Leap Year
February 29, 2008 at 12:52 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: casual seating, leap day sale, soft furniture
February being the shortest month of the year, it is nice to have an extra day to get as many sales as possible. We’ve had a decent month this past February. We’re starting to become a little more consistent in getting sales. We’ve had about 3 days this month where we had no sales at all. Our casual seating seems to be the area that is getting us the most traffic and sales at this time.
I’ve decided to turn on our pay per click ads for the day to see if I can’t generate a higher volume of people who need/want bean bags and other soft furniture products. February has been good, but it certainly wasn’t as good as our January or December. I think the economy is hurting us. But it’s hurting everyone.
I haven’t decided yet, but we might run a Leap Day Sale tomorrow which will allow customers to get an automatic 5% off by entering a code in our order form. It might be a good way to finish the month strong.
About Drop Shippers
February 21, 2008 at 1:17 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: drop shipping
The idea of drop shipping products on your website is great. Selling products you never have to buy unless someone first buys it from you is so much safer than buying a bunch of items to stock and then hoping they sell. I’ve never done it, but I understand many Ebay stores operate in this way. It would scare me to have stock I couldn’t sell.
But there are some problems that occur with drop shippers and I bring them to light here because its happened to us a lot recently. Our biggest problem is production time. We sell some items that are made to order, so they take a little longer to ship because they have to be made first. We outline on our site which products may not ship for 2-3 weeks. Its written there, we stand by that. But sometimes, it takes longer than that. And if I were a customer, I would be frustrated if it took 4 weeks to get something that I ordered online. So I feel their pain.
What is slightly worse than the longer than usual production time is when they tell us that “This will ship today!” And we pass that information on to the customer, and it ends up not being true. When I have to call a drop shipper every single day and they give me information to placate me that is not true, I get pissed off.
Another problem we have is miscommunication or lack of communication from our suppliers. We have a supplier who recently made product and price changes and essentially gave us no notice. We have also had a supplier who discontinued one product and replaced it with another product. However, the information on the new product was issued as, “Hey, this is a new product we’re adding to our lineup!” They never mentioned anything about it replacing the old product. So for a month and a half, we’ve been posting the product as available when it really is not.
Miscommunication is frustrating!
Google Number 1
February 19, 2008 at 1:11 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: shopping
We seem to be playing jump rope in the Google search results. I’ve watched our Floor Pillows keyword jump between the 1 and 2 spots in Google for the last few weeks…I’m glad to be back to one…I just wish that I knew what I was doing to influence these changes.
Maybe I’m not doing anything. Maybe I’m just accessing different datacenters which show us at different places. Who knows. But I like being above everyone else. I’ve just created a new Squidoo lens for My Pillow Place related to shopping. I’m just trying to figure out what are the most common squidoo topics that I may be able to get a foothold on and shopping seems to be a hot topic.
Hit or Miss
February 16, 2008 at 12:50 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentI was elated when our floor pillows page got a number 1 listing in Google and not only had us leap one of our competitors, but a huge company like Crate and Barrel as well. Well, how quickly we fall…we’ve dropped to the number 2 position and although that really stinks, its could be worse. I have to work hard to get us back up…it would seem that being second would make you always work a little harder. Being number 1 seemingly allows you to rest on your laurels…however, in SEO you can never do that because there are sites out there that are alway looking to dethrone you.
Our floor pillows are like cushions….and great for casual seating in any room in the house. But as much as we love selling these type of products, we really need to expand. My Pillow Place hovers around 110 pages currently. And as of yesterday, I discontinued one of our products because I discovered that the quality was very poor. I only wish I realized this sooner. Its unfortunate when you don’t stock all of the products you sell. When you drop ship, you hope everything is high quality. I actually have a sample of almost everything we sell, but there are some things that I don’t. And when we discover a poor quality product, it is gone immediately. You end up putting a lot of trust in the companies you work with.
This week has been odd….We have one day with no sales, then the next day is 6, then the next day is none again…I can’t take the inconsistency. I sometimes blame the economy, but its not always that…sometimes customers are just persnickety (never thought I would use that word).
Back from Vacation
February 13, 2008 at 12:59 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bags, Foam Furniture, remote controlling your business
The staff at My Pillow Place has just returned from Vacation and it had been a long time coming. The nice thing about running an online store is that as long as you have an internet connection, you can still effectively run your business. I didn’t like the idea that I would have orders sitting in the email for a week. So, in our lovely Hawaiian hotel room, we were about to send and receive emails as well as place orders. Taking care of the accounting part of our business had to wait until we returned home.
We received a good number of orders while we were away. I was pleased that some of them even shipped while we were sitting on the beach. The worst part of it was trying to deal with problems being 4-5 hours behind many of our vendors. Calling long distance and having a 5 hour time difference created a few issues. But we were able to deal.
I think we had a surge in sales for the valentine’s day holiday coming up. Our traffic and sales have slowed in the last few days and I hope this is temporary. We had such a good December and January (for us, at least) that we now have these high expectations and to be honest, February kind of sucks! We won’t even come near January’s numbers. But, I have to really measure against last year. We’ve already surpassed the sales and traffic of last year and its only the 12th of Feb. We also have an extra day because 2008 is a leap year.
I’ve been really disappointed because for all of my work optimizing my bean bag products, I have not seen any movement in my keyword listings for these splash pages. This is disappointing because I put a lot of work in. And to really see true growth in our business, I need bean bags to generate the quality traffic and sales I’m looking for. I guess I have to spend some time and figure out another approach…maybe some more web 2.0 related information can help…
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