Bada-Bing, Bada-Bang, Bada-Boom - the worst demo ever

But we all know the past is a different country, and everyone deserves a second chance, even Microsoft ( and me? Ed.).

We arranged a visit this week to a supplier we’ve known for over 30 years, possibly closer to forty, to discuss them adding their stock to our platform. They mostly stock Rolls Royce aviation and industrial spares, but have a growing business in the marine turbine engine market which is growing in importance for them.

It was a low-key approach based on mutual respect for survivors of the British economic roller-coaster of this century, and your editor has been doing these demos online, at trade-shows, and in person since launch time in 2010. To say it can be done on auto-pilot is an absolute understatement and an insult to autopilots worldwide.

So the entry point for our demos is always the story of the ship-management Company purchasing manager who has never, ever, in forty years and with a fleet of over 50 ships ( all of differing origin, age and Class membership), ever experienced a parts supply problem, so what possible use could an on-line spares trading platform be?

Until almost immediately afterwards, and during the following quiet time where you can hear your heart beating, a pin drop or whatever metaphor you wish to apply for a stony and embarrassed silence, he piped up with “ and if we do ever have a problem we use the Google”.

Fine we said, The Internet is a wonderful thing. No-one dishonest or dodgy is allowed on it and nothing ever goes wrong does it? Errrr…….well actually yes it does, The Internet can be a dark and dangerous place and in some ways fifteen years later it is even more dangerous.

So think about this. A place you find on the internet which is a safe haven for buyers and sellers alike, where users are vetted ( high-quality), activity is tracked (“closely-monitored”) and there are no private buyers (“ trade-only”). Like the example above where we ( Partfindermarine.com) show up as the first and third source for this item.

He started taking us seriously after seeing that.

I won’t say we didn’t know anything back in 2010, but SEO, browser technology, cookies and AI marketing were not even in our vocabulary, let alone at the fore-front of our development plans, we knew very little but we did know we received a raft of complaints about how slow our server was, and how long each transaction was taking to be recognised.

We investigated this and found a “ Bing-Bot” trying to scrape ALL the data from our platform which was tying the poor server ( Server #1 in those days) completely up in knots. So we looked at the access stats ( in Google naturally) and found out that Bing was being used by less than 2% of our users so it was blocked and has been ever since.

Right up to this weeks demo, where we wanted to show off how well our SEO work had been done and how high up the “ charts” we were. Have you spotted where this is going yet? Yes, you are correct. Nothing showing. No Partfindmarine.com or any of its parts were visible in the browser we were trying to use. See example below:

We had a chat with the Devs about this, they suggested checking out Duck-Duck-Go as well as that is growing in popularity, and is based on the same Microsoft browser technology and guess what. Same story. No Partfindermarine.com to be seen. Obviously we don’t exist in either Bingworld or the DuckDuckGo universe.

So this weekend we will be removing the block and letting both of these browsers access the platform and by Monday we’ll have an idea of whether they still tie us up in knots, the problem has gone away, or our search stats and visitor numbers will have gone through the roof. We’re closed on Monday here for the late Spring Bank Holiday, so it’s going to be an interesting week.

See you all next week with good news to report and maybe some changes to the results below as well?