The Day of the DayClock

Business is still booming. Traffic hit 273 visits on Monday, and my conversion rate has climbed over 2%. Sales this week more than doubled LY and blew my plan away again. I wasn’t expecting this rate of sales until after Thanksgiving. I’m having a little trouble keeping up. I think I’m pretty well positioned for these next four make-or-break weeks, even though the benchmark numbers are intimidating. If I skip a blog entry or two, you’ll know why.

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The mighty DayClock was one of Curio City’s earliest bestsellers. I’ve sold nearly 200 of them – very good for a $40 item. Other products have surpassed it, but the DayClock always remained a steady performer and one of my favorite products.

Then it died out. I eventually discovered that the manufacturer was advertising them at a discount price in wholesale magazines. New competitors sprang up, all of them offering either free shipping or discount pricing. The few clocks that I had left at the original price threatened to last forever. Well, I’m not going to sell them at a short markup. I’ll wait for these flash-in-the-pan competitors to move on to something else, and then go back to my nice plodding pace with these. But meanwhile, I was still paying as much as $1 per day for clicks on DayClock ads. So I shut down my ads until such time as sales come back.

The very next day I sold one. The day after that, I sold two more. Now I’m on the verge of reordering (they have another, lesser pricing special going this month). And I’m leaving my ads turned off for now, since I apparently don't need them!