Current Mood: Cool & Ecstatic

Finally! After what seems like forever!

It’s open!

Cozy Homewares is alive!

Here, have some search-engine food to celebrate.
Fabric Shower Curtains
Shower Curtain Liners

Getting this one open has been the most aggravatingly slow endeavor of the merchant-side yet. From the molasses-like wholesalers (one of which took 3 1/2 weeks to ship my order…and another one JUST got their catalog to me TODAY) to the balky merchant-account (credit-card acceptance) place that I had to pester to keep things moving, things have gone MUCH slower than when I opened the last site. It’s like there’s some kind of formula…speed of B2B service is inversely proportional to profit potential…

But now that’s done. Now to start the advertising!

Overall, the fact that it’s up can be summed up in one word:

YES!

It’s pretty much all set.

Stock’s in, check.
Cart is customized, check.
New business checking account, check.
Googlebot knows the site exists and has spidered, check.
Packaging supplies, on the way.
Merchant account, in progress.

The only real holdup now is the merchant account (I can get packing supplies locally if I have to). I’ve put in my app, it’s all good…just waiting on getting my new Authorize.net login.

And so it begins: The wait that’ll seem like a million years! They tell me it’ll probably be “within 3 business days” which is code for “we run all the apps through on Monday!” I looked at my email archives for my other sites, and they were activated on a Monday. And gee, what’s 3 business days from now (counting today as 1 day)? Monday!

Granted, that does give me time to put the rest of the items on the site, but I would have been happy to blast out ads before I was done with that…

It probably won’t even take another 2 days to get all the items up, so that’ll leave me with the weekend and probably most of Monday to sit here and STEW while trying to alleviate the antsiness by playing Rome.

Not that Rome isn’t cool, but I’d rather be “playing” Merchant! It’s like having put a $1000 token in a slot machine, pulling the lever…and having it come up “Come back in a few days to see if you’ve won!” Augh!

Not to mention the obvious facts that Merchant is FOR REAL and therefore the wins are way more exciting! It’s one of the few things in Reality that isn’t boring as rocks. Not much else in Reality comes complete with conquests and wins like a video game does, other than sports and warfare, and I suck at sports and am a bit too old to head off to a war zone.

According to the popular “wisdom,” it’s hard to get anyone to loan you so much as 2c when you have bad credit.

Fortunately, if you indeed have bad credit, the popular “wisdom” is, as usual, not so wise. There are all kinds of lenders willing to touch risky credit profiles. It’s even possible to get credit cards soon after declaring bankruptcy!

At BadCreditOffers.com, they have information on many of these sub-prime lenders, categorized by type. Want a bad credit credit card? They list several. Some of the credit-card lenders there are better than others…be sure to check the terms and not just the interest rate.

How about getting a new car–without having to deal with some sleazy sub-prime lot in the inner city? Now you can! Apply online for a bad credit car loan, get the money, and then deal with some place that doesn’t make you want to run away screaming!

Of course, there are also home loan quotes available through BadCreditOffers, as well as a way to check and monitor your credit report. Monitoring your credit report can be important when trying to rebuild credit, since sometimes you have to bug these reporting places to get them to stop reporting expired bad events.

All in all, BadCreditOffers looks like a very good one-stop site for finding creditors willing to deal with everyone–even those with bad credit or bankruptcy!

The initial stock is in! Enough to open!

These product lines will mark a “First” for me. I’ve always wanted to be able to offer Free Shipping, but haven’t yet been able to pull it off. With my other products, there are too many variables to be able to say those magic words.

But with these, there are no variables which will negatively impact shipping. It can all go Flat Rate. So, prices can be set to accomodate the Holy Grail…free shipping.

Since it’s pretty much all set, there’s only 2 things left to do other than some minor site customization cleanup:

Get a seperate business checking account for this biz
and
Get the merchant account for it.

That happens today. Within a couple days, the merchant account should be active…and the doors open with register ready!!!

Then the ads go up.

Does this mean riches overnight? LOL no! First the seedling, then the tree. But I shall water and fertilize faithfully, hoping for growth as fast as a poplar and as strong as an oak!

Current Mood: Cool

A couple of weeks ago, I got a notice to check my contact information for one of my domains. This is a typical autogenerated notice that goes out once a year from that particular domain registrar. It’s basically a reminder to put in any contact info changes which may have been forgotten.

When I got over there, I realized that a lot more than my contact info for that domain had been forgotten about: I had forgotten about the entire domain! Which meant that when I moved servers several months ago, I’d never updated the nameservers for that dom…so, it hadn’t been showing up since!! No wonder the banner-serving place had written and asked why I “wasn’t using them” anymore. It was showing no impressions…

So I updated the nameservers and pointed them at the new server place…and, soon, instead of seeing the site back up, I realized I was in another

“Shepherd to Lost Sheep!” scenario.

No site showing despite the change.

Being busy getting Merchant Site #3 up, I didn’t immediately devote much time to it. But as the days went by, and I sporadically looked at the problem, I realized that, yes:

The site had indeed been uploaded to the new server…
The domain wasn’t expired…
I hadn’t gone and parked it…
The “zone file” was indeed at the new place’s nameservers, so yes, they should know what to do with incoming requests…
The new info had indeed made it into the whois (showing that the main DNS servers should know to ping the new nameservers).

“Shepherd to Lost Sheep, Shepherd to Lost Sheep…”

Finally I resorted to opening a support ticket at the “unmanaged” server place. Within 15 minutes, I had the information that they had stopped “publishing” the domain’s data from their nameservers! I guess if it doesn’t get any hits for ages (which it didn’t, because I had forgotten to update the registrar for so long), they just delete the data from the nameservers. So, all the pings had been met with no response–hence, no site was showing.

They told me they’d republish the data, along with letting me know how to do it myself next time, and said it should show up within 24 hours. 24 hours later…

No site showing.

So I updated the ticket with that info, like they had said to do. Apparently, whoever tried to get it going the last time had hit the wrong button or something, because the next guy to handle the ticket got it through fine. And now, the site is back.

What’s this site that generated so little traffic and income that I didn’t realize it was AWOL for what, 6 months?! Here, for your perusal, and to let Googlebot know that it’s up again, I present an informational c*ntent site that I bought, fully-done, in a moment of insanity back in 2003.

Heart Disease Information

What amazes me is that when I checked for links-in, it actually snagged a few. People were impressed with the healthy recipes section!

Well, I suppose there is a need for recipes that don’t try to compete with McDonald’s for artery-clogging power…

Lead has been the cause of some grief lately. For instance, Toys R Us probably wishes they’d never heard of the stuff. Same with the US purveyors of cheap Chinese “jewelry.”

But sometimes, a little bit of lead is exactly what’s in order. Especially when it happens to be shaped into a nice pellet shape and shot out of a pellet gun!

Shooting at targets like cans or even paper can be quite fun. It’s nice to see the aim getting better, and takes less time to see improvement compared to things like learning how to play an instrument. Or for a REAL CHALLENGE try attempting to ‘remove’ a squirrel from the bird feeder at 50 feet, hehheheh…

If I were to buy another pellet gun, it’d likely be this one: Air Force Condor with Sights What catches my eye about it is that it’s supposed to be super-accurate! As the above paragraph implies, I had a lot of trouble hitting the darned squirrels. (So much trouble that they had even started ignoring the zinging sounds around them.) But they wouldn’t stand a chance against me if I had a decent airgun with good accuracy, instead of the cheap junk thing I was using!! The cheapie was okay against stationary, (relatively) big, paper targets. But a tiny moving target? LOL…

At the linked site, Pyramyd Air, they have an odd way to save 5%. If you can find a typo on their site, they’ll give you a coupon! So if you’ve got a good eye for spotting errors, go over there when you want a pellet gun, airsoft guns, or ammo!

Current Mood: Ecstatic & Surprised

And energized enough to bounce through the roof even though I haven’t had any caffeine yet!

It was to my shock that yesterday my order from the first dino-wholesaler showed up! I think it was 2 days after I got back to them with my card number!! Too bad it took 3 or 4 weeks for them to actually pack it…

Anyway, now I am the proud owner of 4 cartons of merchandise. And hopefully, soon to be the proud owner of just ONE ITEM from those cartons–the one I bought for myself. The rest, of course, are to be sold!

This stuff is the same stuff I’ve seen in stores around here. With the professional packaging and everything! How uber is that!!? I love being a merchant!

Maybe I was a weird kid. I used to go to stores and just wish, wish, WISH that I could have those shelves as mine–and all the stuff on them, with its professional packaging and “buy me” colors. Not fake-o kiddie “brands,” but the real deal. Play-store, that never did it. I didn’t want pretend.

And, I got (and still get) no thrill from buying onesies. I wanted the Store. And not out of greed, either (who’d be greedy for 100 copies of an item you only can actually use 1 of?!). The excitement was/is in being the Store, being the one that other people went to to get what THEY need, and the whole excitement of retailing/advertising, and yes the very LOOKS of a fully-stocked store! And to be the one responsible for its existence as well as its goodness, when people say “I love this store and I wouldn’t shop anywhere else!”

Most kids empathize with the line “like a kid in a candy store.” That never did much for me. But one day I thought, “to heck with being IN one for a night. That’s not very exciting; I can’t even begin to eat all the candy in such a store. What’d be really uber would be to OWN the place, and have other kids clamouring to get in…” Then the adrenaline kicked in.

Opening those boxes yesterday took me back to those days, again. I got the same thrill when I got my first shipment of bulbs, and then when I got the first shipment of scales. But this seems a bit more pronounced, even. These items are branded, and with a brand that someone actually may recognize from a big bricks-n-mortar store!

*holds products like they’re a psychological combination of chocolates and gold bars*

I’m sooooo excited about this…my first Recognizable Brand line…I can’t imagine what it’ll be like when I get the BIG brand stuff. JUST LIKE MACY’S and the like have! I think they’ll have to peel me off the ceiling, then. Is it possible to OD on a natural high?? If it is, I am doomed.

Time to start scanning in the product pix. The store should be open by Tues or Wed at the latest. As soon as the merchant account is turned on, it’s a go.

By all this excitement, you’d think this was the culmination of the dream! And while it does fulfill a lot of dreams that required branded items, there is still one left on the burner: Owning a grocery store! But that’s probably a long way in the future. Right now, my energy is going to the latest site, and there’ll probably be more sites after that!

Current Mood: Meh

The other day I got a shock! A dinosaur-era manufacturer finally got my order together! I about fell off my chair when I got the call–I had really figured that they were never going to fill it.

The place I’m talking about is the one I mentioned earlier, who has a way to “order” online but no way to PAY online. So, they had to call for my payment info. After 10 days had passed, I’d figured that they’d decided that my order wasn’t sufficiently ubersized (even though it was way past their stated minimum).

So now all I have to do is wait, wait for their stuff and the other stuff to show up.

On another note, I decided that I may attack a certain supersaturated product line. Usually I avoid saturated stuff like a plague, but I can’t get the thoughts of big profit out of my head. As a small merchant, I have way less overhead than the big sellers–so, I should be able to bid way up on PPC and still have my shirt!

So, I goes over to MegaFamous Small Appliance Company (not their real name…duh) looking for the contact info for their sales/distribution department, and…

NO CONTACT INFO FOR THAT AT ALL!

Just consumer-oriented info! Geez, wtf, don’t they want any more retailers?! Or maybe their CEO gets an ego-thrill out of having people bother to hound out the address for their US headquarters!!?

Ah well. I’ll find ‘em. But I must say, to an internet retailer like me, some of the ways of the old-line companies strike me as completely CRAZY~!

Current Mood: Ecstatic

FINALLY I’ve found some wholesalers who have a clue!!!

It took some thinking outside the box, but it seems that I’ve finally managed to dredge up some clueful wholesalers. One was even clueful enough to advertise on Google!

The first products should be here by next week…then time to turn on the new Authorize.net account and start barraging the Internet with ads.

If I bid enough, I should be able to catch at least some of the Q4 wave for Merchant Site #3!!!

Although I am excited to see progress, I do have to remember: The first months of a new merchant site are a mere whisper of what it can do after being established for a year or 2. People don’t like to beta-test new companies, so things don’t start really cookin’ until there’s some branding built up.

Still, it would have been a crime not to have been able to get any stock this month!

When I got my point-and-click digital camera, it was top of the line for its class. It’s funny how now, when I go into a store that sells cameras, mine looks like a minibrick in comparison to the latest models! Oh well…obsolescence…

In any case, it takes fine pictures. One of my best pictures is the one I took of my spirea bush in full bloom back in 2002:

The problem with this camera, is that it cannot do proper macro shots. My dream camera is one that can get close enough to see the pollen grains in a tiny flower–and take a clear picture of the intricate beauty! I’ve always wanted to be able to make pictures like that. Of course, such a lens is a lot more expensive than my current camera, but someday I’m sure I’ll break down and buy macro camera of my dreams.

One of the great things about any digital camera is the ease of photomanipulation. Notice how few weeds there are in that picture? Shhhh…

On this page of scrapbook page ideas, they mention making a calendar. No more looking in vain for a calendar with proper flower pictures if I make my own!