Out of the Frying Pan

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.

The numbers:

April

Total income: -14.3%
Total COGS: -21.2%
Payroll: -36%
Marketing: -9.8%
Net Income (Profit): +315.3%

Year to Date:

Total income: -2.6%
Total COGS: +3.2%
Payroll: +9.5%
Marketing: +22%
Net Income (Profit): -277.3%

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.

This week’s sales emboldened me to reorder Lexco cigarette cases 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.

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.

Tax Cut!

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

We Have a Pulse

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.

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.

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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.

Ten years goes by in no time at all. That's how long I've got to make this company big enough to sell.

Give Me Mediocrity Or Give Me Death!

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.

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 earbuds  from a subcategory of Gadgets & Gizmos 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.

While I was shaking things up I renamed “Apparel & Fashion” to “Lighted Caps & Apparel” 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.

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?

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.

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.

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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.”

Hello Crisis, My Old Friend

I expected March to finish behind LY, so the goal was just to keep the YTD numbers in the black. How’d I do?

March
 
Total income: -25.8%
Total COGS: -31.1%
Payroll: +37.1%
Marketing: +22.5%
Net Income (Profit): -262.7%

Year to Date: 

Total income: -1.0%
Total COGS: +7.6%
Payroll: +24.1%
Marketing: +30.0%
Net Income (Profit): -327.7%

I did not expect March to finish that 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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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!

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.

Blood from a Turnip

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 Facebook advertising flopped and I successfully resisted assimilation 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.

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.

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.

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 Cavalcade of Crap 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.

(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.)

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Reasons to hate UPS: 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.

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Reasons to hate Quickbooks: 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.

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Here’s what $350 of Facebook advertising finally bought me:

•    391,111 impressions;
•    141 “social impressions” (impressions shown with the names of the viewers’ friends who Liked my page);
•    93 clicks (Not according to Google Analytics, but OK, if they say so);
•    4 people Liked my page;
•    And, of course 0 sales.

Resistance Is Futile!

Amazon wants me. All of the objections that I raised about the Amazon Marketplace last September 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.

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?

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 Switchables covers.

Drawbacks besides the logistical ones that I wrote about last September:

•    2 million other merchants are cutting one another’s throats in the same space, and most of them are more ruthless than I am.
•    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.
•    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 from Amazon and buying through Amazon. I don’t want to be a mere distributor in the collective.
•    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.
•    Amazon prevents sellers from controlling product images and descriptions by applying standards to each UPC.

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.

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.
 
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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Next week: The dread Ess-Eee-Oh puts in another appearance.