Rearranging the Deck Chairs (Part 2)

After spending hours deconstructing my categories one-by-one, I ended up with one of the most mind-numbingly boring posts ever written. Still, the work will prove useful if I really do restructure my store one day. So here you go. If it’s still not a riveting post, at least it’s mercifully short. Compared to the first draft, I mean.

If you just plain don’t care, skip to the end of this post for a couple of new entries in the ever-popular “reasons to hate” series. I won't be offended.

New Products, Specials, and Bestsellers are no-brainers. They’re built right into Sunshop, and everybody expects them. Those all stay.

Games, Toys, & Puzzles has always underperformed expectations. Games that are genuinely fun and well-produced become popular and get wide distribution, which takes them off Curio City’s radar – why would I sell something you can find at Kay-Bee Toys? The more obscure games have cheesy production values and/or lousy markups. A few products like Fluxx hit that sweet spot of being great games with good production and poor distribution. Such games keep the category alive.

Kites & Other Outdoor Toys just ought to be Kites. I sell just enough bird kites to justify the category, and it's only one or two new products away from awesomeness. They’d do better if they were more visible.

Gadgets & Gizmos is my most popular category and the heart of my original Curio City concept (before I learned that the evil ThinkGeek already owns that niche). I would like to strengthen it.

Timekeeping is also very strong, thanks to two of my inaugural products: DayClocks and the Stonehenge Watch. The Bicycle Parts Clocks subcategory only exists to provide a targeted landing page for PPC ads and improve my search engine results. There is no rational reason to separate them out. I should give DayClocks a landing page, too, purely for SEO.

Living Spaces was always an awkward, nearly meaningless catch-all. Sweep it away! Night lights have sold well thanks to two things: the Lava Lamp nightlight (another of my original products) and the entire Switchables line. I’d probably make Nightlights a top-level category, and give Switchables its own landing page.

Incidentally, while researching this paragraph I discovered that none of my Switchables appear in Google’s first 20 pages, even though the basic fixture is my #5 all-time bestseller! That’s horrible. My product titles and descriptions consistently used “Switchable” (singular). So I changed all references to the plural. SEO comes down to details like that. Such a silly simple thing should improve my placement a few weeks or months from now. (Another SEO footnote: people search for “nightlight” and “night light” just about equally. “Nite light”, “Night lite”, and even “nitelite” come up occasionally. I therefore use both “nightlight” and “night light” on my product pages, even though the inconsistency offends my sense of style.)

Bed & Bathroom currently holds only the Big Schnozz line and the Periodic Table Shower Curtain. I think I still need this category, even if the name is generic. Living Spaces is another nonsensical name. I could rename it “For the Home” and make it a catch-all, or I could obliterate it and distribute its products elsewhere. Not sure what to do there yet.

The Art of Sybil Shane is a relic of my wife's push to carry "nice things". Fine arts didn’t work out so well and are on the way out. Bzzt! Sorry, Sybil. Sorry, Anne.

I like the idea of pet products, but I haven’t found enough unusual items to support it. I thought that the dog Frisbee would be a sure thing. It wasn’t. I can't even sell them at a deep discount. The AntWorks did OK at first, then died. Maybe being buried under a non-label like “Living Spaces” killed this category. I’d like to elevate it, and see what happens...but I’d need more product to justify that.

Kitchen & Grill is very difficult. Although there are gadgets aplenty, price competition is fierce. The Microwave Popcorn Bowl was one of my inaugural products, and one about which I felt strongly. But there are competing products for less money, and the wholesale pricing is just awful. Last spring I got briefly enthused about high-tech grilling accessories, like a solar-powered LED grill light and a remote temperature sensor, until I discovered just how competitive that market is. Home Depot and Target can have it. I still want to keep this category, even if I lack a good rational reason for it.

Vinylux is only there as a landing page. After multiple requests finally got me a link directly from the company’s website to my subcategory page, I’m sure not going to change it now.

Office & Workspace should be among my stronger categories. Except for the Mini-briefcase (another very early product) how do business card holders fit the Curio City concept? Right now I’m down to 10 mini-briefcases left, with no replacement waiting in the wings, so this subcategory is going to die soon unless I luck into something new. Even ordinary business card holders have sold well, so I just need to bring in enough to keep a pulse in the category until I find another great one like the mini-briefcase.

Magnets belong in the “WTF was I thinking?” category. It took me a while to learn that people won’t pay for shipping on small, cheap items. I think I would need to stock hundreds of designs to make them a viable impulse item, and their Curio City connection is weak anyway. Mark ‘em down and get ‘em out.

Outdoors & Travel serves only as an umbrella for its subcats. For Beach or Poolside is just a handful of beach towels. They have sold slowly, but reliably, and the markup is good. Main problem here is that my supplier is erratic. I haven’t decided whether to expand it or kill it. For the Garden fills a personal interest, so it lives. It would sell better if more prominent.

I thought golf-themed stuff would do very well. It doesn’t, except for the golf balls. For Travelers started because my wife was looking for a particular Travelon jewelry case that she couldn’t find. I sold those out fairly quickly, then couldn’t get more. I just don’t like this company for various reasons. I know that I have an audience for Travel, but I lack sufficiently unusual products.

After Hours helps define Curio City as an adult-oriented store. You would think that wine accessories would sell well, but the marketplace is flooded with products, few of which are clever enough to fit the Curio City concept. The category lives on more for its promise than for its performance. Smoking accessories have a more interesting history. In one very early concept, Curio City was going to be a mainstream head shop. Most of the stores that sell paraphernalia are pretty seedy looking, so there was (is) a niche for a more respectable seller. My first sale was a stash jar for a cancer patient’s medical marijuana. Tobacco is so discredited now, and smokers are such pariahs, that few stores court them anymore. I can buy some smoking keywords for as little as two cents per click. So this category stays. In fact, I need to reorder my bestselling cigarette cases and commit to remaining in stock on them.

I’ve struggled with Jewelry ever since supply problems killed off Typewriter Key jewelry. That was a perfect Curio City product – quirky, very individual, artsy, and recycled. Jewelers who will dropship enable me to offer a wide assortment without owning any inventory. I won’t repeat what I said in the Comments section of this post about my current jewelry lines. Suffice it to say that I am still actively trying to develop a new line that fits my store’s theme.

I created Apparel & Fashion specifically for lighted caps, because calling them “gadgets” is a stretch. This category lives on that strength alone. I’d like to expand it, eventually.

Seasonal is a weak name, but necessary as a catchall for holiday-themed items. I’d like to elevate each individual holiday collection to a top-level category and activate it only at the appropriate time, but that is a SEO no-no – if I want those theme pages to be indexed by the search engines, they have to be permanently active. And given the prohibitive cost of buying holiday keywords, I do need whatever organic ranking I can get. Do you have any idea what it costs to get on the first page with popular phrases like “Mothers Day gift”?

I don’t know if The Mayor’s Choice has ever convinced anybody to buy a product. It does support my Mayor character gimmick, and it has probably drawn attention to products that shoppers might not have noticed otherwise. There is no reason to kill it off.

Giftwrap and Greeting Cards might be two ideas whose time has passed. I planned Curio City as a one-stop gift shop. Customers would have their purchases giftwrapped, add a personalized card, and ship directly to the recipient. It still sounds like a reasonable concept, but it never worked out that way. In 2007 I sold all of $67.50 worth of giftwrapping, down from $103.50 in 2006. It’s a trivial amount of money, and it imposes extra work during my busiest season (virtually all giftwrap jobs are for Christmas sales). Due to poor software design, adding giftwrap options to new products is more time-consuming than it has any reason to be. More important, you can’t add products that have options to your shopping cart from the category page – you have to enter the product page to take the default “No giftwrapping”. That imposes an extra click to buy most of my merchandise. In favor of giftwrap: I still have about half of my initial giftwrap purchase left. The occasional giftwrap sale is pure profit. And the very few people who do take advantage of the service must appreciate it. So my executive decision is to keep this category alive until I sell out of one or more paper styles, and then end it.

Cards are a much easier decision. They hardly sell at all. This is another category, like magnets, that would require a much, much larger selection to become viable. I’m going to mark them down and get rid of the category when most of them are gone.

So that’s how I’d dispose of my existing structure. Now what about adding new categories, or shaking up the existing ones?

I keep flirting with ceramic tiles. There’s one vendor that I see at the Cavalcade of Crap every year whose stuff I really like. I’m sure it would sell steadily, if unspectacularly. What holds me back is a weak fit with the Curio City concept, especially since I more or less ruled out carrying art objects. There’s nothing particularly unusual or clever about them. And so the vendor’s catalog never moves from my to-do pile. I could bring in a few to test, but do they merit a category?

Sex is the one vice that’s noticeably absent from After Hours. A line of (tasteful) “marital aids” could add a little fun and edginess to Curio City. But I’m an old married man. It’s outside of my experience since perversion went mainstream and porn became ubiquitous. I don’t have any suppliers or merchandise in mind for it. It’s just a theoretically good idea, if I ever blunder into the right merchandise.

Americans are being told that we can consume our way to a better planet. Why not capitalize on greenwashing with a new Recycled Products category? I already sell a few recycled items like Vinylux and the Bicycle Parts stuff. All I’d have to do is move them to a new category. I already explained why moving Vinylux is problematic, though – I don’t want to break the link that took me so much nagging to get.

Party Supplies are another small After Hours subcategory that will need a new home if I kill off their parent category.

NEW STRUCTURE, assuming I can get my subcat flyouts. (I hope the formatting survives Blogger’s lousy interface).

• New Products
• Specials
• Bestsellers
• Gadgets & Gizmos
• Games & Toys
• Kites
• Card Games?
• Board Games?
• Toys?
• Clocks & Watches
• Bicycle Clocks
• Day Clocks
• Night Lights
• Switchables
• Bed & Bathroom
• Big Schnozz - New landing page
  
• Pets & Animals (?) – Needs more products
• Kitchen & Grill (?) – Needs more products
• Vinylux
• Ceramic Tiles (?) – Possible new category.
• Office & Workspace – no content of its own
• Business Card Holders – Needs more products
• Desk Toys (other than globes).
• Levitating Globes
• Magnets (just until they sell out, then kill it)
• Beach & Poolside (either beef them up or get rid of them)
• Gardening
• Sports
• Golf
• Baseball
• Other sports (I don’t have enough football, soccer, etc to make this any more granular)
• Travel – Needs more products.
• Beer, Wine, & Spirits
• Party Supplies
• Smoking
• Jewelry
• Apparel & Fashion
• Seasonal
• Valentines Day Ideas
• St Patrick’s Day Ideas
• Mother’s Day Ideas
• Father’s Day Ideas
• Summer Items
• Fall (or Back to School)
• Winter Holiday Suggestions
• The Mayor’s Choice
• Giftwrap Choices (might discontinue)
• Cards (to be discontinued)

NEW STRUCTURE, if I raise everything to the top category level. Subcategories exist solely as landing pages for SEO.

• New Products
• Specials
• Bestsellers
• Gadgets & Gizmos
• Kites
• Games
• Toys
• Clocks & Watches
• Bicycle Clocks
• Day Clocks
• Night Lights
• Switchables
• Bed & Bathroom
• Big Schnozz - New landing page
  
• Pets & Animals (?) – Needs more products
• Kitchen & Grill (?) – Needs more products
• Vinylux
• Ceramic Tiles (?) – Possible new category.
• Business Card Holders – Needs more products
• Desk Toys (other than globes).
• Levitating Globes
• Magnets (just until they sell out, then kill it)
• Beach & Poolside (either beef them up or get rid of them)
• Gardening
• Sports
• Golf Balls
• Travel – Find more products, or eliminate
• Beer, Wine, & Spirits
• Party Supplies
• Smoking
• Jewelry
• Apparel & Fashion
• Seasonal
• Valentines Day Ideas
• St Patrick’s Day Ideas
• Mother’s Day Ideas
• Father’s Day Ideas
• Summer Items
• Fall (or Back to School)
• Winter Holiday Suggestions
• The Mayor’s Choice
• Giftwrap Choices (possibly to be discontinued)
• Cards (to be discontinued)

If you plowed your way through all of that, I would like to hear your thoughts. Are either of these proposed structures enough of an improvement to justify the considerable work involved, and the loss of my existing page ranks?

A reason to hate Sunshop:

On April 28, I posted a message asking Turnkey if we were going to need a new USPS module for the May 12 rate increase. On May 2, I asked again, and was told that they were looking into it. On May 8 I asked again. On May 12, Turnkey explained that they had just gotten new specs from USPS; these had probably been published well in advance, but they were too busy to check. They would have a new USPS module for us the next night. Today is May 16, and we are still waiting. International shipping is broken (yay!), and I suspect that faulty USPS lookups contributed to this week’s weak sales results (although I’d expected a slow week anyway).

A reason to hate Google:

I’ve had enough experience with Google Checkout to notice a trend of undercharging customers for UPS shipping. I ordinarily do very little business with UPS because their rates are so high, but most of my GC customers choose UPS. After a customer was undercharged more than $10 for next-day air delivery, I analyzed the problem. Sunshop is looking the rates up correctly, but GC appears to be omitting the fuel adjustment and residential delivery surcharges (which are substantial). This more than offsets the free transaction processing that’s GC’s main benefit. When I reported this to Google, they tried to blame Turnkey. Turnkey correctly washed their hands of this one, so I went back to Google again. This time they referred it to engineering and discovered that, gosh, there is a bug in their UPS lookups. To their credit, they thanked me for my report and assured me that they’re fixing it. Did I ever mention that I also found and reported the parcel post lookup bug to Google a number of weeks ago? Getting them to acknowledge that one took considerably more work. How in the hell am I the only retailer in America that noticed this??? Google ought to be paying me for QA.