Current Mood: Erm… & Playful

Today I decided to look over some items at a wholesaler, since I need to do some restocking. And amazingly, they have an item that actually matches what I’ve been getting quite a few searches for! I realized that since that industry is affected by certain fashion aspects, that they actually update their offerings by the season. And, it’s about to be spring, so stands to reason that all the new stuff would be available now so retailers can start flogging it, right?

Wronggg!!

Apparently they think the particular colors in question are fall colors, or at least summer colors, because they’re not going to actually HAVE the things until JUNE!! Argh…

And never mind that similarly subdued colors, in a different pattern that won’t get half as much customer interest, will be available in March. As in, probably in a few days from now.

Wholesalers: Denizens of their own little worlds.

Current Mood: Ecstatic

It’s always a joyous day when the FIRST SALE of a new merchant site rolls in! And today, I got another hit of that special joy. I woke up to my first sale from Merchant Site #3!!!

Yes, yes, yes. What is there to say but glorious “YES!!”

Another baby has come to life.

As you know if you’ve been following this blog, I recently got Merchant Site #3 up and put it on PPC.

Seems that I got a bit carried away and overconfident in that. I just got reminded that even doing PPC for years does not totally immunize a person from the hazard of shirt loss.

Figuring that hey, I have the Merchant’s Share for these items, I went ahead and bid 30c/click. I checked the next day and it said it was averaging an actual cost of 25c.

Well…something turned out to be wrong with The Picture.

First off all, the traffic from there isn’t converting. Nada. So either I have too general of keywords, or people just like to do more shopping around for things like shower curtains. It could be the latter, which is no problem when the traffic is free, but is a HUGE problem when it’s costing!!

Second, when I checked my account, they had managed to eat up $66+ in click fees. Fortunately, buried in there on some screen or another, is an Account Max Spending Limit. This kept them from going all the way to Bermuda on my money, at least.

That PPC campaign is now off. It obviously needs major reworking before I allow it to live again. Needless to say I’ll be checking the performance of my other campaigns now, too!

On the bright side, in the other window, Google sent all of 16 hits. Free. And, one converted!

It could be a fluke, but it looks like the real buyers for this product line are not hanging out at Yahoo!

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.

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: 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!

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…