Ok, we are fully ready for Online Holiday Shoppers…I’ve gone though the process of adding all the products that I wanted to get up before the end of the year.  I’ve posted deadlines on every product that has a holiday ordering deadline and I’ve optimized everything I could.  As far as site improvement for www.my-pillow-place.com goes…there’s nothing more I can do this year.  The site now can be put on autopilot and we can focus now, on customer service (which usually needs to be ramped up at this time of year.)

I’ve put some of our more popular items on a temporary sale:  our very popular Comfy Cocoon Foam Chair and our very popular Jaxx Giant Pillow Sac.  The products are great and very popular.  We’ve put them on sale for a short amount of time (I haven’t decided how long yet).  People are out looking for deals around the holidays in an economy such as this, so we’re trying to do our part to help people out.  We’ll probably feature different products over the course of the month.  To promote this on our site, we put a section on the left side navigation for “Today’s Specials” and this will hopefully generate some sales.

Now, being that online businesses usually see a very busy time between Mid-November to Mid-December, we’ve seen a little boost in traffic and sales over the last week.  Hopefully it ramps up even more over the next few weeks.  But our sales are lagging behind last year’s numbers at this date.  It makes sense, even though the banking crisis hit last year in October, most people still had jobs.  Right now, unemployment is really high.  Less people are shopping.

In my personal life, I plan to cut back on shopping for the holiday’s since I lost my day job in June.  I’m sure many other people will be doing the same.  As we know, if everyone cuts back on shopping, the economy will get worse.  We have a government who doesn’t seem to know how to stir economic growth and continues do everything the opposite of what would make business and jobs comes back.  But, I digress.

Anyways, here’s hoping that those that still have jobs continue to buy things so that people continue to have jobs. Happy Holidays!

I know its eary…its not even November for goodness sake…but the internet works differently than real life, so its good to start planning ahead.  I’ve updated our Holiday Gift Idea Guide Page.  Removed products that have gone away.  Added products that are new to My Pillow Place this year.  And placed a link to that gift giving page up at the top of the left hand navigation so people will see it.

You see, there are two things that websites have to concern themselves with.  Getting the new page indexed and the shipping time of some of the products on the website.  So if you have products like ours.  Products that have some manufacturing time associated with them.  You want to encourage people to purchase early so that manufacturing and shipping times are not an issue.  You see, even though it is exciting to get a boost in sales because of the holidays, you still stress out because you want everyone to receive their orders on time.

The first year for us was a nightmare.  I won’t bore you with the details, but a mistake with one of our suppliers resulted in some people not receiving their gift orders until mid to late January.  The stress of people not getting their orders is great.  So we want people to order early, often and a lot…as any business does.  We’re still adding new products to the site…so the holiday gift guide may still be growing.

I was a beast today…I’ve added two new dog bed products today.  Never in the history of My Pillow Place have I added two new products in the same day.  Yes, I can see your excitement is shared.  You feel it too, right?  Round Dog Beds and Rectangle Dog Beds….lets add dog bed products till the cows come home.  Or rather, till the Dogs come home…and when they come home, they’ll be able to choose between Round and Rectangular.  Why were the dogs not home to begin with?

Anyhoo….the real news of the week is….well dog beds, see above…no, just kidding.  This week has been a weird up and down week.  Starting Sunday.  Sunday night to monday morning was probably one of our top money generating time periods for about 8 hours…then then next day, nada…then the day after that….awesome…sales galore.  Then then next day, nothing….it has been so inconsistent…I would just like to see slow and steady win the race…several sales every day would be a mind blowing experience…instead we get these drastic ups and downs…I guess I should just be thankful that we have ups, sometimes.

With the addition of our newest supplier, I’ve added our 2 newest products in the last few days…the Sitsational Soft Chair was added a few days ago and the Hide-a-Mat folding floor mat was added today.  I’ve been trying to get these new products up before the holidays come, which seems to be quickly approaching.  The economy’s up and down news is affecting how people spend money right now, and we have to get in position to earn some of that holiday gift giving money as we close out the year.

This is the time when most people spend some money even if they shouldn’t and it gives a boost to the economy.  Last year at this time the bank crisis had just hit and we still did ok in terms of sales.  The difference is that even though the crisis hit, many more people still had jobs.  This year, many people, including myself, lost their jobs.  And people with no money don’t spend.

I’m hoping beyond all hope, that for the sake of the country, things start to get better…can we have the mid-term elections this year?   We need change!

We’re starting to see some movement on a line of kids chairs, soft pillows and other modern kid furniture that we added a while back.  A few months ago, we added 5 new products from one of our vendors that were smaller versions of  some of our larger Foam Furniture pieces.  Best thing is, they come in some kid friendly colors and at a much lower price point.  After a few months of selling none of it, we’re starting to move these items.  I’m glad because it really is good stuff.  I didn’t know how to market these products though and I was afraid that we weren’t getting traffic for this type of stuff.  I’m still not 100% sure how to market it, but it seems to be getting some traction on our floor pillows page and foam furniture page. 

In my personal life, I’m starting to see more and more people I know face unemployment.  In spite of the obama mania media telling us the economy is getting better, it really isn’t.  I see it before me.  An architect job that I seek is not available, and many of my friends are either getting laid off, or on the bubble.  So I don’t see improvement.  Many of my friends are worried about their futures too.  They, however, don’t have an online business to fall back on like I do.  But if so many people in the country get laid off that no one has any funds to buy our products, then I may as well not have  a business because we’ll be making no money.  I hope the economy improves soon, I’m just not seeing it.

Ok, we are now into Q4 2009…this is the home stretch for the year.  This is the season where retailers (online and offline) can start to make the numbers that make it worth being in business.  With economists predicting a 1% drop in sales this holiday season over last year, what are we to do.  There is no doubt that we are making less that we did a year ago.  So many more people are out of work than they were a year ago, including myself.  Unless some miracle happens, the great holiday sales rush we saw last year at My Pillow Place will not be matched. 

So here we are.  It is October.  And the first few days of Q4 have been slower than I anticipated…Slower because September was much stronger than I thought it would be.  And I thought that would continue into October.  Only in the last day has our traffic and sales reached an ok level…(and what’s considered Ok right now is less than acceptable). 

So, I am pushing new products.  I will be adding new stuff in the coming days and weeks.  We have a new company coming on board (whose credit application I will be finishing right after I publish this post).  I’ve added a new and probably our most unique product today.  Its not really even furniture.  More like oversized toys.  I’m not sure how to market it, how to optimize for it…I will be doing a little more research to figure out what this thing should be marketed as…check it out Here:  Jaxxs Kids Shapes

The last few weeks have brought a wave of problems with almost all of our drop-ship suppliers.  If there had to be problems (and there always has to be problems) I’m just glad they occurred in September and not in November and December when sales go up and deadlines become critical.  Now, there still could be problems at the end of the year, but I’m hoping all of the crap has come to an end.

What did we deal with in September?  Well, I’ll tell you…thanks for asking.  One supplier discontinued a slew of products, fabrics options and changed some existing products.  One supplier completely changed their whole computer system which went from helpful and efficient to a nightmare.  And one supplier has to be checked on every single order because they make mistakes.  We do check every order confirmation.  But when we have to call to correct the order, or the amount they charged ,or the address was entered wrong by them or this or that….it sucks away our time and becomes a nightmare of credits, returns, complaints and all the rest of the bad stuff that goes with running a business online.

You’ve probably heard those commercials on the radio where they can set you up with a business selling things online where someone else does all the work and you make all the money?  Well, that’s a crock.  It’s not that simple…there is no magic bullet to easy riches online.  Anytime you run a business that has to rely on and deal with other people, unexpected things will happen because there are people out there that don’t take pride in what they do.

I tell my wife, and business partner, that people who are employees of the companies we work with don’t care as much as we do.  It’s because this business is ours and its success or failure is based on the work we put in.  But many people who are employed by others do just enough to not get fired (to steal a line from office space).  And there are people out there…breaking news…who hate their jobs.  And don’t do the diligence required to make sure things are correct.

If people understood that just spending a little extra time to make sure things are right at the beginning, can save time, headaches and bigger issues later.  That’s a tip folks, write it down…

Based on the discontinuation of some of our products by our manufacturers, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days and weeks updated, tweaking and rearranging our product lines.  This has inevitably caused our product splash pages to need to be updated.  As an example, our Foam Furniture splash page has become an almost entirely new page.  I’ve removed about 3 products from this section. I’ve moved some of our more popular products (such as the Relax Lounger) to the top to increase the exposure of good selling items. And I’ve added new products to this page that are maybe marginally related. 

One of my tricks to improve sales on some of the other items are to put products on pages that are already listed high.  There is the occasional customer who comes to My Pillow Place in search of one item, but the end up either buying something completely different or even adding a different item to the order they originally placed.  This is a good thing.  Well, any sales are a good thing.  But there is something to say by exposing your customers to as much as you can because impulse buys are sometimes beneficial.  Since we don’t have a real store type of register to entice people’s impulses, we have to hope that they see something they really want as they browse through our store.

In the meantime, I do everything in my power every day to increase our presence in the internets and optimize and link trade to help every page get found for something.  I’ve made many changes over the last 2 weeks and now I am waiting for the search engines to recrawl these pages and reindex them based on our most recent updates…pages should be reindexed every 2 weeks or so, because static pages become outdated.

I’ve been spending (wasting) a lot of my days lately updating one of our suppliers product line because they keep discontinuing products.  This really sucks, because our product line keeps shrinking.  In response, we are racing to find new companies to boost our product line.  Here’s a pro tip:  Do not put all of your eggs in one basket.  If you find that you are relying on one or two companies for the bulk of your sales, diversify as much as possible.  If that company ever has an issue or goes out of business, you will be screwed.

One of our competitors rely’s on this one vendor almost completely.  And they are losing product left and right.  On another note, I have re-defined a few of our products with some new meta and title tags to help boost traffic on these products.  Our Square Animal Pillows for Kids as well as our Round Animal Pillows need to get more exposure.  These products have been redesigned based on customer feedback that we passed along to our manufacturer.  So, its time to push these wonderful children’s pillows.

Also, yesterday I, in the name of diversification of manufacturers, have just added a giant Bean Bag Pillow that can be used indoors as well as outside.  Its a unique product in our line because of the fact you can use it outside on your pool deck or even just in your backyard.  I hope we sell this product, because I like it a lot.

I’ve started to focus on throwing visitors from our Yourhomescape.com  website (which is our new affiliate site about home improvement and home accessorizing.) So, using our Rec Room Section, I post products from My Pillow Place (among other affiliate program products) to get more targeted traffic to some of our products.  I find it helpful to have another source of traffic to give to My Pillow Place because we are trying to grow and grow and increase exposure and there are some things I wish I had done earlier.  We created a Facebook Fan Page to let people keep up with our new products and sales.  (Sorry, shameless plug coming:  If you have a Facebook account, become a Fan, tell all your friends, spread the word, you’ll be a hero!)

But anyway, back to our YourHomescape site and integrating it with My Pillow Place to create a sybiotic relationship that can help both site perform better.  The Rec Room Furniture has become probably the best area to help My Pillow Place get people to visit.  I’m not trying to overwhelm and manipulate at all.  I’m just trying to increase exposure of both sites and the Facebook page to help us grow as a business.  And in this economy, we can all use a little help and exposure to increase and grow our business.  I wonder if I should add a My Pillow Place Facebook badge to YourHomescape.  Is that a little too much?  Hard to say.  I may try it for awhile and see what happens.