Taking Care of Business

Ho-hum. Another very good week draws to a close. I don’t know if anyone cares, but being a statistics junkie, I can’t help myself: Calendar August contains only three zero-sales days so far; LY’s August-to-date had 12 shutouts. I’ve beaten LY by comfortable margins every week this year. I actually exceeded my weekly sales plan twice. If next week’s sales continue this pattern, I might achieve my monthly sales plan for the first time since last Christmas. (Jan. and Feb. are statistical throwaways because the benchmarks were so weak.)

Eric plans to begin the fabled Sunshop upgrade this weekend. Curio City’s updated look could debut as early as next week. I suppose I ought to work on the merchandise turnover that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. But this sales surge has slain my urge to liquidate. Almost everything will eventually sell, and it’s not like I have hundreds of fabulous new products waiting in the wings.

Only my front page will survive this makeover unchanged. Its bounce rate is a little over 50%. Nearly half the people who come to my front page actually enter the store, which seems pretty good to me. Cart abandonment is a much bigger problem, and the new checkout procedure should improve that considerably.

Miscellaneous rambling:

Google recently changed their ranking algorithms again, knocking a lot of my old keywords out of circulation. Instead of raising them to ridiculous levels, I deleted them. Deep-pocket bidders (you know who you are, eBay and Amazon) continue to monopolize the top spots with their blind ads. I hope they go broke paying 50 cents a click for keywords that literally aren’t worth a dime. But there's no justice, is there?

UPS bounced two shipments this week. One was misaddressed to 30 Grove, rather than 300 Grove; they returned it to the west coast without contacting me or the shipper. The other one had no address problem; I rescued it from their local distribution hub yesterday. OK, so there’s no physical “Curio City” on Grove Street – my address is a UPS Store. The same UPS Store address that I’ve had for two years. UPS? UPS Store? See a connection? Funny, the post office never has any trouble figuring this out.

I might not update this blog faithfully every Friday anymore. I only know of three semi-regular readers, and none of you come by weekly. Only my nature compels me to update every Friday. Let’s see if I can rein that in.