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!

Current Mood: Angry

I have run into an unexpected snag with Merchant Site #3: Old-Line wholesalers! The industries of interest are choked with them!

“Old-Line” is what I call businesses who are just NOT with it. No fully-functional ecommerce site, no response to emails, just a whole list of “nos” when it comes to doing business in the present day! In other words, dinosaurs.

I find one wholesaler…like most wholesalers they don’t slap their prices up for all to see (because their retailer customers’d kill ‘em if they did!). But, they have a shopping cart. So I emailed for a username/password to get into the Secret Area, expecting that I could just order online. A reasonable expectation I would think!!!

Well, they respond the next day with a username/pass, but when I put in my order, it turns out that they don’t actually have a shopping cart after all–it goes to Accounting, which is supposed to call me for my credit card info. And–NO CALL has come. And, no email acknowledgement. And, it’s been 7 days now. WTF kind of loser place is that?! I’d just give ‘em up for lost, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve seen their stuff in stores around here…

Then the other 3 I found didn’t even have ANY way to order online. So, since places are usually closed long before I get up, I snail-mailed them. I’m sure they’ll respond–I’ve always gotten good luck using snail-mail inquiries–but heck, I thought that went obsolete years ago!! Sheesh!

So I decide to pursue a different product line. They have a site, and full contact info. Needless to say, I picked email. You guessed it. No response.

I suppose their email box is crammed with spam, since they foolishly used the easily-guessable “info @” convention. Duh… Why ANY companies use “info,” “sales,” “service,” or somesuch obvious permutation along those lines, I don’t know. Spambots just throw those guesses out automatically, for Pete’s sake! I always use some offbeat thing for my email addy, and a lot of spam never even hits my box. It doesn’t stop all of it, but the spammers have to be better coders (or pay more for a spam-program) to get an unusual address. But I digress.

It’s looking like I’m going to have to wreck my sleep at least once to get a fire under the butts of these clueless dinosaurs. Then watch them say that I can fax an order anytime. As if I’m going to put a landline back in here just so I can spend money at their joint!! I suppose they’d say *I* was old-fashioned, but not having a fax is just economic sense–while not having a way to order online is pure economic NONsense. I need to run a fax maybe once a year, at that. But they’d get repeated orders from a proper ecommerce site. In fact, I could guarantee them at least one customer who’d repeatedly order at 3AM…

Sometimes I’ve Gotta Wonder…
what lousy experiences customers have had before they got to me!

Today on Merchant Site #2 I noticed this comment on one of the orders (there’s a box at checkout, where customers can add comments for their order):

Be very Careful!

And all I can do is wonder what had happened in his dealings with other merchants that brought that comment on?? Did someone ship him a flattened or otherwise broken item at some point? Or not put any packing material in with it?

In any case, when I ship the type of item in question, it’s packed well! If anything, there’s a bit of overkill involved! It’s a small item, so even with my smallest box, I have to put in a lot of peanuts.

It does remind me how important packaging is to customers, though. Sometimes I’ve wondered if I was too anal about it…I guess not!

People do all kinds of things at and around the beach, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that some ride bicycles there! In fact, there are even bikes sold especially for that purpose: Beach Cruisers.

These are low-cost cruiser bikes which are good for a leisurely pedal near the beach. And there’s a site dedicated to selling them, too: XYZBikes.com. At the time of this posting, they’re selling a lot of them for only $88.00! If you like a fancier look, you can get it. There’s a low-rider version whose looks mimics a low-rider motorcycle, and even that one’s on sale for $145.

XYZBikes isn’t your typical ecommerce site. They have a store, of course, but there is also an extensive blog area which covers everything from bike assembly to XYZ’s concerns with shipping methods, where they even solicit opinions (I say to go with DHL!!).

The store section has a lot of pictures of the bikes. The cool thing is that instead of the usual monotone background, they actually show their bikes on a beach! And you can see that it’s a real beach, not some indoor set.

There are also several other beach-themed pictures throughout the site, which really help set the mood (and make me wish I was on vacation NOW).

It looks like XYZBikes.com’s the place to go for a beach cruiser, and if you go while the sale’s on you’ll get a great deal!