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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02323174335612263559noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-65725728662226989272012-10-22T20:28:00.003-07:002012-10-22T20:28:39.431-07:00Getting the most effective supply Of motorcar Insurance <div style="text-align: justify;">
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Auto insurance is required for those who have vehicles. And that we see in
these recent days, there ar a lot of and a lot of individuals in hand vehicles.
It <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2706830005511106756" name="sg_0"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2706830005511106756" title="Click to get suggestions"><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_0;">implies</span><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_0;"></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_0;"></span>
that there ar a lot of and a lot of cars on the road. This condition would
possibly increase the danger of accident or something <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2706830005511106756" name="sg_1"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2706830005511106756" title="Click to get suggestions"><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_1;">that's</span><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_1;"></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_1;"></span> sudden to happen. Here, motorcar insurance is
extremely necessary for them. Motorcar insurance becomes one in all the
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02323174335612263559noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-40824137564224475742012-10-22T20:21:00.002-07:002012-10-22T20:21:57.606-07:00Getting the most effective supply Of motorcar Insurance In Texas <div style="text-align: justify;">
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Auto insurance is required for those who have vehicles. And that we see in
these recent days, there ar a lot of and a lot of individuals in hand vehicles.
It <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2706830005511106756" name="sg_0"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2706830005511106756" title="Click to get suggestions"><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_0;">implies</span><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_0;"></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_0;"></span>
that there ar a lot of and a lot of cars on the road. This condition would
possibly increase the danger of accident or something <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2706830005511106756" name="sg_1"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2706830005511106756" title="Click to get suggestions"><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_1;">that's</span><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_1;"></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: sg_1;"></span> sudden to happen. Here, motorcar insurance is
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02323174335612263559noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-4706959121618883942012-08-03T11:41:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.228-07:00Google Knows Best<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/7LEgX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="http://i.imgur.com/7LEgX.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some sweat and cussing finally got Google’s Product Listing ads working after I grokked that I had to create an ad group without adding keywords or writing ads -- Google knows best, and I needn’t worry my homely little head over the details. I still don’t quite understand what triggers these ads, where they appear, or what they look like, but the campaign came roaring out of the chute with a click-through rate over 3% (six times the rate of my main AdWords campaign) on Monday. Twenty-three clicks only cost me $0.16 each and brought three sales for an astronomical 13% conversion rate (anything over 2% is pretty good). Sadly, it faded after that debut and I ended up with another lousy week. Traffic is running at 200 visitors a day, but nobody’s buying. I blame the competing demand of back-to-school shopping.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Because Product Listing ads are built from an exported file containing my whole inventory, I get (and pay for) hits from search phrases that I would never choose to buy, such as “beach towels under $5.” I had a few towels left over from my original product assortment, which I marked down to cost years ago. All of a sudden, they sold out last week. With no ad to turn off or keywords to deactivate, Product Listing continued to send me traffic for a nonexistent product. Whereas I only used to update my product feed once a month, I must now upload a new file almost daily as products sell out and reorders arrive.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />I’ve been having fun (inasmuch as anything work-related is ever fun) watching the realtime reporting in Google Analytics – that’s how I figured out the “beach towels” thing. I feel like a voyeur. On average, only 2% of my visitors ever buy anything, but watching the other 98% come and go is fascinating. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />What’s weird is that virtually all of my sales come between midnight and 11 am. I have developed this superstition that if there are no sales waiting for me when I fire up my computer in the morning, I’ll go through the whole day with nothing. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />****************</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease: A credit card processing company pitched me an offer good enough to tempt me away from CDG Commerce. This proposal would have cut $40 per month from an expense category that’s consistently over budget. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />The pitch looked like this:<br /> </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(Existing deal from CDG)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2.35% qual (debit, and qualified)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">4.01% Non qual (rewards and non qualified)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">$0.10 transaction</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">$10 maintenance fee</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">$0.25 capture fee</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(Proposal from competitor)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1.89% Debit</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1.99% Qualified</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2.47% Mid Qualified</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">3.47% Non Qualified</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">$0.10 per transaction</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">$0 statement or monthly fees</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">$0.25 capture fee</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Superficially, that's a clear winner. But when I started probing I found a $10 monthly gateway fee (my current gateway is free) and a $96 annual PCI compliance fee (I currently don’t pay one). Moreover, they changed the original four-tier rate offer to a slightly weaker three-tier structure (1.99, 2.35, and 3.37%) in the contract.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Because I loathe perturbing a system that’s working and because CDG has been decent enough, I asked them to make a counteroffer. They finally came back with rate reductions to 2.05 qualified and 3.15 non-qualified…and they removed the $0.25 daily batch fee. That saves me a little money without the hassle of jumping ship and ought to bring my processing costs back into line with my budget. Assuming, that is, that I can stay afloat until Christmas season begins in another month. </span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-21546020901350236822012-07-27T08:30:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.191-07:00Did You Miss Me?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/bKbR9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/bKbR9.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Owning a business is almost as bad as having a child – it’s a constant bundle of needs that never goes away. Sometimes you have to send it away to summer camp for sanity’s sake. “Closing” Curio City for a week is always a nice break, even if I do still check in on it daily.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I turn off all of my ads, disable the expedited shipping options, post notices on my News page, on my Shipping & Returns page, and on my front page, and make a Facebook announcement. Despite those measures, I typically still get 1-2 sales per day from natural search and repeat customers. Those people get emails inviting them to cancel if the delay is unacceptable. Every now and then, somebody does.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />This year’s vacation should’ve easily gained some ground on LY, when I spent the whole week fighting with HostGator (worst host ever…no link here) while finding <a href="http://www.mddhosting.com/support/aff.php?aff=310" target="_blank">MDD Hosting</a> (best host ever). But my store-closing measures must’ve been particularly effective this year, because the week finished with a paltry $102.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Oh well. Vacation week is supposed be a black hole, and business always snaps right back after I revive everything. Or does it? This year sales remain becalmed even as traffic has rebounded to >150 daily visits. Google’s realtime reporting lets me watch people navigate my site. I can see what pages they’re looking at, where they’re located, and what keywords brought them in. People are dutifully shopping, but nobody’s buying.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I had to blow the $1,000 that I had reserved for site improvements just to cover the bills. A normal week’s business would’ve patched that right up, but normality is still not restored. It looked like an unexpected $360 <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=98" target="_blank">golf ball</a> special order was going to save the day (even after paying $190 for the merchandise) until I discovered a $62 authorized return and a $75 unauthorized return waiting at my mail drop, and that $360 windfall was gone before it was even deposited. At this writing, I’ve got $99 in the bank with no pending deposits. I’m getting just enough sales to assure me that there’s nothing technologically wrong. These lulls happen, and all I can do is wait them out. This one’s timing is just especially bad. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />And so cash flow’s now a full-blown emergency. If business returns to normal in August, reduced expenses from July should bring things back into line. And Google came through with a $100 credit for their new “Product Listing” ads, so I’m slowly trying to create a new campaign that won’t compete with my old AdWords campaign.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />July numbers follow. The tl;dr version is that the month started strong, died during vacation, and hasn’t come back yet.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;">July:</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income:</b> <span style="color: red;">-10.7</span>%<br /><b>Total COGS:</b> <span style="color: red;">-22.3</span>%<br /><b>Payroll:</b> +113.2%<br /><b>Marketing:</b> <span style="color: red;">-19.9</span>%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit):</b> <span style="color: red;">-6.9</span>%<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Year to Date: </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income:</b> +3.3%<br /><b>Total COGS:</b> +3.2%<br /><b>Payroll:</b> +15.2%<br /><b>Marketing:</b> +9.8%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit):</b> <span style="color: red;">-49.3</span>%</span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-74479231488201886652012-07-06T10:28:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.284-07:00If I Could Turn Back Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/uqEvB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/uqEvB.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I demurred when someone asked a few weeks ago “about things you learned that you didn't expect to learn, mistakes you made, and what you would do differently (or what you did right and wouldn't change!).” Today I’ll take a stab at it.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />When Curio City was still on the drawing board back in 2005, I figured it needed to gross $175,000 in annual sales to generate an annual salary of $35,000, which is half of what I earned in my heyday. I figured it would take five years to get there. My bricks-and-mortar store would deliver 75% of the revenue with the website picking up the rest (about $44,000).</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />The store never came to pass, of course. The website should make something close to $70,000 this year, and if the economy ever turns around, I could hit $100,000 by 2020. That’s a lot of money for an old man selling stuff out of his cellar, but it still leaves me solidly below the poverty line. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />What happened?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Most obviously, the Great Recession happened. I thought that Americans would always spend money that they don’t have to buy things they don’t need for people who don’t want them. It seemed like Ronald Reagan’s new Age of Greed would roll on forever. Will those high-flying days ever return or are we back to the more modest lifestyles of the 1970s and earlier? Hard to say. Economists think that we might return to historic norms by 2016, but I don’t expect to see boom times again during my remaining years in harness.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />But blaming the economy only goes so far. Americans are still as materialistic as ever, even if they lack the means to indulge themselves like they used to. The rich are richer than ever, the middle class is treading water, and the poor…well, nobody cares about them. Maybe the go-go years are gone, but people are adapting to this new normalcy.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I blame three things for my failure: Marketing, technology, and poverty.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I don’t like self-promotion or have even the slightest interest in it, so it’s no wonder that I suck at marketing. I had thought that I’d be able to farm it out to consultants. But marketing professionals earn big salaries that price them out of my reach. So I’m left to thrash about on my own.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I don’t understand the appeal of social networking at all; my Facebook page is somnolent and I don’t even try to use Twitter. When every other entity in the world is putting itself forward to the point of saturation, such reticence is deadly. My email newsletter is so ineffective that I am tempted to close my Constant Contact account to save $18 a month – the newsletter doesn’t even drive the $180 in sales that would justify that expense. I keep it going mostly because I understand it and I’m fairly good at it (my open/click statistics always beat the industry average).</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I was interested in technology back when I used to go out into the world. I even had a short career in software development. But I dropped the tech ball after leaving the workforce. I almost got a smart phone this year out of professional necessity, but my wife decided that she needed one, too, and we can't afford two data plans. The choice was easy since she actually wanted one and I did not, but it probably doomed Curio City to ever-decreasing relevance. The appeal of tablet computers also mystifies me. The incessant parade of new i-Thisses and e-Thats is boring. Technologically, I am stuck in 2005.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />That might not matter so much if I could reach enough curmudgeons like myself; we Boomers still command the economy. That’s where poverty comes in. I would like to spend $500 a month on Ess-Eee-Oh for six or more months to dramatically boost my organic search results (unpaid clicks). I need to overhaul my website’s design. And I need to refresh my product line, writing off a lot of old dead items and bringing in some new lines. It would take between $5,000 and $10,000 to accomplish all of that. But I constantly struggle just to cover monthly operating expenses.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />What would I do differently if I could start over? I might spend the $28,500 that I invested in Curio City on education instead. I could’ve bought a degree in, say, accounting. It’s not that I yearn to be somebody’s employee again – the “being your own boss” thing has forever spoiled me for wage slavery -- but sometimes I wish that I could just mindlessly punch a clock and earn enough money to survive on. After all, it’s not like Curio City fulfills my boyhood dream of taking things out of big boxes and putting them in little boxes. I don’t make the world a better place, or get much personal fulfillment, or make much money. Yet that’s how I spend my days.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />No, that’s a copout. If I had it to do over, I would take one of these two paths:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />1. Find a partner whose skills complement my own and who would contribute some startup cash and be a co-owner. That would yield a better capitalized startup, compensate for my personal weaknesses, and force me to work harder when my self-motivation flags. I considered doing that. But I’m a loner and I didn’t want to give up half of my business, I didn’t want anybody second-guessing me, and I didn’t know anybody who would have been interested, anyway. If I could reset the clock, I would try harder to find somebody who fits that bill.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Or:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />2. Find a line of business that interests me personally. I enjoy the managerial aspects and creative control of running a business. But I’m neither a consumer nor a capitalist. I chose retail because I’d done it before and because it was easy, not because of any desire to sell things. I didn’t know in 2005 what else I could do, and I still don’t know today. I’m not passionate about anything. So…why not retail? It’s no better or worse than anything else I might do. If I could reset the clock, I would look harder for some type of business that might suit my personality better.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I’m an old man selling stuff out of his cellar with no visible path forward and 15 more years until I can max out my Social Security checks. Yet, rather than give in to despair, I cling to the hope that if I keep plodding along and making those incremental changes that I can understand and afford, I can still kick this thing up to a higher level. After all, the web store is beating my original forecast for it. Curio City has generated more than $60,000 in paychecks <i>and</i> repaid more than $13,000 of my original $28,500 loan. If it's not been a big success, neither is it a failure.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />***************************</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />An interesting “new” scam crossed my desk. Although it’s new to me, it’s so obvious that I can’t believe I never encountered it before. In this active version of domain-name squatting, somebody pays the usual $8 to register a domain name similar to yours (in this case, “curiocitiesonline.com”), then emails you to say that it’s being auctioned off with a minimum bid of $69. What do you want to bet that if I had bid $69, fake competitors would’ve jacked up the price? And if I fell for that once, how long do you suppose it would be before the scammer registered and “auctioned” another variation on my name? </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Very clever, legal, and I’ll wager that the sleazebag (recordio.net) earns a lot more money than I do from my legitimate business. Maybe I should’ve become a scam artist.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />**************************</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />There will be no posts for the next two Fridays due to my annual vacation. You might want to read this one three times.<br /></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-50345278480890924412012-06-29T08:08:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.236-07:00E-Commerce for Dummies Part 3 Q&A (Plus June Numbers)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/dRiPd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/dRiPd.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I get to milk my online lecture one more time. The post in question is <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2012/05/e-commerce-for-dummies-part-3-good-bad.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />But first, let’s celebrate June. An otherwise strong month faded this week, but it still turned out OK.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;">June:</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income</b>: +18.1%<br /><b>Total COGS</b>: +16.6%<br /><b>Payroll</b>: +50.4%<br /><b>Marketing</b>: <span style="color: red;">-6.3</span>%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit)</b>: <span style="color: red;">-162.8</span>%<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Year to Date: </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income</b>: +4.1%<br /><b>Total COGS</b>: +5.3%<br /><b>Payroll</b>: +8.4%<br /><b>Marketing</b>: +13.8%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit)</b>: <span style="color: red;">-81.2</span>%</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Spinning the month</b>: Income is up; that’s good. COGS rose by less than income; that’s good. Payroll – WTF? Marketing is down; that’s good. And the $149 drop in net income can be explained by that wacky payroll jump, which just means more money in my pocket now and less at the end of the year. Predictably, <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=96" target="_blank">bird kites</a> and <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=970" target="_blank">lighted caps</a> made the month.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Spinning the year</b>: In January I threatened to give myself a raise if I made plan (+7.5%) as of June 30. Fortunately for my balance sheet, I didn’t. COGS is up more that income, which is bad; payroll is up more than income, which is good for me but bad for Curio City; marketing is way over budget, but I’m gradually whittling down my disastrous Facebook experiment. Net income is down thanks to all of the above items…but the $621 that it represents is recoverable.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Worries</b>: Several of June’s larger sales compelled me to special order new merchandise or replace inventory ($600 for a six-month supply of <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=16" target="_blank">mini briefcases</a> especially stings). After breaking down and buying some long-delayed new products as well, I spent $800 more on product than I could afford. Payroll taxes are due again in July…during which Curio City is “closed” for a week. It is so easy to throw cash flow into crisis. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Now here’s that last Q&A session.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Q: You describe about the positives and negatives of starting your own business. I read in "The World is Flat" that our world is in Globalization 3.0, which is the ventures of being your own boss, and starting your own company. The fact is though, I understand the positive of being your own boss, but the negative of that nothing gets done unless you do it, but based on business, in your opinion what are your top 5 things that one must research and learn and becoming familiar with in knowledge and execution before or while starting their beginner stages of an online business?</blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A: Before you even get into the nuts and bolts of starting a company, answer some fundamental questions.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />1. What is your objective? Are you trying to earn a modest living while working from your home during your own hours, or are you trying to build a big company and get rich? How much time and money are you willing and able to invest in that goal? Is a home business a stepping stone to a large business, an end in itself, or something you should avoid entirely? </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />2. What are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? Conversely, what are you bad at and what do you hate doing? What type of venture plays to your strengths and interests? Can you outsource or avoid your weaknesses, or achieve competence in them? Are you selling goods or service? What kind?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />3. How much will it cost to do what you defined above? Include everything that you can think of, from software to packing supplies, and, when you have to guess, overestimate costs rather than underestimating them. Can you finance this yourself, or will you take out a loan? Is that going to be a bank loan or are you going to solicit investors? This is where you begin writing a <a href="http://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/starting-managing-business/starting-business/writing-business-plan" target="_blank">business plan</a>. You might need to join a trade association to get reliable numbers for your industry, or you might get lucky and find enough free information online. If you’re going to need outside money, you’ll need a formal business plan. Even if you’re going to self-finance, an informal business plan will eliminate surprises.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />4. How much revenue does your business need to generate to cover these costs? How much can you reasonably expect? This is the other half of a business plan. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />5. Is implementing your plan physically feasible? Do you have the space to set up a home office and store products? Do you have adequate transportation to haul boxes and supplies? Do you have a convenient shipping/receiving facility (like the UPS Store that I use)?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />When you’ve addressed all the above, implementing them is just a matter of following a script. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Q: A lot of what you describe in your blog sounds great - being your own boss, not having to dress up, being responsible for your own time, etc. But you also write about the near constant work and lack of time off. How do you cope with that part? How do you draw the line and know when to quit for the night? I think that, if I owned my own business, I would work like a maniac, because if I don't work, I may go under. I'm truly not sure I'd be able to handle this kind of stress. I'm already the type who has a pretty high baseline stress level. <br /><br />Also, what insights has running your own business led you to, with regard to business management and the economy? I'm just curious about things you learned that you didn't expect to learn, mistakes you made, and what you would do differently (or what you did right and wouldn't change!).</blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A: I hope I didn’t give you the impression that I’m a workaholic. My customers determine my workload. From Halloween through MLK Day I work 40+ hours a week. During the two weeks after Thanksgiving I’ll exceed 60 hours. During the summer doldrums, though, I might work as little as two hours a day. There’s just not much to do when you don’t have any orders to pack or money to spend. You can only spend so much time fiddling with your pay-per-click campaigns and looking for new products (that you can’t afford to buy anyway). <br />When it’s slow, it’s slow. Flogging yourself will not change that very much. I felt driven to work all the time when my business was new and I was flailing around, before I understood that disconnect between effort and results. Now I have more of a Zen attitude. Slow summer sales give me time for vegetable gardening.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I suspend my advertising and post “warehouse closed” notices on my News page and my front page for 10 days every July. That’s my vacation. I still check email every day during that week. I email anyone who places an order to make sure they know about the shipping delay. If a product sells out, I remove it from display. That might take as little as 15 minutes a day…but I do at least check in 365 days a year, and I can’t imagine that ever changing. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Insights? Sorry, but that bears more thought than I can give it right now. It’s a good idea for a future blog post. If you should happen to become a reader, you’ll probably see that topic come up in the next few weeks.</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <br />Q: As you stated in your lecture, you have a strong aversion towards marketing. I found this interesting because as your own boss/employee it is up to you and you alone to market your business. With such a high level of competition in the online market with more and more people starting their own online businesses, do you believe marketing is going to become an increasingly more imperative part of your business strategy? If so how do you plan to "get over the hump" so to speak between finding a balance between your own ability to market your business and having to outsource marketing efforts to others?</div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A: I wish I knew the answer to that. Last year I invested some money in two Facebook ad campaigns with poor results. In case my amateurism was at fault, I paid a marketing company to manage a FB campaign this spring with disastrous results ($350 spent did not yield one single sale). I spent $750 on these efforts that proved beyond any doubt that FB advertising is a complete waste of money…which I already suspected before conducting the experiments. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I haven’t figured out how to monetize my free FB page. Being an asocial person by nature probably doesn’t help; I only post when I actually have substantial information – new product announcements, coupon codes, etc. It seems to be a complete waste of time, but at least it doesn’t take very much time.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Twitter baffles me completely. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Two areas that I might be able to affect are <b>Random Acts of Media</b> and B2B sales. I had another Random Act of Media just last night: After selling exactly one Doomed Crystal Skull shotglass (no link because it’s sold out) last Christmas, I sold the remaining 11 pieces within an hour. Somebody somewhere must have blogged about it. The demand will be history by the time I can restock that item. Random Acts of Media strike without warning and blow over very quickly. Trying to get products reviewed and linked in blogs and gift guides is something I’ve tried, haltingly and unsuccessfully, but haven’t given up on.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I get several B2B sales each year, too. It’s not unheard-of for someone to drop $1,000 on <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=973" target="_blank">Panther Vision caps</a> or $800 on <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=96" target="_blank">bird kites</a> or $600 on <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=98" target="_blank">golf balls</a> for a tournament. Being approached by a company or a tournament organizer is another random event that I might be able to encourage. The drawback is that large customers expect discounts. Given my cost structure, I would be in trouble if a major share of my business was discounted by 20%. But it’s something else that I can explore.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />****************</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Speaking of marketing…I have a new <b>reason to hate Google</b>! I’ve been uploading a monthly product feed to Google Base for years. A year or so ago they renamed it Google Product Search and required UPC codes for all of my products. Entering those was tedious and pointless work, and at least a third of my products don’t use UPCs at all. Last December Google threatened to suspend me over this. I appealed and won. Since then, I’ve been slowly adding UPCs wherever I can.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Well, now Google Product Search is going to become Google Shopping. Google wants me to create ads, managed through my AdWords account, for all the products in my feed. Worst of all: “bid is one factor in how products will be ranked on Google Shopping.” Yup, it’s going to be another pay-per-click medium, with the transition beginning in July. I’ve been avoiding looking into details. So far I only know that it will be complicated, expensive, and lucrative…for Google. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Google Base/Product Search only ever brought a few clicks a day, and I don’t know if any of those ever converted to sales. I probably wouldn’t notice a difference if I just dropped it completely. Should I consider this a new advertising opportunity or an expensive new chore? Google’s bribing people with a $100 Adwords credit and a 10% discount on clicks through the end of the year. I’ll probably try advertising a few products (ones that have UPCs!)…but I won’t be happy about it.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />*****************</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Speaking even more of marketing…based on this <a href="http://www.internetretailer.com/mobile/2012/03/01/pinterest-beginners" target="_blank">Internet Retailer article</a>, I logged onto Pinterest to see if anybody had ever pinned any of my products to their boards – and discovered, much to my surprise, 23 pins and re-pins! I had no idea. Now I need to figure out if I can capitalize on this. Pinterest users seem to be my demographic (older women, mainly) and the focus is on products and shopping. I got my invitation to join Pinterest yesterday.<br /></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-30646404882256920322012-06-22T09:25:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.199-07:00E-Commerce for Dummies Part 2 Q&A<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">…In which I just “phone it in” for another week. During the high summer I'm just too busy with real life to do more than caretaker work for Curio City.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/u3Zfk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://i.imgur.com/u3Zfk.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">These questions refer to <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2012/05/e-commerce-for-dummies-part-2-buck.html" target="_blank">this post</a>. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote>Q: Based on how the dollar is broken up within an e-business. What is the most vital mistake one can make, in regards to finances when starting an e-business? What were the obstacles that you encountered when you first started up Curio City? How did you dissect the issues and find solutions?</blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A: The biggest danger is to overextend yourself based on optimistic projections. It’s tempting to spend as much as you can afford on as many products as possible in the belief that you’ll turn them over before the bills come due. But it takes time for a new business to attain its expected turn rate. (Turn rate = the number of times in a year that your inventory turns over: If $20,000 worth of stock produces $60,000 in sales, your turn rate is three…which, btw, is at the low end of acceptable.) If you don’t attain the turns that you expect, you’ll tie up inventory dollars in merchandise that’s just trickling out. I’ve said before that cash flow is the lifeblood of a business. Think of your inventory as a pile of frozen cash. Eighty percent of your sales are going to come from 20% of your merchandise, and only experience will teach you which products are in that magic 20%. Until you learn, don’t push your budget to the edge. Keep a cash cushion.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />On a closely related note, don’t think that if you build it, they will come. Have a marketing plan in place before you turn your cash into inventory and infrastructure. Marketing is one area where you do want to max out your budget, and your budget needs to be bigger than you would probably like it to be (I initially planned to spend 5% on advertising). Undervaluing marketing was my single biggest mistake. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Finally, don’t count on drawing a reliable paycheck from your new business right away. You might have to skip a check now and then to pay the bills. Start your payroll budget as low as you can get away with and raise it as you gain experience and confidence. (Obviously, that’s hard to do if you have employees.) Have some personal savings or a spouse’s income that you can fall back upon.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Obstacles? Getting noticed! Having awesome products at great prices gets you nowhere if nobody knows about them. Yup, marketing again. The solution, inasmuch as I ever found one, was to read up on basic principles of pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Today, social media marketing might play an equal role. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Q: How do you manage to sustain your profit margin? Which are the strategies to increase profit margin in spite of increasing operating and other costs?</blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A: Buy low and sell high. :) Seriously, you want to mark your products up to the highest price the marketplace will accept, and reduce your controllable costs as much as possible.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Look for products with better markups than keystone, because you’re going to end up taking a loss on some portion of your inventory. My overall margin is 50.5%. Most of my bestsellers deliver higher margins. The <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=16" target="_blank">Mini-Briefcase</a> is marked up 53% and the optional gift bag that you can get with it carries a 64% markup. <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=973%20" target="_blank">Panther Vision cap</a> margins range from 49-55%, and the optional batteries that one can add are marked up 66% (wholesale batteries are ridiculously cheap, btw; profits are high in the battery business). The 80% of my stock that sells slowly (or not at all) brings the average down as I discount it to clear it out. Keeping that average markup above keystone is mostly about wise product selection and appealing presentation. You can sometimes gain a couple of extra margin points by taking advantage of special offers from vendors, buying closeout merchandise, etc. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Many of my costs are scalable – they rise and fall with sales. Payment processing is a percentage of sales. So is payroll (as long as you’re the only employee, that is; hired help won’t regard their paychecks as flexible). Advertising doesn’t scale, but it’s at least partially controllable. I try not to spend more than 50% of net sales on merchandise each month, which is a very crude and simple way of calculating an <a href="http://www.businessknowhow.com/manage/open-to-buy.htm" target="_blank">open-to-buy</a> budget. Finally, almost everything that I spend goes on two credit cards – an Amex for operating expenses and a Mastercard for inventory. I am fanatical about paying them both off in full every month, but in a cash flow emergency I would be able to carry a balance, effectively writing myself a high-interest loan. Of course, credit card interest would quickly eat into my already thin profit margin, so that’s a last resort. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Q: I've got a few questions on this lecture, one of which is just a point of clarification: You write that $0.23 goes to you and to taxes, and that $0.04 goes to profit. Does that mean that the $0.23 is your salary (in a sense), and that that is the money you earn to pay yourself for your labor, and then the profit is gravy? <br /><br />The other question: I know you decided to bootstrap the business, but would you ever consider using credit to expand the business? I ask because I was told in a financial management class that credit is the lifeblood of growth. That said, some very successful companies have bootstrapped themselves (CSN stores, for example). Why or why not? How do you see the future of your business? <br /><br />Also, how long did it take you to become profitable? What were some of the early impediments to profitability?</blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A: $0.20 is my salary and $0.03 is payroll tax. Profit is indeed gravy – whatever’s left after all expenses are paid. Assuming that there is a profit, Kraken Enterprises pays me a nice Christmas bonus at the end of the year, as the law stipulates that S Corporations must do. Incidentally, corporate profit distributions are not subject to payroll taxes (although they are taxed as ordinary income – it’s not a Romney-scale tax dodge). From a tax perspective, it would make sense to minimize my paychecks to plump up that end-of-year bonus. But the IRS stipulates that corporate officers must take a “reasonable” salary. Guess who decides what’s reasonable?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Being extremely debt-averse, I would only use credit if I was certain that the investment would yield more than enough new income to cover the debt. I’d also have to make sure that I wasn’t personally liable for my business’s debt – business credit cards require personal indemnification, and banks require collateral. People think that being a corporation insulates you from personal liability, but that’s not quite true. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Credit is certainly crucial if you want to hang out with the big dogs. That’s never been my objective for Kraken Enterprises. I want it to provide me with a reliable living until I retire, and then be attractive enough to sell. It needs to double its current size to do that – challenging, yes, but not high finance.<br />I recently identified $15,000 worth of improvements that might kickstart double-digit growth again and I have not completely ruled out borrowing that much. But, like everyone else, I’d like more confidence that the economy’s not headed back into the crapper before I roll the dice. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />It took two years to show my first profit. The chief impediment was my own cluelessness about online retailing in general and the direction of Curio City in particular. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Q: I was intrigued by the link in the first section of your lecture regarding rejecting becoming an Amazon seller. The link unfortunately didn't lead to a post so I was unable to further research that particular topic. I'm curious as to why you rejected becoming an Amazon seller and if it had anything to do with the amount of money it would take off your profitability. The organization I work for recently became an Amazon seller in order to expand their offerings through the Amazon Marketplace. So far it has paid off really well for us. We are a much larger corporation than Curio City and have the capital to take on the added costs associated with becoming an Amazon seller but I can see how this could be a risky move for a smaller, personally run business like yours. Could you expand some more on your choice here?</blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A: Sorry for the bad link. Here’s <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2010/09/exploring-amazon.html" target="_blank">the first time I rejected the idea</a>, and here’s <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2012/03/resistance-is-futile.html" target="_blank">the second</a>. Bonus: <a href="http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/06/08/irce-2012-report-selling-amazon-not-everyone" target="_blank">Internet Retailer magazine’s take</a> on it. <br /></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-43226487498113469572012-06-15T08:32:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.217-07:00E-Commerce for Dummies Part 1 Q&A<br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://yarnall.com/images/yarnall_main_photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://yarnall.com/images/yarnall_main_photo.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"></span><br /><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Did you miss me last week? No, I did not fall to the zombie apocalypse. I was busy answering student questions about my “E-Commerce for Dummies” e-lecture. Justice demands that I milk that work for my next few posts. Regular readers will notice that I’m covering a lot of old ground, but perhaps from a different perspective.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Here are the student questions and my answers from <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2012/05/e-commerce-for-dummies-part-1-what-is.html" target="_blank">Part 1</a>. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Q: The utilization of dropshippers seemed to hinder a start up's will to carry what they want, their quality control, and all of their revenue. Toward's the end of your discussion, on how investing several thousands of dollars and your own personal space is much more plausible and efficient then using dropshippers, you mentioned your "strategies for kicking it out". Could you expand on those strategies, and what exactly you mean by kicking it out? Are you referring to the hopes of producing so much inventory that eventually you would have to find warehouse space? </span></div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A: The short answer is that there are physical limits to how much inventory I can store and how many orders I can process and ship. At some point, it will outgrow my house. The seasonal nature of retail means that I only approach my limits about eight weeks out of the year, making it hard to justify the expense of outsourcing fulfillment during the 44 slow weeks. My posts <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2010/02/kicking-it-out.html" target="_blank">“Kicking It Out”</a> and <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2008/10/zombie-store.html" target="_blank">“The Zombie Store”</a> <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2008/10/zombie-store.html"></a>go into a lot more detail, but I’ve grappled with this is a topic many times over the years. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Q: You have mentioned that rent, loan, payments and payroll consume all the revenue in brick-and-mortar stores. It is true that brick-and-mortar stores don't make money compared to online business. Could you please tell me that what were the challenges you faced in the initial stages of your online business and in how many years did you break-even and how did you manage to do it?</span></div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A: You might have noticed that most online shops are very specialized, and there’s a reason for that: It’s easier to market a specific product or category to a narrow audience. As a matter of fact, one of the possible futures for Kraken Enterprises that I ultimately rejected (<a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2007/01/possible-future-3-tentacles-of-kraken.html" target="_blank">Tentacles of the Kraken</a>) <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2007/01/possible-future-3-tentacles-of-kraken.html"></a>involved setting up a series of highly specialized stores, rather than one general store. But I wanted Curio City to be a general-interest shop, so figuring out who my customers are and what they’ll buy was a huge challenge. My wife had one idea (“nice things”) and I had a different idea (“high-end toys for adults”.) Neither of those individual approaches ever really found an audience and trying to mash them up didn’t work at all. After years of trial and error I figured out that the ideal Curio City product has some of the following characteristics: Unusual or clever, useful, easy to understand, fun or funny, modestly priced, good quality, lightweight, and easy to ship. <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=973" target="_blank">Panther Visionlighted caps</a> meet all of those criteria to some degree…and it’s no coincidence that they’ve been my #1 product for years.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I opened for business in October 2005 and my first profitable year was 2007. Homing in on successful products and mastering Google AdWords, while controlling expenses carefully, was what tipped the balance. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">One specific challenge that comes to mind was finding an affordable, reliable web developer who would implement and customize my shopping cart, and who would be available on short notice for troubleshooting when I needed him. After I finally found such a person, he quit after two years, and I had to start that search all over again. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Finding a reliable web host was harder than you might think, too. Curio City is currently on its fourth host. Fortunately this one (<a href="http://www.mddhosting.com/support/aff.php?aff=310" target="_blank">MDD Hosting</a>) is awesome. The earlier ones? Not so much.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Q: This may be a really basic question, but I have experience only in the non-profit world, so I don't know a whole lot about the nuts and bolts of a small business. <br /><br />How do you find suppliers, both ones that drop-ship and ones that don't? Do you just decide what you want to sell, and Google "[widget] manufacturers?" How does the pricing work? Do you get to negotiate prices with them, or do they set firm prices? How do you find out about new products?</span></div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A: Initially, I just googled “gift wholesalers” and some related terms. Since 90% of everything is crap, that involved a LOT of shopping. Almost all of those early products were duds, but a few are still with me today (you can tell them by their low SKU numbers). <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=96" target="_blank">Bird kites</a> (the Canada Goose is SKU 1) gradually developed into one of my top lines. I’ve sold nearly 1,000 <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=16" target="_blank">Mini Briefcases</a> (SKU 16, the only survivor of a larger selection of business card holders). Basically, I started with a wide array of product types aimed at the demographic that I thought would become my customer, then looked for things that were similar to the most successful ones. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Pricing is fixed unless you’re a very large customer. When trying new products, I generally order the minimum six or eight or 12 pieces. Before deciding to carry it, I check to see how many other stores are carrying it and whether it’s selling for “full price” (meaning double its cost). If there’s a ton of competition and they’re discounting, I’ll pass. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Two of my best products – <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=973" target="_blank">Panther Vision caps</a> and <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=733" target="_blank">Whisky Stones</a> <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=733"></a>– were recommended to me by friends. Not being much of a consumer myself, I pay attention to what my online friends are interested in.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Every spring I endure the Boston Gift Show, or <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2008/04/cavalcade-of-crap.html" target="_blank">Cavalcade of Crap</a>, where I sift through the tons of mass-market kitsch that fill your typical tourist gift shop. <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=98" target="_blank">Novelty golf balls</a> and <a href="http://www2.blogger.com/goog_1866605869">Switchables </a><a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=93" target="_blank">night lights</a> both came from the Gift Show. So did <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=65" target="_blank">Pursehooks</a>, which were a huge seller for about a year. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sometimes I find decent stuff in trade publications like Web Wholesaler. That’s where <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=72" target="_blank">keyboard stickers</a> <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=72"></a>came from. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Of course, once you have some history with particular vendors, you can simply browse their new catalogs twice a year. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The world is awash in merchandise. Affording it is a much bigger challenge than finding it.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Q: After reading your first lecture I decided to do some further exploration of your website to get a better understanding of your inventory. Being such a non-specific e-tailer how do you choose the products you list? Do you research online retail trends for "gift" type items in order to see what consumers are purchasing or are your inventory decisions more based on profit margin and supply availability. Being so non-specific must lead to a lot of risk in bringing in inventory that you are not certain will sell. I imagine this is another reason why maintaining your own inventory is the most feasible option rather than relying on drop shippers.</span></div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A: I just look for products that fit Curio City’s profile of being useful, reasonably priced, high quality, good value, and (above all) unusual and/or fun, and if the pricing measures up I order the minimum allowable quantity to test it. What gets it in the door, though, is my hunch that I can sell six or eight or a dozen of them. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">After you get some experience and history, new products become a better gamble. But the truism that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your products always seems to hold up, so even though I’m always trying to zero in on the magic 20%, I know that most of my bets will dribble out slowly, never to be reordered, and I’ll have to mark many of them down to cost (or even lower) just to liberate the inventory dollars. </span></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-30927132342929049432012-06-01T09:22:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.202-07:00May Flowers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rKMixiuJ2L8/SlJYimMthuI/AAAAAAAABeg/NOdE7G5I1xE/s400/1.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rKMixiuJ2L8/SlJYimMthuI/AAAAAAAABeg/NOdE7G5I1xE/s320/1.PNG" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">May was already blooming nicely before a bulk order for <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=469" target="_blank">Dove kites</a> kicked it into overdrive. Just look at these rosy numbers:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;">May:</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income:</b> +30.5%<br /><b>Total COGS:</b> +22.1%<br /><b>Payroll:</b> <span style="color: red;">-21</span>%<br /><b>Marketing:</b> +2.1%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit):</b> +368.9%<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Year to Date:</span> </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income</b>: +0.8%<br /><b>Total COGS:</b> +2.6%<br /><b>Payroll:</b> +2.3%<br /><b>Marketing:</b> +17.4%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit):</b> <span style="color: red;">-98.2</span>%</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />For the month, sales rose more than COGS did. That’s good. Marketing costs barely rose at all. That’s also good. I made up substantial ground on the bottom line. That’s very very good. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The drop in payroll is just a calendar quirk. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">For the year, COGS is up more than sales; that’s bad. Payroll is also up; that’s bad for Curio City but good for me. My <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2012/03/gambler.html" target="_blank">failed Facebook experiment</a> accounts for most of the marketing overrun, and that overrun accounts for much of the bottom line deficit. That’s been whittled down to $660; a lot of money, yes, but still possible to make up. Quickbooks says the top line is a scant $195 ahead of LY; Excel reports a slightly rosier $450 edge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Facebook's tumbling stock price reins in my compulsion to curse them for ruining my bottom line. I'm not the only one losing money on that company. Curio City will never be worth billions of dollars, but it will probably survive longer than Facebook will. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />*******************</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />For years I dreaded what would happen when <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=973" target="_blank">Panther Vision lighted cap</a> sales inevitably dropped off. That’s happening now. They’re still a major product line, but they’re no longer my only engine. Fortunately, <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=96" target="_blank">bird kites</a> and <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=98" target="_blank">golf balls</a> have soared enough to plug the gap. The seasonal nature of those lines worries me, but maybe the caps will come roaring back in the fall. And there’s always a chance that <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=93" target="_blank">Switchables </a>(which are going through another one of their dormant stages) will surge again, too.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Without seeing Panther’s sales numbers, I can’t tell if the decline in lighted caps is my problem or theirs. There are an awful lot of competitors selling them now; that would be my problem. At the same time, endless design changes have complicated the line so much that it’s become confusing to sell, let alone to shop; that would be Panther’s problem. You've got your basic 4-LED solid caps, your <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=970" target="_blank">4-LED camo caps</a> with and without color accents, your <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1106" target="_blank">4-LED Runner's caps</a>, your <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=971" target="_blank">6-LED caps</a> (some of them with the old 4-2 arrangement and some with the new 3-3, some with green lights and some with red), your 2-LED promotional line (which I don't carry), and a new power switch being phased in across the lineup. I know that the marketplace compels manufacturers to constantly innovate, but life was easier and sales were better when all they made was the basic 2-LED cap in half a dozen colors.</span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-33160775877839851552012-05-25T12:45:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.205-07:00E-commerce for Dummies Part 3: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Self Employment<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Good-Bad-Ugly-Image-SEO.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Good-Bad-Ugly-Image-SEO.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />When you think of online stores, you think of huge companies like Amazon and Overstock.com. If smaller stores come to mind at all, you probably assume that they want to grow into retail superpowers…and most do. But in fact e-commerce empowers businesses of all sizes, right down to one-man home-based companies like Curio City Online. If starting a cottage industry has ever enticed you, here’s what it’s like to work by yourself, for yourself. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Good</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Being your own boss is generally as good as it sounds. You don’t answer to anyone. Your word is law. You can set your own schedule, within the demands of your workload, you never have to do pointless busy-work, nobody ever yells at you, and you don’t have to yell at anyone else. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Job security: I can never be fired or laid off unless my company fails.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />The commute is really, really short.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Seeing results from your work is especially rewarding when the credit is yours alone. If your company is very successful, it will enrich you – not somebody else.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Quality standards are whatever you say they are. The company culture is an expression of your personality.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Other people are often very impressed that you're a President and CEO. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />The Bad</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Sure you’re your own boss…but you’re also your own employee. Nothing gets done unless you do it, and nobody except you knows or cares about anything that you do. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Income insecurity: I pay myself a percentage of net sales, so when I have an especially bad week I get an especially bad paycheck. Because retail’s highly seasonal, I make fully half of my annual income in November and December, which stretches the other 10 months awfully thin. I could annualize my salary – take a standard paycheck based on the previous year’s sales – but I’ve come to like the immediate, direct link between sales and pay.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Working alone is isolating. I have no casual social interaction, nor can I float ideas and hash out problems with other interested persons. I get some virtual human contact in various web forums, but a very social person would quickly go mad.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />When you work at home, you can never go home from work. You can never call in sick. You don’t get defined vacations or holidays; in fact, holidays are mostly just extra work. If you ever do take a day off, everything stops because nobody’s working. And “day off” is a stretch; I haven’t gone more than one day without at least checking my email in nearly seven years. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Just as you deserve all the credit for your company’s successes, you’re also wholly to blame for its failures. Your personal weaknesses are your company’s weaknesses. I suck at marketing. I have no interest in it. But a business can’t survive without it, and it's too expensive to outsource, and so I do what I must…and I do it poorly. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Sometimes you need to hire experts to handle things that are simply beyond your abilities, like tax accounting and web programming. It’s difficult to find people who will work reliably for reasonable fees, and depending upon outsiders for vital functions might be repugnant if you’re the self-sufficient type. You don’t have much leverage over independent contractors, and you will sometimes find yourself at the mercy of their schedules.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <br /><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Ugly</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Personal grooming and presentable attire sort of drop off your radar when you seldom leave the house. It’s not too unusual to work in your pajamas or underwear. Unless you make some effort to keep up professional appearances, you might be surprised one day to see a hermit in the mirror. <br /></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-6556761114822934442012-05-18T09:28:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.275-07:00E-Commerce for Dummies Part 2: The Buck Doesn't Stop Here<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This is the second of three ideas for my online e-commerce “lecture” (about 700 words). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.directhostingonline.com/images/dollar_split.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.directhostingonline.com/images/dollar_split.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Curio City’s gross sales look like a decent living wage. Alas, I can only pocket a fraction of them; most of my revenue enriches other people. (Regular readers might recognize this topic from when I rejected <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2012/03/resistance-is-futile.htm" target="_blank">becoming an Amazon seller.</a>) So who got how much of every dollar that came in last year? </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />$0.495 buys the stock, including inbound freight and some other fiddly little things that constitute “Cost of Goods Sold”, or COGS. “Keystone” is the rule in retail, and it simply means doubling your cost: Paying more than 50% of retail is bad and paying less than 50% is good. Some things (like clothing) are marked up by as much as 400% to a benchmark price that only the ignorant and affluent ever really pay, then sold at semi-permanent discounts that still deliver bloated margins (the difference between cost and selling price). This deceptive pricing technique is so common that Massachusetts requires retailers to occasionally display clothing at its nominal retail price to justify calling it “regular price.” Other things (like books) deliver margins as low as 20%. Retailers can affect this cost by sourcing their merchandise and setting prices…but 50% is the general goal.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Rent would typically be a merchant's second-largest expense. As a home business, I only have to rent a UPS Store box and web server space, which fit comfortably into "miscellaneous". One could ascribe a percentage of our mortgage payment to a business expense – that is, if Curio City takes up 25% of our house, then 25% of our mortgage could be considered business rent. But for this discussion let’s just simplify “rent” to zero. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />$0.20 goes into my pocket and another $0.032 goes to federal and state payroll taxes. If I had to offer basic employee benefits, payroll and associated expenses would rise to about 30 cents from each dollar.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Shipping costs would come next if shipping fees didn't cancel them out. Small shippers (fewer than 200,000 parcels a year; Curio City ships about 1,500) pay the same retail rates to UPS and USPS that you pay. Medium-sized shippers hire freight consolidators who pass along their volume discounts but charge their clients for warehousing and labor; ideally, the discounted postage plus service fees are roughly the same as small shippers pay to do it ourselves. The biggest players, of course, get very attractive bulk rates that enable them to offer free shipping. Anyway, Curio City spends almost exactly 14 cents per dollar on postage, but I’m treating it as another zero for this expense breakdown. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />$0.119 goes to advertising. It would be nice if sales rose and fell predictably with advertising outlays, but they do not. This line item is chronically over budget, and cutting it without harming sales is an ongoing challenge -- I’d like it to run under 10%. Google AdWords gets about three quarters of this money, with Microsoft AdSense taking the rest.<br /><br />Debt payments are another potential budget-buster that varies according to each company's circumstances. I started Curio City with my own money and then grew it slowly from its own revenues (called "bootstrapping"). Being debt-free is obviously good from a cash flow standpoint -- and remember from my previous post that cash flow miscalculations are the most frequent cause of business failure. Loan payments are non-negotiable costs that (along with rent) often kill companies whose revenues don't meet expectations. I could easily invest $10,000 or $15,000 in improvements (a website redesign, new merchandise, and some contracted marketing services) that would probably kick sales up by five or 10 percent. I could borrow that much from the credit cards that cover my operating expenses. But if the additional revenue that I project doesn't materialize, or if sales fizzle from uncontrollable circumstances like another global recession, I'd have a new monthly demand on my already-fragile cash flow. Being a debt-averse person by nature, I've kept debt to zero. The tradeoff for staying debt-free, of course, is lack of capital for expansion. Most companies borrow enough money to reach their expected potential all at once. The impact of debt service on their balance sheets depends on how much they borrowed as a percentage of their income. Listing it here, after advertising, is arbitrary, but probably accurate for most small businesses. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <br />$0.063 goes into discounting – markdowns, coupons, quantity discounts, and <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=page_view&p=cc_terms#Customer_Rewards" target="_blank">Customer Rewards</a>. This is one cost over which I have almost complete control. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Bricks-and-mortar retailers have to budget 2-5% to cover shoplifting and damages (“shrink”). That’s another expense that e-tailers escape almost entirely. The lost and damaged shipments that impart a small amount of shrink fit within "miscellaneous". </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />$0.042 goes to PayPal, Google Checkout, and credit card processing. Large enterprises pay lower rates, and the largest of all do their own in-house payment processing. But for the small players, bankers take a cut right off the top of every dollar.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <br />That leaves $0.055 to cover everything else – office supplies, shipping supplies, licenses, taxes and fees, professional services, Internet access, telephone, etc. Last year those miscellaneous expenses ate up $0.013, leaving 4.2 cents for profit. An S Corporation’s profit is owned entirely by its shareholders, who pay the income taxes on it. As the sole shareholder, I pay myself 75% of it as a year-end bonus and let the company keep the rest, but I have to pay taxes on the whole thing.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <br />To summarize, one dollar breaks down like this:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />• 0.495 to vendors<br />• 0.232 to me and the government<br />• 0.119 to marketing, mostly Google<br />• 0.057 to discounts<br />• 0.042 to banks<br />• 0.013 for miscellaneous<br />• 0.042 for profit (shareholders, a.k.a. me)</div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-83627139260418246692012-05-11T12:56:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.292-07:00E-commerce for Dummies, Part 1: What Is an Internet Store?<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This is my 300th post. There are 299 others like it. I’ll wait here while you go back and read them all.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Throwing my wife’s thoughtful suggestions for my “guest lecturer” gig to the winds, I decided to write about something interesting instead. I think her e-commerce grad students will find these three topics entertaining:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />1. What is an Internet store?<br />2. Where does a dollar go?<br />3. Self-employment: The good, the bad, and the ugly</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />My only payoff for doing this is the blog posts that I can get from publishing the first drafts. Here’s the first one (865 words): </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://wordpressshoppingcartreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/optimize-online-shop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="254" src="http://wordpressshoppingcartreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/optimize-online-shop.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What is an Internet store? </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <br />Besides being a state of mind, it’s mostly ones and zeroes. The muscle and guts of <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/" target="_blank">Curio City Online</a> are:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />• Shopping cart software on a rented server;<br />• The MySQL database that the shopping cart creates;<br />• A Quickbooks company file;<br />• A couple of Excel workbooks;<br />• A checking account and two credit cards; <br />• A Google AdWords account;<br />• A UPS box (address) and a cell phone number; and<br />• 400 square feet of cellar space, more or less, devoted to merchandise and shipping supplies.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />But first, the bones: Every business starts as a concept. Unless you have a specific passion, that’s harder to nail down than you might think. Curio City’s concept didn’t come into focus until I’d been in business for several years, and it is still evolving. Read my <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/search/label/early%20history" target="_blank">blog posts tagged “early history”</a> from the bottom up if you want the full story.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Three layoffs in two years persuaded me to make a career change, and a small inheritance made starting a business feasible. My background in writing and editing, bookselling, and computer game development led to retail as the easiest and potentially most lucrative path.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />After ruling out opening a bookstore, a game store, or a hobby shop, my search for a niche that wasn’t already owned by either a mass market retail chain or a category-killer web store settled on the vague label of “gift shop”. Keeping the store’s name non-specific would give me flexibility, and I could use the store’s website to test merchandise before making big inventory commitments.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Researching my business plan convinced me that brick-and-mortar stores can’t possibly make money. Rent, loan payments, and payroll (in that order) consume all the revenue. All of the desirable locations that I scouted were far too expensive, and all of the affordable leases were undesirable. I refused to go deeply into debt unless I was sure that it would pay off, and my spreadsheets were adament that it would not.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />My wife’s suggestion that I start with the website first and worry about the store later broke the stalemate and led to Curio City Online as a home-based, one-man business. It took the Great Recession to finally kill the idea of <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/search/label/opening%20a%20store" target="_blank">opening a physical store</a> (again, read from the bottom up if you want the full story).</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Now to put some flesh on those bones.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />The skin that Curio City shows the world is a licensed software program called <a href="http://my.twt-inc.com/aff.php?aff=012" target="_blank">Sunshop</a>. There are a lot of competing shopping carts on the market (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_shopping_cart_software" target="_blank">wiki has a good list</a>) ranging from free up to $800 or more. The <b>shopping cart</b>’s front end displays products and enables checkout. Its back end is the interface that I use to manage my products, transactions, and customer accounts.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A <b>MySQL database</b> forms the guts under that skin. A web store is essentially a huge collection of data tables that one only need deal with directly when something goes wrong. The shopping cart manages that database.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><a href="http://quickbooks.intuit.com/" target="_blank"><b>Quickbooks </b></a>is the desktop accounting software that organizes all of that MySQL data into a business. Although far from beloved by its users, Quickbooks has owned at least 75% of the small business accounting software market since the 1980s. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />The <b>Excel </b>workbooks that I had used for research evolved into inventory and sales tracking tools that I find more useful than QuickBooks. I’d be lost without my Excel files, but this is a personal quirk. Most businesses get by just fine without them.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Cash </b>is the life blood of any business, and that involves banks. Money arrives through a credit card processor, PayPal, or Google Checkout (all of whom take a cut off the top), rests briefly in a checking account, and quickly departs through Mastercard and Amex cards. When small businesses fail, it’s almost always because they lost control of their cash flow.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Google AdWords</b> (and Microsoft AdSense) sell advertising on search engines. I pay a small charge (typically around 25 cents) every time someone clicks one of my ads. “Paid search” drives more than 80% of my traffic so maximizing the bang for those bucks is crucial.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />My <b>UPS box</b> and cell phone are the closest thing Curio City has to a physical presence. Every retailer needs a physical address and a place to receive shipments, and a telephone number is just as mandatory, even if you seldom use it. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Most home-based retailers use dropshippers. These vendors (manufacturers, wholesalers, and importers) ship products directly to your customers without you ever seeing them, usually in exchange for a cut of the sale. Dropshippers free you from the need to buy and warehouse merchandise and from the effort of shipping it. But they also limit you to products from dropship vendors, which is why so many small online retailers sell the same stuff. Investing several thousand dollars and half of my cellar in actual, <b>physical inventory</b> gives me the freedom to carry whatever I want, quality control, and all of the revenue. Eventually (I hope) my sales will outgrow my ability to handle them and I’ll have to outsource warehousing and shipping. I’ve blogged about <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2010/02/kicking-it-out.html" target="_blank">strategies for kicking it out</a> more than once, although the Great Recession put the kibosh on those plans. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">That's essentially all there is to it. I'll be happy to answer your questions about the specifics.</div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-47348583335683321872012-05-04T08:28:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.231-07:00Leading the Googlebot<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.clippingimages.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/301redirect.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.clippingimages.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/301redirect.gif" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I expected to slip another $800 behind LY because a big <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=970" target="_blank">lighted cap</a> sale had set this week’s bar ridiculously high, so I flogged Mothers Day to cushion the damage. My first newsletter and coupon in four months turned out pretty well. 271 emails got two bounces, two opt-outs, 58 opens (which is below my usual 74; mentioning “Mothers Day” in the subject line probably made some recipients ignore the email), 19 clicks (33% of opens is considered very good), and two sales. That’s two more than usual, and enough to justify keeping my Constant Contact account open.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />The related Facebook post supposedly reached 104 of my 159 followers. It drew 2 “likes” from the usual suspects (and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for those charity clicks; please keep ‘em coming!) and two new ones. None of my personal FB friends answered my plea to share Curio City’s coupon. Oh well; with FB you get what you paid for.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Decent Mothers Day traffic narrowed this week’s anticipated $800 slippage to just $500 -- it turned to crap yesterday after a very encouraging start. The intermittent web-hosting woes that started to plague me at this time last year depressed my sales targets over the next several weeks, creating an opening to catch up.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />**************</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I finally figured out how to do the “301 redirect” that a couple of Ess-Eee-Oh experts told me I needed. Search engines see a URL with and without the “www” as two separate sites. The redirect tells Google that they are one and the same and will supposedly boost my esteem. It felt good to take that silly little chore off my nag list.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />**************</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />My wife slotted me in as a "guest lecturer" for her online e-commerce class. Yup, I’m going to teach some grad students the secrets of wealth and success. I’ll use next week’s post – which, incidentally, will be my 300th – to outline some ideas for these youngsters. At least it won't be more boring trivia about the ups and downs of weekly sales.</div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-26147101334606849442012-04-27T14:53:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.195-07:00Out of the Frying Pan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/tmcnem/tmcnem0509/tmcnem050900147/238588-mannequin-climbing-out-of-an-iron-skillet--metaphor--out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/tmcnem/tmcnem0509/tmcnem050900147/238588-mannequin-climbing-out-of-an-iron-skillet--metaphor--out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />April gradually overcame a terrible start. In fact, this week was downright good despite a software version upgrade that broke First Class shipping for a couple of days. Sure, cash flow is still a struggle…but so is life. Two or three more weeks on the high side of normal -- that's just five or six sales a day -- would make everything better.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />The numbers:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;">April</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income:</b> <span style="color: red;">-14.3</span>%<br /><b>Total COGS:</b> <span style="color: red;">-21.2</span>%<br /><b>Payroll:</b> <span style="color: red;">-36</span>%<br /><b>Marketing:</b> <span style="color: red;">-9.8</span>%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit):</b> +315.3%<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Year to Date:</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income:</b> <span style="color: red;">-2.6</span>%<br /><b>Total COGS:</b> +3.2%<br /><b>Payroll:</b> +9.5%<br /><b>Marketing:</b> +22%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit):</b> <span style="color: red;">-277.3</span>%</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Interpreting the tea leaves: COGs and marketing costs should both fall farther than (or better yet, rise more slowly than) income, while payroll should exactly track income. Net income takes care of itself when the other numbers behave themselves. The YTD numbers are poor, but at least I made up some ground on the bottom line by cutting costs more than sales fell.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />This week’s sales emboldened me to reorder <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=694" target="_blank">Lexco cigarette cases</a> after a shopper asked for the one size that I’ve been out of for ages. I’d rather have spent my scarce money elsewhere because these things sell very slowly, but I do like the bird in the hand. Lexco cases are clever, unusual, and just politically incorrect enough to be retro-cool. The 2-dozen piece minimum order was daunting in the face of all the other claims on my cash trickle, but two new models designed specifically for blunts tipped me over the edge. Even if tobacco smokers are still pariahs, marijuana smoking is on the upswing – and that’s the real market for these cases.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Besides the normal costs of doing business, I owe my developer money for the Sunshop upgrade. My UPS box (which is to say, Curio City’s address) is up for its annual renewal. I still “need” a new copy of Quickbooks. I have to scare up $100 to renew my trademark, ideally by the end of May. Advertising costs remain stubbornly high. And I’m making no progress on my new-product wishlist. But my credit card bills are paid through the next three weeks and I have $577 in the bank.</div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-55597185666902776052012-04-20T10:12:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.242-07:00Tax Cut!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://buyersutopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011-2012-Tax-Cuts-Help-Real-Estate-Investment.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="http://buyersutopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011-2012-Tax-Cuts-Help-Real-Estate-Investment.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Our personal tax return, e-filed on Monday with just a day to spare, delivered an unexpected surprise: For complicated reasons, I overpaid our 1040-ES quarterly withholding. The consequent windfall (especially when I had feared that we might owe even more) lets me ease up a little this year.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Anne’s grownup paycheck provides most of our household income. Her company’s payroll department doesn’t consider our other income, so her federal withholding is lower than it should be. Convincing her to reduce her take-home pay is about as likely as convincing Mitt Romney that the Buffett Rule is a good idea. So for the past few years I’ve used my toy paycheck’s federal withholding to make up a little of the difference. I’ve taxed myself anywhere from 10-15% as our personal fortunes rose and fell, even though the federal withholding tables don’t oblige me to take one thin dime.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />This year’s big refund emboldened me to cut my withholding from 12.5% to 10%. That’s right: I’m giving myself a 2.5% tax cut! That’s an average of $12.50 per paycheck, or almost a case of beer per month.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Adjusting my tiny salary by a couple of points is mostly symbolic. My paycheck only plays a bit part in the art of withholding. The amounts that I withhold from Anne’s teaching and freelance checks dwarf my own payroll withholding, and most of this year’s refund came from her freelance business showing a robust loss in 2011 (a feat that will be difficult to repeat this year). With next April a year away and the stakes low anyway, I’m going to take my extra $325 and stimulate the economy.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />(This would make a nice segue into a diatribe about misplaced Republican faith in tax cuts, with a bonus dose of Bush bashing. But I don’t feel frisky enough for it today. Consider yourself harangued.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />And what about that serendipitous refund? Alas, there are no exotic vacations or luxury purchases in our future. I’ll stash most of it in hopes of replacing our roof before the fall rains come, and use some to chip away at Anne’s debt.</span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-38985903604219785472012-04-13T10:51:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.213-07:00We Have a Pulse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.pulseofflorida.org/PULSE_of_Florida_Patient_Safety_Advocates_Logo_op_600x600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.pulseofflorida.org/PULSE_of_Florida_Patient_Safety_Advocates_Logo_op_600x600.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I decided to pay myself on Monday after all. If Curio City gets to where it can’t even afford my dinky little paychecks, what’s the use of going on? I grossed all of $175 for two weeks. There are people who make that much in a day. Hell, Mitt Romney makes $175 in two minutes and he’s unemployed.<br /><br />Business clawed its way back to the low side of normal this week, so maybe the three-week slump really was just Easter-related. Cash flow is still in intensive care but its condition has been upgraded from critical to serious. The Amex bill is paid with $218 to spare, and the two weeks remaining should be just enough time to raise another $902 for Mastercard (although it will be touch and go at the current rate of sales). I’m even fantasizing about bringing in a couple of new products next month.<br /><br />****************<br /><br />I turned 55 years old today. I earn less money than I did when I was 25, but I’m just 10 years away from Medicare and 11.25 years from Social Security (assuming we can keep the Republicans at bay). Because benefits are based on my best working years, my Social Security checks will dwarf my Curio City paychecks. It’s easy to forget that I used to make more than four times what I earn now in salary alone, never mind benefits.<br /><br />Ten years goes by in no time at all. That's how long I've got to make this company big enough to sell.</div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-77257874773635163762012-04-06T09:26:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.288-07:00Give Me Mediocrity Or Give Me Death!<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxdOx20W5QNdG4M3UghXa8iNBVUZjVmhqmg9DQwN9_R-YG0yP0eFGg_1ZQ0KgVFpf3b5VHBuivBGda-75a0aLUMRENmGaUCLSC5l5AqB-I7_xwWhJQX7IdMh-6diiFqq_3vDdCID_9gt8u/s1600/dcb2591_450.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxdOx20W5QNdG4M3UghXa8iNBVUZjVmhqmg9DQwN9_R-YG0yP0eFGg_1ZQ0KgVFpf3b5VHBuivBGda-75a0aLUMRENmGaUCLSC5l5AqB-I7_xwWhJQX7IdMh-6diiFqq_3vDdCID_9gt8u/s320/dcb2591_450.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>Knowing that it was coming didn’t make parting with $1,071 worth of payroll taxes, withholding, and sales tax any easier. After scheduling the payments I was down to $400 in the bank with $2,400 owed to credit cards by the end of the month. Sales need to be a little bit healthier than normal to fill the gap. But traffic and sales both fell by half a few weeks ago. If sales don’t rally in time to avoid credit card interest charges, I risk entering a death spiral. Being a corporation doesn’t shield me personally from credit card debt, so my tolerance is very low.<br /><br />I don’t need a miracle. Just returning to normal will do. I wish there was a way to force that. Advertising costs are already way over budget so I can’t kick those up. I raised up <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=115" target="_blank">earbuds </a>from a subcategory of <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=10" target="_blank">Gadgets & Gizmos</a> to their own top-level category, broadened my AdWords bids, and created a MS AdCenter campaign. Why earbuds, of all things? The keywords are extremely competitive (everybody seems to sell them) and the retail price is low. Worse, my main vendor has this annoying practice of bundling multiple variations into take-it-or-leave-it prepacks that prevent me from fine-tuning stock levels, and they habitually import just one production run and discontinue it when it’s gone. So why flog these things? Mainly because having over 25 styles on one landing page creates a pretty good chance of converting any shoppers that I can lure in. Plus I got an iPod last Christmas and the first thing I did was replace the ill-fitting buds that shipped with it, so I kind of like them. Results so far? None.<br /><br />While I was shaking things up I renamed “Apparel & Fashion” to “<a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=16%20" target="_blank">Lighted Caps & Apparel</a>” and moved it to the top of the list, and added lighted caps to my index page – they don’t fit the seasonal theme, but more exposure is good. A few ensuing cap sales vindicated those ideas.<br /><br />I’m actually considering skipping next Monday’s paycheck. If I do take it, it will be my smallest since last July…which is good for cash flow and the balance sheet, but it sucks to be me, eh?<br /><br />Incidentally, while filing my taxes I noticed that my state unemployment insurance rate fell from 3.64 to 2.99% of payroll. They just got around to notifying me yesterday, meaning I overwithheld $40-something in Q1.<br /><br />Speaking of people with their hands out, a company impersonating the US government (the “United States Trademark Maintenance Service”) tried to trick me into shelling out $469 to renew my trademark. Although it’s an obvious ripoff, it reminded me that I really am supposed to renew my trademark at some point. Sure enough, the five-year anniversary is coming up, so I have to scare up another $100 by the end of May to retain ownership of Curio City.<br /><br />****************<br /><br />As I strive to restore mediocrity, I see Quickbooks Pro 2012 on Amazon for $50 below Intuit’s price. Amazon’s reviews all complain that Intuit has again added more valueless bloat. People hate Intuit like cancer, but there’s no realistic small business alternative to QB and Intuit is prepared to coast on that fact indefinitely. I need to find another $135 this month if I don’t want an interruption in their so-called “service.” </div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-63177041293260487942012-03-30T10:18:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.270-07:00Hello Crisis, My Old Friend<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I expected March to finish behind LY, so the goal was just to keep the YTD numbers in the black. How’d I do?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;">March</span><br /> </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>Total income</b>: <span style="color: red;">-25.8</span>%<br /><b>Total COGS</b>: <span style="color: red;">-31.1</span>%<br /><b>Payroll</b>: +37.1%<br /><b>Marketing</b>: +22.5%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit)</b>:<span style="color: red;"> -262.7</span>%<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Year to Date: </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Total income</b>: <span style="color: red;">-1.0</span>%<br /><b>Total COGS</b>: +7.6%<br /><b>Payroll</b>: +24.1%<br /><b>Marketing</b>: +30.0%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit)</b>: <span style="color: red;">-327.7</span>%<br /><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkmzr81Pi21qf4jjto1_r1_500.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkmzr81Pi21qf4jjto1_r1_500.png" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />I did not expect March to finish <i>that </i>far behind LY. This week was the worst of the year so far. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s something to do with Easter, that wild card of a holiday. Or maybe Google is punishing me because my site was offline for half of Monday.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">There's nothing good hidden in those numbers. YTD sales are really down by more than Quickbooks knows, because QB thinks that an invoice that I prepared for a customer price quote was a sale. QB thinks gross sales are only down by $144, but Excel knows that it’s really more like $900…at least until that customer closes on his estimated sale. The numbers will line up again if he eventually comes through.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />****************</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />The SEO dude that I talked to last week knows his stuff. An hour-long follow-up phone call convinced me that they can increase my monthly traffic by at least 6,000 visitors, and possibly as many as 12,000, just by optimizing my site (using non-sleazy methods) for my four best keywords. I figure that would increase sales by a minimum of $1,200 per month using the most conservative assumptions and as much as $4,800 under the rosy scenario. Unfortunately, their cheapest plan runs $495 per month, and it takes 90-120 days for SEO to deliver the calculated improvements. I could spend $2,000 before traffic picks up sufficiently to cover the new line item…and, of course, there is no guarantee that it really will. This month’s sales figures make it obvious why that can’t happen. With payroll taxes due in a couple of weeks, my old familiar cash flow crisis is back again. The 10 vendors currently on my new-product wishlist will have to stay wishlisted indefinitely.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />So I put the guy off until July. Who knows? A miracle could happen between now and then. Last week’s post called down a plague of SEO spammers, as I expected, so I shall not write those letters again. At least I learned a few tricks that I can implement myself that should improve things incrementally.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />****************</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Citizens Bank announced that they were going to screw me over by changing my seven-year-old Business Partners checking account to a Business Advisor account. Um…what? Old terms: $12 monthly fee, $10,000 average daily balance to avoid it – and, thanks to a 2005 business recruiting drive, mine was supposed to be free for life. New terms: $25 monthly fee, $35,000 average daily balance, and no more promotional waiver. Gah!</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A quick phone call unveiled their Business Green account: $10/mo fee, $2,000 minimum balance, and a mere five transactions per month to waive it. Whew. Why didn’t they tell me about that in my notice letter? Undoubtedly because some fraction of their customers will suck it up and pay the new fees. </span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-17217514625585960062012-03-23T09:06:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.187-07:00Blood from a Turnip<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.havingwords.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/FBC-Turnip.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://www.havingwords.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/FBC-Turnip.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Attentive readers might realize that I’m looking for a way to jazz up my sales without a lot of expense or risk – to dip a toe slightly outside my comfort zone, as it were. This month <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2012/03/gambler.html" target="_blank">Facebook advertising flopped</a> and I successfully <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2012/03/resistance-is-futile.html" target="_blank">resisted assimilation</a> by the Amazon collective. I was wondering what to do next when a SEO salesman called. Ordinarily I terminate telemarketers the moment they say “How’s your day going?”, but this one’s timing was lucky. I let him pitch me the usual complementary site analysis and follow-up phone call.<br /><br />Typing those letters is like throwing chum in shark-infested waters. Telephone spammers will frenzy minutes after I hit the Post button. So be it. Search Engine Optimization has been on my to-do list for years. I’m not clever enough to implement most of the free advice that I’ve been given over the years, even when I can understand it, because a PHP shopping cart isn’t as straightforward as a plain HTML website. Consequently I can’t do much more than write keyword-heavy product descriptions and plug meta phrases into Sunshop’s provided fields. I know that I need professional help if I'm ever to get serious about SEO.<br /><br />Nathan satisfied me that his company is thorough, knowledgeable, and non-sleazy. They don’t use link farms or make grandiose promises. Their analysis ranked me at 53 on a 1-100 scale where anything under 40 is pathetic and 70 is well-optimized, so I’m already doing better than I would have expected. I’m quite sure that they could improve my natural search rankings and, eventually, my sales. The big question is affordability. Tight cash flow is a common lament in this blog. SEO is a long-range prospect; improvements made today don’t bear fruit for weeks and it takes months for incremental sales increases to add up, yet the bills are due immediately and in full.<br /><br />We’ll talk cost next Monday. I’ve warned Nathan that I’ll have to put him on hold, if I can even do it at all. Payroll taxes are due in April. I already have nine vendors on my new product wishlist, and tomorrow’s <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2008/04/cavalcade-of-crap.html" target="_blank">Cavalcade of Crap</a> might add even more. I need to reorder four of my mainstays. And Intuit wants $184 just because. That gobbles up any free cash in April and probably May as well…and then we’re in the summer doldrums. But he’s a salesman, and he smells blood.<br /><br />(Incidentally, as a longtime blood donor who’s homing in on his 4 gallon pin, I offer this disclaimer from Wikipedia: A turnip cannot be coaxed, squeezed, or cajoled into producing blood. All efforts at obtaining blood from this vegetable will be futile. There's no substitute for rolling up your sleeve.)<br /><br />**************<br /><br /><b>Reasons to hate UPS:</b> An envelope from the UPS Dimensional Adjustment Bureau is not the exciting science fictiony thing that its name suggests. It ordinarily heralds a surcharge for a package measurement error. Miracle of miracles, this particular envelope held an unexplained check for $1.55. Why is this a reason to hate UPS? Because they issued and mailed a paper check that I had to endorse and schlep to the bank’s ATM; the bank had to process it and return it to UPS; and UPS presumably has to reconcile their account...all of which must cost more than $1.55. Why didn’t they just refund my credit card? They never hesitate to charge it when an alleged error is in their favor.<br /><br />**************<br /><br /><b>Reasons to hate Quickbooks:</b> For $184, Intuit would like to sell me some new bloat that I’ll never use and keep my current install fully functional for three more years. The only “services” that I use are emailing purchase orders and invoices directly through QB, and automatically downloading bug fixes. $15 per month to preserve a “service” that I might use two or three times is not exactly a good value; I can easily save documents as PDFs and email them myself. OTOH, Curio City is essentially just a website, a MySQL database, and a Quickbooks file. I feel compelled to keep those components up to date even when there’s no clear benefit. I suppose I should shop around and see if anybody sells it below Intuit’s $184.<br /><br />**************<br /><br />Here’s what $350 of Facebook advertising finally bought me:<br /><br />• 391,111 impressions;<br />• 141 “social impressions” (impressions shown with the names of the viewers’ friends who Liked my page);<br />• 93 clicks (Not according to Google Analytics, but OK, if they say so);<br />• 4 people Liked my page;<br />• And, of course 0 sales.</div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-60844945590140911072012-03-16T09:11:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:32:00.260-07:00Resistance Is Futile!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://static.desktopnexus.com/thumbnails/546422-bigthumbnail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://static.desktopnexus.com/thumbnails/546422-bigthumbnail.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Amazon wants me. All of <a href="http://curiocityonline.blogspot.com/2010/09/exploring-amazon.html" target="_blank">the objections that I raised about the Amazon Marketplace last September</a> are still true, but I did end that post with “I’ll revisit this idea going into next summer’s doldrums.” Now here we are. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />150 million unique monthly visitors hell-bent on shopping add up to one huge reason to join the Borg collective. Amazon recently made it a little easier to sell out. And what man can say no to 7 of 9? </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />First, the array of “revenue share” points has been winnowed to 15% across the board (except for jewelry at 20%, but I would not list that). Second, Amazon now handles the initial setup; the complexity of that was a big turnoff last time. The 40-product minimum is a burden, but I could easily pad that requirement with <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=93" target="_blank">Switchables </a>covers.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Drawbacks besides the logistical ones that I wrote about last September:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />• 2 million other merchants are cutting one another’s throats in the same space, and most of them are more ruthless than I am.<br />• Amazon uses its participating sellers’ sales and pricing data to compete with them directly. You will soon find your “host” moving in on your successful products. <br />• Adding my best products enhances Amazon’s appeal, not mine, while Amazon’s name weakens my brand. Customers don't understand the difference between buying <b>from </b>Amazon and buying <b>through </b>Amazon. I don’t want to be a mere distributor in the collective.<br />• Amazon owns the customers who buy through their website and forbids its sellers from marketing to them – not a big practical concern, since I do almost no direct marketing, but it bothers me anyway. I assume that Amazon’s Terms of Use (such as their privacy policy) supersede mine if those customers are its property.<br />• Amazon prevents sellers from controlling product images and descriptions by applying standards to each UPC.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">To succeed, one must have an appealing product at a competitive price that Amazon and its merchants aren’t already selling in any quantity. The UPC code requirement rules out my more offbeat items.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />A recommended strategy is to keep your bestsellers for your own site, and use Amazon to test new products or liquidate losers. That’s one argument in favor.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <br />Internet Retailer magazine said that sellers who have fewer than 40 transactions per month pay only 99 cents per sale. Forty doesn’t sound like much, yet it would be a 40% increase over my typical 100 monthly sales. Can I suspend my Amazon products when I reach 40 sales? Their salesman wants to sign me up as a “Pro Merchant”, which I think precludes the 99-cent small seller option. He wasn't interested in discussing the small-potatoes approach that interested me.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Mostly, the 15% haircut is a killer. Consider what happens to each merchandise dollar that I ring up. A bit over 50 cents pays for the stock. Twenty cents goes into my pocket, and I have to pay another 3 cents or so in payroll taxes. Ten cents goes to advertising. Payment processors take 4 cents. That leaves 13 cents to cover everything else – packing and printing supplies, licenses, annual taxes and fees, professional services, Internet and telephone, etc. My actual profit is whatever’s left after I meet all of those miscellaneous expenses (which obviously ain’t much). Amazon covers payment processing costs, so that reduces their take from 15 to 11 cents per dollar. That would leave me only 2 cents out of every dollar for miscellaneous expenses and profit. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />OK. For 2 cents to do the work that 13 cents is doing now, dollars would need to increase by…well, I don’t know how much. It’s less than sixfold because some of my expenses are fixed (advertising would not rise proportionately, for example), and because the 11-cent Amazon expense would only affect the Amazon portion of total sales. But it’s definitely a lot. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Ultimately, though, it just feels wrong. Curio City’s niche is selling products that you don’t find in mainstream retail. Amazon defines the mainstream. Joining the mainstream contradicts my core concept. So, for better or for worse, I rejected their pitch again – permanently, this time.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />What next? I do want to jazz up my game this year without risking a lot of money or radically changing the way I do business. Growth is already returning to Curio City as the economic recovery finally trickles down to the middle class. How do I enhance that without risking it? Facebook advertising didn’t work. I decided against selling on Amazon. What next?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Next week: The dread Ess-Eee-Oh puts in another appearance.</span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-3888951153690168172012-03-09T08:34:00.000-08:002012-08-05T00:32:00.209-07:00The Gambler<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.thevirtualcasino.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/online-gambling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://blog.thevirtualcasino.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/online-gambling.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My Facebook advertising experiment needed to generate $2,500 to be an unqualified success; $1,500 would have justified continuing and refining the ads. I was sure that it would at least recoup its $350 up-front cost – that’s only 10 sales, after all. Actual sales that I can pin to FB ads: $0. This year’s FB referrals fell by 34% over the same period LY, from 56 to 37. My “weekly total people reached” moving average rose from 47 to 42,158. The only result I’m seeing from that 10,000-fold increase is a spike in marketing pitches. I did pick up seven new “Likes,” which might be worth slightly more than zero. Very slightly.<br /><br />The ad agency had strongly recommended linking the ads to my FB page rather than to my store, as most FB users don’t like to leave FB. You’re apparently supposed to send them to a landing page with a “click for special offer” gimmick that gives people a discount code and refers them to your website. That might have worked a little better…but spending extra to generate discounted sales is a losing strategy.<br /><br />So that unambiguous failure makes the cancellation decision easy. I spent $700 on three tests over two years to prove to myself that FB advertising is 100% worthless for selling products.<br /><br />OK, I gambled and lost. What now? It just so happens that I’m weighing another gamble. That will be next week’s post.</div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-64652983977554906392012-03-02T11:33:00.000-08:002012-08-05T00:32:00.273-07:00It's a Lock<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://tamsandroid.tamoggemon.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/open-lock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://tamsandroid.tamoggemon.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/open-lock.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Back in December a customer asked why there was no lock icon on my checkout page. Huh? The page is secured under an “https” URL and my SSL certificate is up to date, and yet there it was: An open lock icon. I made a note to ask my developer the next time I needed to hire him for other work.<br /><br />This week I was checking out an unrelated Internet Explorer bug report. I was aghast when my checkout page popped up a security warning. When I told it to load only the secure content, my Facebook “Like” button disappeared.<br /><br />Hmm.<br /><br />A few versions back, Turnkey implemented a Facebook plugin for Sunshop, but I could never figure out how it was supposed to work and I didn’t need it anyway since I had implemented some FB code on my own. Now it looked like I’d have to remove my custom code and either use their plugin or drop the “Like” button entirely. This would be much more daunting than it ought to be. When I finally remembered where I had inserted that code ages ago, I noticed that it linked to a plain old non-secure “http” URL.<br /><br />Just for kicks, I changed the “http” to “https”. Lo and behold, it worked! The error message is gone, the lock icon looks locked, and the Like button seems to work.<br /><br />I really ought to be paying myself more. </div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706830005511106756.post-58818653655845633252012-02-24T13:22:00.000-08:002012-08-05T00:32:00.249-07:00Big Black February Numbers<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Yes, I know today’s only the 24th, and I know that this February has 29 days, and I know that I ought to add a fifth week to fiscal February instead of shifting four days into fiscal March. But a five-week February would blow my mind. March will bring the accounting calendar back into harmony with the real calendar.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.boom-online.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Booming-Economy.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="http://www.boom-online.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Booming-Economy.gif" width="325" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">February </span><br /> </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>Total income:</b> +59.4%<br /><b>Total COGS:</b> +96.6%<br /><b>Payroll:</b> +8.4%<br /><b>Marketing:</b> +69%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit):</b> +60.3%<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Year to Date: </span><br /> </span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>Total income:</b> +14.9%<br /><b>Total COGS:</b> +34.8%<br /><b>Payroll:</b> +17.9%<br /><b>Marketing:</b> +33.1%<br /><b>Net Income (Profit):</b> <span style="color: red;">-23.7</span>%<br /><br />Looks like a boom to me. Two big telephone sales kicked February over the top: The <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=468" target="_blank">Create-a-Bird kite</a> sale at the beginning of the month, and a big <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=316" target="_blank">Animal Print Golf Ball</a> sale today. Excel says I’m up $700 on LY and nearly $200 over plan. Quickbooks is downright breathless (as you see above), but QB doesn’t know that an invoice that I prepared as a price quote wasn’t a sale. As far as cash flow goes, it’s not all unicorns and daisies: I had to order inventory at the usual price to supply discounted sales -- hence the scary Cost of Goods Sold increase. I sacrificed bottom-line income to pay for that extra top-line income. From another perspective: Except in Q4, I want each month’s inventory purchases to be less than or equal to the cost of what I shipped that month; this month I had to order $200 more than I shipped.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />March 2011 benefited from four unusually large <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=973" target="_blank">Panther Vision cap</a> and <a href="http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=93" target="_blank">Switchables </a>sales. I’m likely to lose the ground that I gained this month unless my Facebook advertising gamble hits paydirt. I made four sales of advertised items (Panther Vision caps and Switchables) within a few hours after the campaign went live on Tuesday. Then…quiet. I’ve picked up a few new followers but my FB referral traffic has barely budged from normal and I can’t trace a single sale to FB ads. But this was a school vacation week, and that means a lot of people are stuck at home babysitting instead of at work shopping. Next week will be a better gauge. So far, though, it looks like this is going to be a short experiment.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />******************</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><b>Reasons to hate Quickbooks:</b> I mentioned an autoupdate that will deactivate QB unless I buy the 2012 version. Fine. Requiring an upgrade instead of making customers want it is a fascist business tactic, but Intuit gets away with it. What I didn’t bargain for was losing the ability to resize the “Make deposits” dialog. That’s right: I can change the height but not the width, so now I have to use the scroll bar on this screen that I use nearly every day. How lousy does a developer have to be to break such basic Windows functionality?</span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0