On the Sixth Week of Christmas, My Business Gave to Me...

...Six days of sickness/A five-digit month/four minutes offline/three giveaways/two gorgeous days/and a big rusty pail of fail.

Last week my wife brought a virus home from New York, as she traditionally does when she travels. This week it jumped into my head and chest. After slogging through long days of processing orders, shipping packages, reordering stock, and ordering supplies, I needed long naps. I couldn’t do anything proactive at all.

Sales were good even without any higher brain functions engaged. It might have made some small difference if I could have worked on a late newsletter, monitored my ad campaigns, put out some facebook tweets, and returned telephone messages promptly. But recent reports that the American consumer is again consuming with gusto are not exaggerated – which is especially good after I had to refund $102 today, making it the first sub-par day of the week.

My “Christmas Lite” strategy of bringing in fewer marginal new products is being vindicated as people buy marginal old products instead. Take, for example, ear buds: I don’t sell more than half a dozen of those all year, and I have 100+ in stock. I was planning to phase them out. But in the past two weeks I’ve moved at least a couple dozen. I also cleared out at least eight old discontinued products. When all the dust settles, I hope that my inventory level will be a thousand bucks lower than it was last year, and with the money more effectively invested.

There are some unexpected casualties. Fuzz scarves have died almost entirely after consistently strong sales for the past three winters. Whisky Stones were very slow coming off the blocks, although they are surging now. Switchables are scarcely participating in Christmas at all. Competitor shenanigans have driven that line down many times before, so I presume that's happening again. I should investigate that when I get time, as there are a crapload of inventory dollars locked up there.

But I won’t start a post-mortem with two more weeks left to go. Next week should be the peak. It’s a good thing the virus has mostly finished with me, because naps won’t be an option if the shoppers frenzy as expected – no matter how bushed I get (and doesn’t that word seem even more apt after the disastrous presidency?).

On the Fifth Week of Christmas, My Business Gave to Me...

A five-digit month/four minutes offline/three giveaways/two gorgeous days/and a big rusty pail of fail.

I needed a five-digit month just to match LY, so that’s less wonderful than it sounds. More wonderful was an $1,100 lighted cap telephone sale that propelled yesterday to a new one-day sales record. Thieves don’t usually order by phone and the charge passed the fraud screening with flying colors, so I think it’s OK. That not only put November in the bag, but even put me $800 ahead of last year to date. If I can just hit my numbers for the next few weeks I might still avoid my first-ever year-over-year decline.

Look at all the black ink, courtesy of the past two days:

November: 

Total income: +23.8%
Total COGS: +32.5%
Payroll: -4.1%
Net Income (Profit): +48.4%

YTD:

Total income: +1.7%
Total COGS: +0.6%
Payroll: -1.1%
Net Income (Profit): +11.3%

Ain't that beautiful? Speaking of sales records, you might like to see them. 

•    Biggest day: Yesterday, at $2,202, surpassed the previous record of $2,169 on 12/8/08 (when the New York Times Gift Guide mentioned the LED Motherboard Christmas Tree  )
•    Biggest week: $6,344 on 12/13/08 (thanks to the same random act of media)
•    Most sales in one day: 51 on 12/9/09 (Boston Globe Whisky Stone mention)
•    Best paycheck ever (2 weeks): $1,943 on 12/25/10.

Cyber Monday brought in 14 sales, the best single day this season until yesterday. Unfortunately most of them were so small that the day ended up $120 behind LY. Of the 11 new orders facing me on Tuesday morning, 10 were under $20. I don’t mean to be unappreciative, but after PayPal takes 55 cents from an $8 purchase and I stuff it in a 35-cent padded mailer, it’s barely worth the time it takes to generate a label and drive it to the post office. One or two orders like that is just a small nuisance. It becomes a problem when they define a busy day.

On the plus side, I didn’t have any trouble loading them into my Miata. 

The weekend’s offer of free shipping on orders over $50 should have prevented exactly that. Only one person redeemed the coupon. Lesson learned: Cyber Monday sales should be one-day only, simple, and highly targeted – just a few specific items prominently on sale. Maybe next year I’ll try creating a temporary category and moving a handful of items into it -- no coupon necessary. This year’s offer was generous, but it took two paragraphs to explain, and if there’s one thing the past five years have taught me, it’s that shoppers don’t read. 

BTW, I passed a milestone this week with transaction #7,500. Imagine what that pile of boxes would look like.

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Here’s a helpful tip for telemarketers: If you call me during the Christmas season, I won’t even take the time to be polite. Bonus tip: If you call me back after I tell you to take my phone number off your list and hang up on you, you will not find that my mind has changed.

On the Fourth Week of Christmas, My Business Gave to Me...

…Four minutes offline/Three giveaways/Two gorgeous days/And a big rusty pail of fail.

My heart sank at 11:31 pm on Thanksgiving when MDD Hosting warned me of emergency server maintenance. With previous hosts, that might have meant being offline for the rest of this crucial weekend. But MDD had the server back online by 11:46. Kudos to them. OK, 15 minutes isn't four, but I’ve got nothing else for my gimmick this week. Maybe I’ll get a four-digit day.

This was the first real Christmas mega-week. A $750 cap sale on Thanksgiving Day 2010 created a huge holiday hill to climb, and unusually weak days this Sunday and Monday made it look impossible. Then things turned around on Tuesday and Wednesday. I needed to average $350/day this week; right now (in the midst of Black Friday, which is hobbled by all the hardcore shoppers out doing battle in stores) I’m running at $350/day. I started Week 4 neck-and-neck with LY; right now I’m running $19 ahead for the week and $161 behind the month-to-date. I need $528 by the end of tomorrow to catch up. It’s another nail-biter.

Last Saturday was downright depressing. Against a background of weak sales, I had to authorize a big nasty return ($140 worth of Panther caps) from somebody who simply changed his mind. Besides the obvious financial hit, returns are also a processing and inventory-management pain in the ass. I may have to put a restocking fee in place, as most stores do to discourage speculative purchases. On the same day, a Canadian customer claimed that his levitating globe arrived with a cosmetic blemish; he eventually settled for a partial refund, limiting what could have been an $84 refund to just $20. And then, just to ice the cake, somebody submitted a bad product review. It was well-written and -reasoned, so I had to publish it. Even though it’s a minor product that I wasn’t going to reorder anyway, it was another slap in the face that I just didn’t need.

Next week's target requires an insane $495/day. I don't know how I'm going to make that...but I've done it before. No reason it can't happen again.