or simply email it to yourself.

Alternatively simply save to your browser bookmarks.

3. There are several reasons that a product may disappear.

Sometimes when we synchronise the data we find that a product name can change or is dropped. Retailers also come and go from the programme too, but not that often. Occasionally we drop retailers, which is pretty rare.

4. We do have multiple ways of finding a product, either by retailer or brand. We have a number of search tools:

http://www.ecomonkey.co.uk/search

Good for simple search: e.g. "Wiggle" will pull up 7 retailers, one of which is the Wiggle online cycle shop. You may not have noticed the filter bars are clickable and allow you to sift through brands and categories too, so you can narrow your search when you get too many results.

http://www.ecomonkey.co.uk/power-search

Looks across all parts of our website. From here you can find brand and retailer profiles, but also products. You can use the built in advanced search tools here too.

http://search.ecomonkey.co.uk/

Is simply Google's impression of what is in our database. It is not always up to the minute and we have asked them recently to speed up their data collection.

Hope this helps

Philip

Amazon s3 (serving the feedback widget) seemed to be slowing our site recently ...

solution: we updated the feedback widget script and everything was better

Thank you Ken for pointing out this issue.

We did a quick check and sure enough the brand Natura Organics was not on the system, despite there being some 35 products from So Organics Ltd.

Now, usually a quick simple search would find the string "natura organics" without a problem, but like Ken I couldn't find them either.

I had to use google to check "site:www.ecomonkey.co.uk natura organics" to check.

However after of couple of tries and different combinations, the products suddenly appeared in the listing.

We have now rebranded the products so that Natura Organics appears in the brand list.

In our defence, we do rely on our participating retailers to brand their products accordingly - they do not do this consistently. Will will continue to ask them to do so.

However, this does not answer completely why Ken could not find Natura Organics using simple search. The system is designed to be able to perform simple searches, particularly on brand names and retailers, but not mispellings - yet.

It can't have been a user error, because I could not find them either.

My best guess (and we have not encountered this that often) is that it is caching issue. The system remembers an earlier database query and throws up an incorrect answer.

So, we will try shortening the cache period in case this has something to do with it and will monitor it some more.

Thanks Ken for pointing this out.

funny that this hasn't been fixed? maybe it has.

Eric, I have been getting the occasional spam on meetup. A pain.

What is worse, I think that the message appears in your public profile - which seems weird.

Is there a way to turn greetings off altogether?.

This is actually a really good question.

First off, we'd say that CDs and tapes may not be the greenest choice.

mp3 players may be a better choice, simply because they do not require the packaging and distribution of a physical CD. This process, called dematerialisation, helps reduce negative environmental impacts in the manufacture, delivery and disposal.

But that still leaves you with a very wide choice and a question regarding the materials the mp3 player itself is made of, how it is powered, and also the reputation of the company (e.g. is it socially responsible?).

When Ecomonkey doesn't have information about a specific product, or a range of products, the ratings will use information about the brand to rate products.

e.g. up until recently we gave all Apple products, including ipods a red label (poor).

What is our advice then? Avoid any red labelled mp3 players.

Gimmicky perhaps, but you could try a Verio wind up mp3 player (and if 20 minutes of music is insufficient, it comes with back up mains charger).

http://www.ecomonkey.co.uk/browse/all...

In fact we do not give any other mp3 product a green label ... yet.

Hope this helps.

Ecomonkey

PS Another thought, when you charge a device like an mp3 that uses a lithium battery, keep it topped up regularly (daily) - do not discharge completely as you will reduce battery life and do not forget to disconnect the charger from the mains.

Rache

The offer to talk was more than an empty gesture and made on the basis that other outcomes might be possible.

Sounds like you have made up your mind; we haven't and our offer remains open.

Regards

Philip

Thanks Eric, but as you say this is a tricky one.

We are but a phone call away and would be more than happy to talk it over some more, and, who knows there could be a mutually agreeable solution.

Ever the optimist

Philip

Hi Rache

Nice to hear from you and thank you for your point.

While we were aware of the blogger with the soubriquet ecomonkey, sometimes known as racheblue (behind http://bluangeldesigns.com/), we felt that the internet space was big enough to accommodate both. Similar sector but different business areas. We can assure you that there wasn't any attempt at confusion, nor to undermine.

We do take the point about lacking creative thinking (and ditching hundreds of good competing names that we had spent a lot of time to come up with), but that's probably no consolation.

I am not sure what else we can say that will ease your annoyance.

You are welcome to give us a telephone call / skype and vent your frustrations further ...

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Philip
--
One of the other ecomonkeys

I'm not sure went wrong, but here goes one more time with the full (offending?) code:

I was using one of the widgets here (at the foot of the page): www.ecomonkey.co.uk

Today IE7 started throwing up that horrid error: Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site. Operation aborted.

The first script I took out was the GS widget. IE7 was happy again.

Looking around for this problem I found elsewhere that adding defer="defer" iinside the script tags containing ...

src="http://getsatisfaction.com/ecomonkey/widgets/javascripts/201427/widgets.js" defer="defer" type="text/javascript"

And
src="http://getsatisfaction.com/ecomonkey/topics.widget?callback=gsfnTopicsCallback&limit=5&sort=last_active_at&style=topics" defer="defer" type="text/javascript"

fixed it. Hopefully this doesn't fezz up anything else.

Regards

Philip

If you've just joined and are entitled to the free 500 green points intro offer, the following conditions must be met:

You purchased a green rated product through ecomonkey
The product is showing correctly in My account
The transaction status shows as "Paid"

We'll then add your free green points, usually within the day of the last condition being met.

I got this reply to a question I then deleted (I realised it had been answered in a complementary post):

The best type of format for us is YAML. I can send you a file that is mocked up in that format to show you how that is composed. It's pretty straightforward and looks something like this:

question: |
What is the ideal format for Importing FAQs to Get Satisfaction?
answer: |
YAML is the format we import. It's very simple.

One thing to keep in mind: The value of FAQs can be hard to determine. While it's efficient to pull together your customers' most-asked questions, the downside is that you may actually be missing questions your customers might ask that you simply can't envision. That's a potential strength of conversation on Get Satisfaction: Your customers often reveal new issues or details about your product, so steering them down a path of FAQ, while helpful, might make you miss something.

But, that's mostly a philosophical debate we have in the Get Satisfaction office. So, if you're ready to pull in some FAQs, shoot me an e-mail [eric (at) getsatisfaction (dot) com] and I'll send you the dummy file that explains the YAML formatting.

This isn't really a problem at our end and depends on participating retailers and our intermediaries providing us with transaction data.

Your green points should show on your account within a day of your transaction. If you are lucky within hours. While a few checks are taking place the points are marked pending, but when they are confirmed you can be sure everything is in order.

It can take a little longer though. Do hang on in there just a little longer if nothings turns up before submitting your problem details using the "ask ecomoney" enquiry form.