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9/25/2006 Monday
Time: 8: 48 AM PDT

***ePier Newsletter #33***

New Announcements

1. Break-through advances in our server performance.

2. This is our re-launch of our community newsletter.

3. Our goal

When I first started ePier many years ago, we had one thing in mind and that was to provide a lower cost marketplace for our members. Even though we provide a significant cost saving, in the form of no listing fee, final value fee half what the other e-site costs, we have not seen the growth that we expected. I believe there are a number of reasons for this. The most significant of these is the misperception, mostly in the mainland US that other marketplaces cannot thrive. This is absolutely incorrect because we know for a fact that in China there are 2 major auction sites, Alibaba and ebay.com.cn. And in Japan, ebay has even quit their Japanese site conceding defeat in that marketplace. Therefore there should be no reason to doubt that our community can thrive as well.

Secondly, a site is only as strong and great as their members make it. Have the courage to support us. We have been here now for several years being up 99.8% of the time, while others have come and gone, or have been sold out. Of course, no site can be free and provide a great service. However, I do not think that a site should gouge their members with ever increasing corporate profit either. Consider making a donation, there is a link for our members to do this from the home page, or purchasing one of your many low cost services we have. Every dollar that you spend with us is precious to us. For example, just $15 means being able to answer 5 of your email questions, or hiring someone to answer your questions in the forum, or spending a full hour fixing a bug that has bothered you. We are only going to be as strong as your support.

My third point is on a happier side and that is that we now have a great foundation to continue to grow. We now have over 100,000 registrations. We need to increase our revenue by just another 20%-30% to be able to advertise on radio and reach a greater population. We have some of the best marketplace features, a newly revamped storefront that costs only $19.95 per year with no other hidden fees. We have the most advanced anti-fraud measures in place of anywhere on the Internet today. We spot and suspend Nigerian fraud and reject fraudulent bids.

This newsletter represents a re-launch of our community newsletter.

I have been personally busy with a number of projects but will be devoting more time in writing these newsletters. We will also be broadcasting video blogs starting this week so please look for them. I would also like to invite our community members to contribute to this newsletter on a volunteer basis. However, if I use any part of your writing I will send you a personal $20 gift certificate to Baskin & Robins Ice Creams for your contributions. I believe strongly in giving back to you 100 fold what you help us in. We are also planning on doing some really exciting and innovative things to grow our community such as sending out brochures to sellers and expanding our referral program. So I am very excited for what is to come.

Another important item to note is the many great improvements we have made to ePier in the last 7 months. Over 100 important improvements have been made, the least of which is in our server performance. We have made important improvements that have made our pages 5 times faster and load within 2 seconds what was usually taking over 5 seconds. Hooray for us.

Our Goal in the coming months is to focus on marketing and add more buyers and sellers alike. In recent news articles, Yahoo is said to be planning on purchasing facebook for $1Billion because they have 10million users. Well, based on these numbers our community is worth $10million based on 100,000 plus members. With this type of financial strength that we now have we should continue to grow and be able to innovate and provide you the best value on the Internet today. Thank you for reading my first newsletter and supporting your ePier community. Cheers.

Yours Truly,
James Kim
CEO, ePier.com


Thank you for your continued support of ePier.

http://www.epier.com/announce.asp

6/29/2006 Thursday
Time: 3: 00 PM PDT
   
***Incremental Improvements Being Made***

We have been quietly making gradual improvements on a great number of fronts. Some of the improvements have been made to make the site perform faster and better on existing services. Others we have added to take advantage of viral marketing and growth that our ever increasing member base have. We have added our own version of My Space to make ePier a true community of buyers, sellers, and friends. You can now add friends, invite friends, add favorite music, talk about yourself and chat with your customers and friends. We have also added a link where you can donate to make ePier a better community. We all understand that no site can be great without good sound financials. In this effort we have created a link here where you can contribute to making ePier an even greater site.

Thank you for your continued support of ePier.

[Tags:]

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[bargainbloodhound]

We have added our own version of My Space to make ePier a true community of buyers, sellers, and friends.

If the visitor is a member of Hitler Youth they may be tempted to join the ePier community after visiting the home page but otherwise it's doubtful they'll stay on the site long enough to join or buy.

ePier's home page a few minutes ago: the first thing a visitor would have seen is 48 photos of "the popular current items"...and every single one of them when I visited either had a swastika, SS or other Nazi insignia, or a catchy slogan like "sieg heil"

Snapshot of ePier's home page (.pdf file)

The "popular current items" displays a different seller's items every time the page is refreshed but if I saw a page full of Nazi items there's a good chance many other visitors have too when they visited.