Here's the Black; Now Gimme the Green

March

Total income: +27.8%
Total COGS: +41.1%
Payroll: +33.2%

Marketing: +15.1%
Net Income (Profit): +62.1% (+$761)

Year to Date

Total income: +8.3%
Total COGS: +14.8%
Payroll: +3.2%

Marketing: +8.1%
Net Income (Profit): +39.1% (+$666)

Kite season is here! I not only demolished LY’s sales…I’m just $74 shy of squeaking out my sales plan for the month. It’s not all lollipops and unicorns, though.

·         Most of the profit increase (actually a loss reduction…real profit never shows up before November) will evaporate after I pay my accountant’s tax prep fee. That expense is a few weeks late this year.

·         A lot of those sales were Jackite dropships, meaning that I’m selling merchandise I haven’t paid for yet. I’d rather sell stuff I already own.

·         COGS (the Cost of Goods Sold) rose a lot more than sales did, in part because shipping charges cut into my markup on dropships.

·         As much as I appreciate all of the nice big kite sales, my routine, bread-and-butter small sales have dropped off noticeably. Eight $250+ days is great; 13 sub-$50 days is worrisome.

The numbers might have looked even better had a mysterious technical glitch not shut down credit card processing for a day or two before I caught it. My credit card processor (CDG Commerce) gives me access to either the Quantum Gateway or the Quantum Transparent Gateway. When you submit a credit card order, the “regular” gateway takes you away from my site and pops up an ugly plain-white CDG confirmation page. You click a button to return to my checkout confirmation screen. The transparent gateway eliminates that extra screen. I used the transparent gateway for five years until it simply stopped working for no apparent reason last week. 

It took a few hours of fumbling to figure out that I can still accept cards through the regular gateway. The superfluous confirmation screen isn’t a big problem because the customer has already clicked Process Order by the time they see it. It’s not like they can back out. I’m a worrier, though – when something stops working, I need to know why. Technology can be a lot of things, but “mysterious” isn’t one of them.

When you’re a one-man business, nobody cares about your problems except you. It took two days of nagging just to get somebody to take ownership of the mystery. Once you finally get a support person’s interest, he’ll usually run it to ground. I say “usually” because they still haven’t solved it and they stopped sending me progress updates two days ago. I think they've given up.

Meanwhile, three charges from last week never found their way into my checking account. CDG just fixed that today, citing a “technical issue”. Seriously? This should be routine stuff. This is what your company does. I have reluctantly decided to ditch CDG next week. I hate to perturb systems that are working, and this one worked fine for five years. But they’ve been plagued with errors ever since they started implementing “improvements” a few months ago. 

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Oh, and with all of that crap going on I blew off the Boston Gift Show.