Monthly Archives: December 2007

How to unblock email to …@yahoo.com

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When you create an account at COMC.com our server sends you an email. Sometimes email from our server gets blocked by your email provider. The easiest way to unblock our email is to add staff@COMC.com to your contact list. To do that with Yahoo! Mail simply click on the Contacts tab or go to http://address.mail.yahoo.com.
Contacts Tab

Then click the Add Contact button.
Add Contact

Specify staff@checkoutmycards.com as the email address and click Save.
Save Contact

Now email from our server will arrive in your inbox and you will be able to activate your account.

To request a new activation email go to the following page, sign in (if necessary), and click the ‘Request a new activation email’ link.
http://www.COMC.com/manage/activate.aspx

Background
As part of the account creation process at COMC.com we verify that the user has specified a valid email address that can successfully receive email from our servers. This is very important for sellers on our site because they need to be notified if a potential buyer sends them an offer on their cards.

Unfortunately many people have trouble receiving email from our servers. In the past 30 days most email domains have had a 65-75% success rate in receiving our emails and activating their accounts. However there are two outliers, @yahoo.com and @gmail.com. As we have seen with just about everything from Google, their services appear to be superior. 95.74% of the users from @gmail.com successfully activate their accounts. Even though Yahoo! Mail is the post popular email provider it appears to be on the other end of the spectrum. Only 47% of the @yahoo.com email addresses are able to receive our emails.

Email Domain  Activation Rate
@yahoo.com 47.42%
@hotmail.com 70.67%
@gmail.com 95.74%
@aol.com 69.23%
@comcast.net 76.92%

4,000+ unique visitors

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In my last post I mentioned that it took 50 days to get from 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors in a day, and it took 10 days to get from 2,000 to 3,000 unique visitors. Well, it took 4 days to get from 3,000 to 4,000 unique visitors.

Yesterday we had 4,041 unique visitors. That was more than 20% better than our previous best day. COMC.com is really taking off.

On another note, you may have noticed that we now have the Hacker Safe logo on our site.
HACKER SAFE certified sites prevent over 99.9% of hacker crime.

We have started using the services of ScanAlert.com to help keep our website safe.

When it rains it pours!

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Many of you may have heard about the flooding we had in the Pacific Northwest recently.

A 20-mile section of I-5, the region’s main north-south route, finally reopened Friday after being covered by up to 10 feet of water for much of the week.

President issues disaster declaration for Wash. flooding

Just like the weather, traffic has been flooding into COMC.com this past week as well. In November we saw a steady increase from about 1,200 unique visitors per day to about 1,800 per day. Then all of a sudden… December happened.

December 1st 2,235 unique visitors, more than 15% better than our previous best day.
December 2nd 2,508 unique visitors, more than 10% better than Dec 1st.
December 3rd 2,782 unique visitors, more than 10% better than Dec 2nd.

In the first week of December we had more orders than we had in any month prior to October.

September 18th was the first day we had more than 1,000 unique visitors in a day. Since October 12th we have had 1,000+ unique visitors every day, but we didn’t have 2,000 visitors until December 1st. That was about 50 days in the 1,000-2,000 range. On December 9th we topped 3,000 unique visitors. That was only 8 days on the trek from 2,000 to 3,000 unique visitors per day.

Yesterday we had 3,347 unique visitors. That is the 4th time in the last 10 days that we have topped our previous best day by more than 10%.

Sorry I haven’t had time to post more frequently. I will try to do better, but with stats like this it might be hard to find time. We are currently making plans to increase to size of our staff to support the growing demand.