Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

April is almost over and I am happy about that.  When May hits, many Americans will start receiving their government rebate checks and they will have a little bit of extra disposable income.  I hope it will stimulate the economy as a whole so that consumer confidence rises.  I’m not sure it will because many people might save the money for a rainy day or spend it on Gas and Groceries.  But I’m sure a good portion of people will spend the money on goods and services that will put money in the pockets of businesses.

That being said, April has been okay in terms of business for us.  We’ve made a good push at the end of the month and we might actually make our financial goals for the month if we have a few more good days.  My plan is to add at least 2 new products to www.my-pillow-place.com before the month ends this Wednesday…worst case scenario would have new items added by the end of the week.

April has been a most inconsistent month for sales.  Taxes were due yesterday and not surprisingly, our traffic was slow and sales were none.  I remember last year how poor our business did in April and I expected the same this year.  We’ve exceeded last Aprils number by a lot, but compared to March and February, April has been a dog.

I expect things to pick up as this month comes to a merciful end.   As slow as we’ve been, I feel like I’ve been doing more work than ever.  Invoicing, product research, website optimization.  There’s a lot of work that goes into having an online business.  But it doesn’t seem worth it when sales are slow.  However, the work seem so worth it when you’re selling a lot.  So, come quickly May 2008.

The other day I had a trojan horse infiltrate my computer and lock me out.  The virus spread and infected my computer, in spite of the fact that I have norton antivirus and spysweeper running on my computer constantly.  I have a removable hard drive which has all of my business files backed up on it and I can’t stress enough how important it is to have backups of all your important files that are in a separate area than your main computer. I really don’t know what made me take the precaution, because I’m usually the type of person who thinks, “this will never happen to me!”

So now my computer is in for service and I won’t have it back for up to a week and a half.  Thankfully, I was able to add some of my new products over the weekend because now I can’t do any website changes until I get my main computer back.  Over the past weekend we added our New Children’s Floor Pillows and on Monday, I added our new easy to clean dog bed. The nice thing is that it forces me to take a break from working on the website every night.  I can actually get some rest now.