Heeeeere's Christmas!

After an encouraging weekend and one huge corporate sale, I quit waffling and placed nearly $5,000 worth of Christmas orders this week. I don’t have a single thing with bestseller potential, but I think it’s a solid lineup of “B” items. So Christmas is locked in. Even if I stumbled upon some miracle product today, it’s too late: Anything that arrives after thanksgiving has effectively missed Christmas, since online sales die out 10 days before the holiday.

This week’s daily average LY: $253. This year: $484, thanks entirely to three bulk sales (including one $1,400 lighted cap sale). Without those I’d be running way behind LY; with them, I’m ahead of the game. Traffic picked up a little this week, but it’s still nowhere near where it ought to be. 

My worries would all be behind me if I could position myself for bulk and B2B sales over regular B2C retail. Bulk sales do bring some drawbacks: Markup suffers because the merchandise is almost always discounted; costs that scale with sales go up (payment processing and payroll…but of course payroll is the whole point); and I have to reorder immediately to prevent lost sales when someone strips the shelves. But those are good problems to have. This week kicked ass by any measure. In fact, it might eclipse 2/6/2010 as my best non-December week ever.

Next week the average day rises to $384. Wish me luck. Or, better yet, buy stuff.