Uh-Oh

Did you miss me these past two weeks? Probably not. A few regular readers have added Curious Business to their RSS readers; presumably they at least see the subject line of new posts. But if it’s become a chore for me to write these entries, it must be a chore to read them, too. My recent posts have only been interesting if you’re following Curio City in obsessive detail. Hell, even my own wife doesn’t read my blog. It’s no wonder the hit counter at the bottom of the page doesn’t move much.

Only a small fraction of the 115+ posts in my archives might entice a curious browser to stick around. So I’m going to finish up the few topics that I still have on the hook, and then break my weekly posting compulsion. I’ll update when I have something compelling to say.

Last week’s vacation killed sales deader than did either of my previous absences. Traffic dropped from 150 visits to 50 per day. LY I enjoyed roughly 65% of normal sales during my vacation week. This year I did barely 30% of normal. More worrisome, sales did not recover along with daily visits when I flipped my ads back on. This week is breathtakingly bad. I’m hoping that technical problems are to blame.

Eric found the time last weekend to upgrade my site from Sunshop 4.1.0 to 4.1.4 (on the same day that Turnkey released 4.1.5, keeping me one step behind). I’ve turned on several new features. The best one is a javascript rollover photo app. To see what I mean, just go here and sweep your cursor over the little thumbnail pics.

There’s also a new cross-selling feature on the shopping cart – “users who bought this product also bought…” And a little currency converter on the main page lets you see prices in a variety of other currencies. Currency conversion is supposedly turned off, so it only shows up because of a bug in my template. But even though I don’t especially want to encourage more non-US sales, I think it’s kind of nifty. I’ll keep it for now. Every sale is precious.

Google Analytics should be using the new Sunshop modules now. That would mean one less customization to maintain going forward. I don’t think Eric has commented out his own code yet, so I’m not positive that Sunshop is doing the heavy lifting. I really ought to verify this, although I’m loathe to perturb something that’s working.

So, what’s the technical problem I mentioned? Twice since the upgrade, I’ve seen this message instead of my website:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: User kraken has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in /home/virtual/site152/fst/var/www/html/include/db_mysql.php on line 47

There seems to have been a slight problem with the database. Please contact the server admin to report this problem.

If I have hit it twice in routine checks, how many customers has it driven away? This is one of those frustrating things that I’m powerless to fix myself. I’ve been seeking help from Turnkey, MochaHost, and poor longsuffering Eric. Between the three of them, it will get solved. Eventually. Meanwhile I’ve been paying for ads that direct people to a crippled website. This morning Turnkey posted an easy fix that seems to have worked, so far. We shall see.

If it looks stable, I will try next week to implement flyout menus myself. There are a couple of other minor amateur modifications that I think I can attempt, too. After that, I can finally try again to find a new (permanent?) contract developer.

On a cheery note, I’m still selling some old marked-down merchandise that I won’t replace, liberating long-imprisoned inventory dollars. Unfortunately, my usual bestsellers barely have a pulse. Shoppers must be spending their increasingly scarce dollars on back-to-school necessities right now, while the macro economic news keeps getting worse. Or maybe my website is just broken.

• Tick…tick…tick
• Legal extortion
• The zombie store
• Wacky ideas

Taking the Bull By the Horns

After last week’s malaise, I forced myself to grapple with some unpleasant details that have been piling up. Sales are down, and things are slow as I wait for vacation to arrive and my OTB to build up. Most of what follows is pretty picayune.

First I tried to resolve a mildly irritating customer return problem. A customer wants to exchange the record purse that she ordered. Being the buffer between the customer and the vendor is costing me more time and postage than it's worth. The vendor is even less thrilled with this than I am. To make it doubly challenging, the customer has a Yahoo.com email address, so I can only sporadically reach her via email. (Yahoo blocks most of my email as commercial spam). To make it triply challenging, email communication with the vendor is often slow and spotty, too. This is the slowest-motion transaction ever. I hope that it wraps up with everybody's feathers smoothed before I leave for vacation. But I doubt that it's possible now. As of yesterday, the returned purse still had not arrived.

I finally followed through on the bluster of my past few posts: I reset my open-to-buy number to zero. (I know; go ahead and catch your breath.) Customers last week obligingly bought merchandise that I either have in plentiful supply, or won’t reorder at all, so the newly liberated dollars increase my nice new black OTB number without compelling me to immediately replenish the merchandise. I’m a little concerned that my bestsellers have stopped selling for the moment. Most of the old merchandise that is moving out now is discounted to break-even, or a little better. But some of these dollars have been locked up since late 2005, so I'm pleased to get any of them back.

Vendors can smell money. They have been calling and emailing lots of tempting new items and special offers. I remain resolute, at least until after vacation. Grow, little budget, grow!

I chased down a missing Fascinations backorder. I’ve sold a couple of floating globes lately. I need more. Their warehouse called on 7/12 to ask if I wanted my backorder shipped. Yes, please. I followed up with them on 7/26. As of today, I still don’t have the merchandise or an invoice. Are they really that backed up on order fulfillment?

I found out that my software supports quantity discounts. Displaying a discount schedule might deflect some of the wholesale inquiries from the clueless that I receive almost daily. But alas, bulk pricing applies to a product’s individual variants, not to the total quantity ordered. I can’t give you the 24-item discount price if you buy six each of four different cap styles. Since I don’t ordinarily stock more than 24 pieces of any individual color/style, the feature is worthless. I did implement bulk discounts for a few items that don’t have variants, but that’s just tinkering. Maybe I can eventually have it customized to work the way it ought to work.

Most significantly: I begged my current developer (Eric, who's been with me from the start but would like to be freed) to bring my site up from version 4.1.0 to 4.1.4 – ideally while I’m on vacation -- so that I can try once again to hire a new developer. Yes, I decided to grapple again with that old problem. A new developer will undoubtedly be expensive, but I have got to have regular support if I’m to keep growing. I will simply have to find a way to pay what it costs.

Despite whittling away at my PPC ad campaigns, Google is still costing in excess of $10 per day. Traffic last Tuesday zoomed to 175 visits – the busiest day since June 5. Yahoo still burns $5 daily without much result. Together, I’m spending up to $450 per month on search engine marketing, with a $250 budget. I’m reluctant to slash ads that are bringing visits, but if those visitors aren’t buying, they're just a burden. My OTB reset maneuver means that my bank account is running much closer to the bone than previously, so I can’t tolerate significant, ongoing overruns in PPC ads. I need to keep cutting, slowly and surgically.

That's it. Unless something extremely unexpected and interesting develops, my vacation will preempt blog posts for the next two Fridays. I'll be back on Aug. 22.

Possible future topics:

• Legal extortion
• The zombie store
• Wacky ideas

Dog Days

Man, am I bored. Business is taking a nice nap. This week could end up as the worst of the year to date. July will be the first un-spectacular month of the year, and August (with its nine-day vacation) could be downright poor if the current trend holds up. Traffic is down and the macroeconomic news remains grim, so I’m not worried that I’m doing something wrong. But it does get me thinking about how I might be able to goose things.

I don’t have any medium- or long-term projects going. This year’s robust sales gave me a good excuse to turn my back on the old, persistent problems that I’m sick of thinking about – no developer support, no marketing or advertising initiatives, shitty search engine rankings, no open-to-buy dollars – you’ve read this lament over and over. Unless “natural growth” (a dubious concept) carries Curio City forward on momentum alone, 2009 isn’t going to match 2008’s progress. I either need to surmount one old obstacle or to put something new into play…and I need to invest the effort now, before Christmas ramps up.

My motivation falls off along with sales. It’s easy to put Curio City on autopilot and tend my garden or putter around the house instead. I’m not much of a spark plug anyway. Even if I manage to kick myself back into gear, I’m not sure where the effort should go. What can I do by myself…isolated, without resources, and bereft of new ideas?

Well, I can reduce my PPC ad costs. Google is costing me about $10 per day. First I deleted most of the “Product Categories” campaign and tuned up what’s left. Those generic keywords (e.g., “unusual clocks”) were costing up to a buck a day with only miniscule payoff.

Then I tended to my “Product-specific” campaign, which I neglected while sales were robust. For an example: Thanks to ridiculous shipping charges from the Left Coast, the gross margin on my one mechanical coin bank struggles to reach 40%. It’s dubious whether I should even carry this thing at all, much less pay to advertise it. Yesterday I spent $3.28 to buy 16 clicks and no sales. The keyword “coin banks” alone has cost $25.33 to date to produce one sale. Buh-bye! I have spent an astonishing $105 on advertising record purses, and recorded only two conversions (although I’ve sold more purses than that). I wonder if I'd ever sell another purse if I were to shut those ads down entirely. Whenever my attention wanders away from PPC advertising for more than a week, I start to bleed money.

Rising prices sent ten more Yahoo keywords into dormancy last week; I deleted nine of them. My Yahoo spend is comfortably below $5 per day now…but given its lousy results, why am I even spending that much? Given the rate at which Yahoo keeps trimming my keyword list, they seem to have reached the same conclusion.

Reducing costs by a buck or two a day is nice, but it doesn’t increase sales and might even harm them slightly. What else can I do?

I could pursue more links. My percentage of referral visits remains stuck at around 20% despite landing links at Dayclocks.com and Panthervision.com in the past several weeks. Octopus Overlords referrals came roaring back when that forum was resurrected. But my #1 source by far is search.ebay.com. Huh? Where does that come from, and how can I affect it? And why don’t my other forums – Popehat.com and GamingTrend.com – even rank in the top 50? I suppose I could improve the links in my signatures on those sites, and see if that makes any difference.

I can try to remember that Google Base expires every month, and upload a new data file before that happens instead of my usual 3-5 days after the fact.

I can keep hammering out blog posts in the hopes that I can find new ideas through brute force.

None of this adds up to a hill of beans. I need to step out of my comfort zone and initiate something serious. But what? Figuring that out should be next week’s goal. Maybe I should follow the open-to-buy formulae to some conclusion.

Open to Buy Revisited

I spent $1,000 more in July than my old OTB method indicated was prudent. I pushed the red ink to well over $2,000 and drained my operating cash to its lowest level ever. Naturally, I turned my liquidity into inventory just as business dropped off…and, naturally, I barely scratched my merchandise wishlist. I could easily spend another $2,000 to replenish a few items and get everything new that I’d like to try.

Since I managed to spend that money without the sky falling, I decided that I’m going to reset my OTB to zero at the beginning of August. As we discovered three weeks ago, that old number is a rough guideline at best.