Current Mood: Angry

Cool–WP had saved a copy of this post for me!! So, here it is after all!

This week started with craziness and idiots and the trend kept going all week long.

First, some junk happened that I won’t mention further here.

Then the other day, a merchant got the notion that it should decide what it’s worthwhile to spend MY money on. Did they overcharge? Ship 10,000 things I didn’t want? Noooo! The opposite. They refused to sell what I DID want! So they’re fired.

And, despite their claims of having an “exclusive” on the machine I’m after, they do NOT have any such thing. They may have made a deal with that *particular* manufacturer, but there are several competing manufacturers, who surely have dealers who are not so jealous of someone who wants a private garden…and, the machine to delete the work of it.

In amongst all that, were other idiocies. I was shorted 3 items by a different place. Who didn’t know about it? Their billing department… So I had to deal with that. Did they email a confirmation that they read my emailed protests? Noooo…I was just about to send the check (sans cost of missing items) when surprise, a “claim number” arrived in my email with a request to include that number with the payment. The email had the title “claim”–even though my original email was titled “shortage in order!” I almost deleted it unopened–I figured it was spam. But something about the “from” name looked just *barely* legit, and I opened it.

And, yet another wholesaler held onto my order for 2 1/2 weeks before admitting to being sold out on an item. Thanks dudez for the notice! But at least the refund has come through.

A person returned some merchandise as defective. It’s clear that she broke it–the box was mashed. That’s the *inner* box. Shipping box, not mashed. So it had to have happened after the “customer” got it, unless the Post Office has invented a new way to dent inside boxes that were surrounded by peanuts–without affecting outer ones.

Another, more minor, irritation was reading a comment on Wordpress MU that said people who didn’t want to have to mess with their server’s root config ought to just “use [his] multi-user hack” for regular WordPress…saying that if someone couldn’t figure THAT out, they should just go with the version of WordPress hosted by WP itself (that’s the commie noncommercialiable version :p ).

Needless to say, when I went to the post with the “hack” in it, it was a pile of ununderstandable gibberish and non-explanations. Programmers love to put up stuff that’d take an MIT degree to understand and then call everyone a n00b for not getting it by osmosis *grrr* And of course, I have zero use for the commie version. If I want to have FUN, that’s what games are for. Sites are for money.

So I did the easier thing. Changed the server config file to prepare for the install of the full Wordpress MU setup! Yes that was easier. The config file has clue comments all through it! Unlike that unhelpful git’s hack.

I haven’t installed MU yet, but the supposedly-hard part should be done. But with any kind of program, I don’t relax until I see it running and not crashing.

I wouldn’t say changing the config is a “totally newb” operation, but it’s certainly not hard like he was making out. Reading the file plainly marked README gives plenty enough info. I had more trouble with vi…I hardly ever need to use it, so I had to look up the commands in Google. (Hint to people who find this while trying to find out how to use vi: Search for “vi commands” in G…)

Of course, I tried to find relief in the wonderful pixels of an old game. But, no dice even there! The game which had seemed so great 10 years ago–Pacific Theater of Operations–now strikes me as incredibly slow. I’m sure it’s partly because I instantly remembered exactly how to win.

The computer will OCDly send its entire Pacific Fleet at its objective, one small fleet at a time. ALL it takes to win, is to figure out the comp’s objective (easy to do), sail nearby with a full 16-ship fleet which has about 8 CVs in it, camp within easy airstrike range…and torpedo-bomb the blazes out of anything that dares to sail within range.

But the other problem is that between every operation, the ships’ crews require “shore leave” or their morale will drop (causing their fighting ability to start sucking), and if you push them too long, they’ll even get a “plague.” And, the ships have to be refueled often, unless you always sail at half-speed. So, most of the game is spent waiting for shore leaves, refuelings, and doing administrative junk.

It was fine and great when it was new and I actually used that time to think of my next move, but now I wish I had a hack that’d make them always have no fatigue and 100% fuel. Then I wouldn’t have all that infernal waiting. I’ll have to try to figure out the code. To heck with “realism,” the fun part is sinking all the enemy’s sh*t! So maybe tonight I’ll see if I can get the lead out of the thing.

Now…IE had better not crash…
*Hits “Publish”*

Current Mood: Erm…

Lately I can’t help but notice that more and more sites are being written in infinitessimally small type! Seriously–it’s no bigger than font size 1, and I’m sure some are coding in px (pixels) so they can get it even more miniscule.

What’s with them? Are they so unsure of themselves that they wish their words would disappear into the background? Don’t they want people to be able to read what they have to say??

Or is it something more sinister? Perhaps they have a secret deal with the reading-glasses manufacturers of the world. Maybe they want to convince people that they can’t see, and then the ad for glasses will “concidentally” appear later…

Or maybe they’re just following the latest STUPID design trend.
In any case, I always use FireFox to enlarge the font back to something reasonable–if I bother to stay on the site. But it’s nonsense to make readers do that. And readers won’t bother staying if they can go to a decently-designed site and get the info there!

Current Mood: Meh

After spending the week trying to get motivated, I managed to accomplish some stuff! Two things are now off of my list.

Reuseable grocery bags are now up on Cozy Homewares, and the month’s advertising is now running.

Woop-de-do, huh… Still have to get those products into the Froogle feed, too, since the spiders aren’t yet convinced that that site should be king of the SERPs.

As for next week, I really need to quit stalling on getting the rest of the Escali stuff up. They’ve passed the test run and then some. Not to mention that their stuff looks cool

Nice, huh.

I’ve decided to try to get all the major steps of becoming a merchant into one post. My reasons are simple: My irritation at how “hard” and “expensive” people have made it seem, has overtaken the negative of more possible competition on my list. There is a lot of BS out there, and it’s time for me to get out a shovel.

I will disclaim that: This is not meant to be comprehensive–to do that would take a book rather than a single post! I also disclaim that what works in some categories may bomb in others.

So you want to be a real merchant!
Not a weenie ebook seller. Not a provider of “quotes.” Not a service provider. But a real, honest-to-goodness merchant, who buys stuff wholesale and then ships it out for retail. Good for you and congratulations–you have more guts than what seems to be 99% of the population!

First thing–before you do anything, before you even decide what to sell: Start collecting about $1200. That’s right, just twelve-hundred, also known as “one thousand, two hundred” dollars, USD. This–not $100k, not $1MM–is what it takes to get a basic setup started (assuming you’re not thinking of selling something like diamond jewelry or Rolex watches, of course). The rest of the startup doesn’t cost money. Ongoing operating expenses are another matter. For now, I’m talking about the raw startup fees.

Don’t start spending that dough yet. Read on…

I’m figuring that it’ll take some time to get the money up. While you’re saving up, that’s when you brainstorm up products to sell, and research the markets. Since you’re going to be online, that means you’ll most likely END UP having search engines deliver most of your traffic. At a search engine, if people aren’t searching for what you’re selling–you ain’t gonna sell it. It’ll sit and rot. So, you need to make sure people are searching for what you are considering selling. Use keyword tracking services for this. WordTracker’s the best one that won’t take your arm and leg clean off. If you’re willing to part with the limbs, there’s KeywordDiscovery.

Don’t ever get wedded to a particular idea, product, or category.
Don’t be discouraged if/when it turns out that the searchers are NOT searching for what you are thinking of selling! If there aren’t enough searchers, the solution is simple: Stop thinking of selling that!!! Think up something else to sell. Better to dump an idea, than obstinately try to “make” a market for it. Yah yah some lucky sucker in the 50s managed to sell pet rocks yada yada yada. To heck with that guy. Pretend he never existed. The average merchant will get laughed right outta the arena trying to sell some junk like that. And if you’re reading this, that means YOU, newb.

Keep checking out ideas until you find one that 1) People WANT! and 2) Doesn’t have much competition, or, the competition doesn’t know SEO (search engine optimization), and/or, the only competition is lame free-hosted-looking sites. Basically you want the competition to either not be there, or be so lame that it might as well not be there.

Get your sales tax license and any other legal stuff your local government requires (register your business, etc.).

Get a Business Checking account for the new business. Don’t get your merchant account (for credit-card acceptance) yet.

Set up your shopping cart software. Zen-Cart is FREE but the first setup is a really frustrating experience. Others charge, but some of them are ALSO frustrating! So I say, go with Zen. It’s free, and your pulled-out hairs will grow back.

WEB DESIGN: Throw away whatever you think would look good. Newbs have no taste in ecom. You’re reading this guide? That means you’re a newb.
Take yourself over to Amazon.com. Check out Sears.com. Peer at your own favorite ecommerce sites–ones you’ve bought repeatedly from.
Notice that they all have similarities: WHITE BACKGROUND, nav down one side, a search box, the logo goes at the top. Product-finding nav is separate from links to stuff like “about us” and the FAQ. About-us is on a separate page. Copyright stuff goes in the footer. Fonts are clean, nothing fancy. Border and tab colors are not ugly (what counts as “ugly colors” depends on your target market, NOT your own idea of ugly.) Links to products are underlined! Everything is easy to see and even a moron can work the site.

They have this kind of format for a reason: IT WORKS. Never mind what YOU think is “pretty.” Beauty on a sales site is in the mind of the Bank Account, and only the Bank Account. The Bank Account lives by the KISS Principle (Keep It Simple Stupid). So too, does your site, for they are joined at the hip.

Get and install a Secure Server Certificate (if you have shared hosting, you may have to have your host do this). Don’t pay any arm and leg for the thing. Check out RapidSSL.com.

Find Wholesalers.
This post may be enough, or it may be frustratingly not enough, depending on the product you’ve picked. Sometimes, finding a wholesaler is as easy as typing “Wholesale [product name]” into Google. Other times, it’ll be a wretched pain in the butt and require a load of research along with a couple of months of interminable-seeming waiting while the ones you find get around to responding.

For those research-requiring times: This is what almost always works, but is a PITA anyway. Go to the store that carries The Items. Write down the name of the manufacturer of the item, or the distributor, whichever is listed–it should be right on the pack. Write to them or call. Be prepared to WAIT FOR AGES for responses (if you call, it’ll seem immediate, THEN you wait ages for the catalog and price list to actually show up). Then, if it’s made by some really big place like Proctor & Gamble, expect to have to do more research before you find the distributor that’ll accept you and your little $1,000 order.

Still–do NOT tell them up front that you only intend to order $1K or less of stuff!!! Just ask what the minimum order is. If it’s above your budget, just say “uh huh” or “okay thanks” (without giving away your budget) and keep looking. Don’t burn your bridges by gagging outright, or otherwise branding yourself as a Puny Newblet. Remember, if all goes well, you won’t be puny nor a newblet in a few years. But if you let them pigeonhole you now, because it may interfere with dealing with them later.

Once you find a suitable distributor/manufacturer, get their price list. This should be a just-ask proposition once you find the right place. But, they may take ages to actually send the thing. That’s how the dinos are. Just vent on your blog

Make sure you can resell the item at a price the market will bear–and still make a profit doing it. Don’t forget to calculate for overhead, and the cost of them shipping the stuff TO you.

If it passes the demand-vs-competition test, and you can make a profit selling it, MAKE YOUR FIRST ORDER.
It takes about $900-$1000 worth of goods to get going, and not run out 2 seconds after the buyers find you. Don’t buy lots of the same exact item, rather, spread it out over 15 or so variants so you have an impressive selection (buy a few of each variant though). Customers don’t like empty shelves, and the web equivalent of that is a site that’s got about 3 different items.

Get the stock in and put at least some of it up on your site. DON’T ADVERTISE YET! You still need to be able to accept credit cards! Don’t worry, nobody’s going to find a site that’s not yet in the search engines, and isn’t advertised either. But don’t dawdle on the next steps–when the engines do rank your site in a findable position, you want to be ready. Get it into your mind that you will CONTINUE with the next steps right away, once you’ve put the stock onto your site! Don’t get so hurried that you do something stupid!!! But, don’t go on vacation or something, either, because eventually, the engines will list you, and you want to be ready by then. This isn’t the time for days off–at least, not until you’ve put in your merchant-account app (they will probably take a few days to do their end).

Go to your bank and get hooked up with a merchant account, to accept those magically wonderful plastic cards. It may cost you about $300 for setup fees (some or even all of this may be called an “application fee.” Important part is, you end up paying out money!). Yeah, there’s “free” offers on the net, but they have catches. For instance, Wells-Fargo has a free-app no-setup one, but their monthly fees are so much higher that you end up missing your shirt after about a year or 2. Other “free” offers are often more fly-by-night, doing things like renaming “setup” fees as “application” fees, or bait-and-switching you on the transaction fees (those “1%” fees are only if you–yes, YOU–have great credit, are in physical possession of the card [like at a brick-n-mortar], and other such baloney. Baloney, because if you’re an ONLINE merchant, you are doing “card not present” transactions–which are charged at the high rate. Etc. etc. etc.).

Monthly fees for merchant accounts come under various baffling names. Cut through the red tape by adding the whole wad of them up.

Make sure your merch acc’t uses Authorize.Net for its online processing. Auth.net’s one of the biggest online card processors, they know what they’re doing, and don’t F it up. All others I’ve checked out have been cussed for various things, some of those things being major.

When you get your merchant acc’t info, hook it into your shopping cart. The “how” varies with the cart. Check the cart’s manual/FAQs/forum/docs for the specifics that pertain to your cart.

Put the rest of the stuff up on the site, if you haven’t already done it.

Advertise. This is an ongoing expense. Some methods of advertising are obvious, while some are proprietary information even though they should be obvious to those with good eyes. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) at Overture is a fast way to start bringing in traffic. It’d take a whole other post to talk about its nuances. But the basic thing to remember is: Don’t pay more per click than you can afford.

How to do PPC and not lose your shirt at it is beyond the scope of this post, which is already very long. But it’s definitely worth more research if you don’t already have the skill (have=you have actually done it successfully). PPC does have a risk factor that is higher than something like a newspaper ad. That’s the tradeoff for it actually having the potential to be profitable–unlike a newspaper ad, which is usually a waste of money for a site. With PPC, you can get an INTERESTED viewer for as low as 10c/click…while with hardcopy advertising, your ad gets slapped at thousands of people who COULDN’T CARE LESS, yet the overall cost is higher! Sometimes much higher!

Look around online for other methods of advertising. There are a couple of good ones…good enough that I’m not going to explicitly state them, but I will admit to the fact that they exist.

I will also mention that some things online are JUNK: Foremost among pure junk are “guaranteed traffic” sellers. These money-eaters do things like show your site as a popup, or send robots to it, or show your ad in click-fraud-ridden foreign countries that you can’t ship to even if they did order. Some traffic-sellers even “show” your site in a frame on other sites, a frame so small that it’s invisible! This fools your logs into seeing lots of different IPs, but no humans are actually seeing you! So SAVE YOUR MONEY, nobody can legitimately guarantee nonjunk traffic!

Congratulations, you now have your merchant site up and traffic will start coming once you advertise it! The search engines will *find* you fairly quickly, but won’t LIST you in a user-findable spot for quite some time. Check out some SEO forums or blogs for how to get around that. Once you get your site to rank well in search engines, your business can expand exponentially!

Will you be able to sell anything? A resounding “maybe.” It’s a gamble. Some people have a good eye for what types of things they can sell, while others have some really abysmal product-picking skills! If a particular product is a go, expect to have to make some tweaks to get the best conversion ratio. And, if you have a good conversion ratio already–don’t mess with it!

An acceptable conversion ratio (visitors-to-buyers ratio) is 1/100. Higher than that is good.

Oh, one other thing: Make sure your TRANSACTION LIMIT from your merchant account can handle a spike of at least TEN TIMES the initial volume–and maybe more. A #1 Google listing for the relevant keywords can happen literally overnight. It’s not guaranteed by any means–but IF it does happen, you need to be sure your merchant account won’t put a “hold” on the funds due to the unexpected spikeage.

Good luck–unless you’re trying to sell the same stuff I am…

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…

gotta play it again!

While there is indeed a song called that, and it does occasionally drive me crazy, the “song” in this case is the song of the merchant side.

Some people have an addiction to buying domains. Some, to putting up sites. I’ve gotten an addiction to putting up MERCHANT sites! In fact, I’ve just registered a new domain, for a new merchant site.

While the timing is a bit on the suxor side…too close to Christmas to get enough ads in after I’ve made all the contacts I’ll need to in order to get the latest round of stock in–I’m quite confident that this will be a winner within a full cycle. There’s some serious competition for some of the items, but I’m sure that I’ll be able to get a fat enough piece of the pie, based on my prior experiences. Not only that, the product area looks quite profitable, so I should be able to advertise the tar out of it

Some may wonder why I’ve gotten addicted to the merchant side. I used to argue against it, preferring affiliate-side promotion hands-down! What made me change my mind? A few things went into the decision, but, to make a very long story short:

IF retail product cost = $50.
Affiliate commission = $5.
MERCHANT profit = $35!

With that, and the control factor, I have seen the fnords!! I just wish I’d opened merchant sites years ago. I used to talk about being a merchant and opening an aff program at CJ, but got lulled into just being an affiliate because it’s so easy. But now I cringe when I see the 10% commish, knowing that it’d (generally) be at least 40% if I’d been the one to ship the thing!

I did do one thing different this time: I picked a non-niche domain. Ultra-niche sites never did match my personality; they’re far too limiting and it’s never long before I think of something else I’d like to sell. So this new domain has room for lots of product lines. While they’ll still be fairly related (unlike a true mall), it’s not a single-line kind of name like my other merchant sites. I suppose it could be called a semi-niche…

So what’s the name? I’ll have it up in my link list soon. But I just registered it, and it’s still going to 404sville at the mo. So I’ll refrain from announcing it just yet. No point in getting a #1 in Google under “404!”

Since I’ve done that, the next week or so will be a bit busy. Now that I’ve got a Name, I’ll be off to the bank tomorrow to get the latest biz registration notarized and send that to the county, then I’ll have to send in to get another sales tax license, find a bunch of wholesalers, set up the next merchant account (they’re getting to know me at the merch. acc’t place LOL), get another bank account, etc.

Funny thing is, it’s all fun! Well most of it. Finding all the wholesale distributors for this stuff isn’t going to be too easy. And Providian’s going to love me a bit too much when I charge up the initial stocking.

But other than that, it’s fun and exciting! And I’m always looking forward to the next level: A place in some light-industrial building…only this time with MY name on the front door!

Current Mood: Erm… & Happy & Shocked

I have the trait of getting spurts of industriousness. Most of the year I prefer to do a minimum of w*rk…note the asterisk giving away my opinion of it. And I think it sucks because it seems a lot harder for me than for most people. Imagine having to spend 10,000 times the effort that the rest of the place spends, and you get what I usually experience. Yeah sux!! But the point of this post isn’t to whine, because a Spurt of Industriousness has kicked in.

A couple times a year, I’ll get a huge spurt of energy good for aiming at productive activity! In fact, if I didn’t aim it at productive activity, I’d probably end up climbing the walls!!

And this is one of those times. Yesterday I put up 28 posts on my game blog (scheduled so they don’t all show up at once, of course), and slated for today is a site redesign on a sales site, and I updated my deals blog, and I might even put some more flowers in.

Is it that I finally have been getting out into the sun? They say that sunshine is actually necessary for humans (it causes increased vitamin D production, among other good things)…

Dunno. But I know I’d better jump on this train while it’s here, because it only comes around once every few months.