Bye, buy my American Pie

I KNEW e-commerce has been around for a decade or longer, but the tools to turn any vanilla website into a money machine are now remarkably simple - and even free for a limited time.

For example, I recently sent off a half-dozen pies from Mom's Apple Pie Company to various mates in the States. Sorry Mageek, they don't ship to the UK and I think you'd prefer a pint over something baked.

You look at Mom's Website and it's pretty obvious they're not spending a lot of money on what a buddy of mine called "flying bologna" - a site heavily laden with Flash, pop windows, and all sorts of fancy crap that seems to be designed to allow graphics artists to fully express themselves, rather than for a user to quickly load a web page and read the information they want and need.

You can easily recognize "flying bologna" sites because while it takes you two seconds to realize you want to find an "exit" or "HTML Only" button, it takes about 30 seconds for the web page to stop its insane flash dance of cool swooping graphics before you actually can find the button. Sometimes this is followed by a sudden urge to find the web designer and beat him senseless with an olive loaf.

Mom's ordering system is back-ended into Google Checkout. According to the New York Times, here, Google is not charging any processing fees through the end of 2007. I like this, because that processing fee would most likely get tacked onto the price of the pie. Apparently, Google hopes that merchants will take their eBay listing money and spend it on Google search result ads. Mom's hasn't done this yet, at least for the words "apple pie."

Anyway, buying something through Google Checkout is as simple as typing in a user ID and password to log into Google and then enter in credit card information, shipping, and billing address. Checkout will remember the information so if you go to other Checkout stores, it's already there. I have to confess I don't use PayPal anymore because I've received too much spam saying my account is overdrawn or some such. True, PayPal has millions of companies and around 123 million users around the globe, but Checkout is giving away free processing, so it should be making good progress against PayPal over the next year.

How unsophisticated is Mom's ordering? Well, if I want to put a brief note in along with my pie, I can't do it through the ordering system. Instead, I have to e-mail orders@momsapplepie.com or call them. Kinda takes a bit of the fun out of e-commerce, but que sera.

The fun is added back in once the order is processed and the pie is on the way to be delivered. Google Checkout generates an e-mail receipt that includes a link with the FedEx order number and tracking page of the FedEx website. With one click, I can traceroute where my pies have gone and where they are going!

Over the past month, I have sent four pies to locations in Laurel, MD, Wake Forest, NC, Denver, CO, and Tuscon, AZ. Pies ship out from Mom's warehouse in Sterling, VA, so I was surprised to see the Laurel MD pie travel north about an hour and 12 minutes to a FedEx Ground distribution center in Hagerstown Maryland, before traveling south about 90 minutes to Laurel. A straight-line trip from Sterling to Laurel would have been 60 to 90 minutes, depending on traffic.

I was also surprised to find the pie I had sent to Denver, CO had been routed from Memphis, TN to Indianapolis, IL, rather than finding a direct flight to Denver. Later that day, I noticed that the U.S. CNN website had headlines like "Blizzard Shuts Denver Airport, Stranding Thousands." Even E-commerce can't beat Mother Nature. µ