The Owl and the Peregrine

The neighborhood squirrels and birds love my vegetable garden. I always plant more tomatoes than I expect to harvest with a little bit of attrition in mind --"one for the mouse, one for the house." The internet says that the rhyme actually says "one for the mouse, one for the crow, one to rot, one to grow" but I don't like the implied 75% loss there. 

The varmints seem to be more aggressive than usual this year. Birds pecked holes in my early bell peppers and eggplants to reach the tasty seeds inside. I find a tomato or two on the ground with one bite missing every day (ATTENTION SQUIRRELS: If you're going to steal my fruit, please have the courtesy to eat the whole thing). I only have enough space to overplant tomatoes so there's a real danger that I won't get any peppers or eggplant or squash at all this year. 

What's a gardener to do? The obvious answer is off the table: Firing a shotgun in my town would bring a SWAT team down on me.

If I were to google solutions, I might very well trigger a Curio City ad for bird kites. I've sold hundreds of Osprey and Falcon kites specifically to protect gardens just like mine; many customers have testified that these kites are the one non-lethal solution that really works. They need more airspace than my small yard can offer, though. I could probably fly a small bird (Blackbird, Blue Jay, or Cardinal) but those aren't proven scarecrows. 

So I invested $30 in a solar owl on an online friend's recommendation. Hundreds of reviews on Amazon were split about 50/50 as to its effectiveness. After a couple of encouraging days the local squirrels wised up, and vegetables started disappearing again. 

Since they're laughing at my fake owl, I fell back upon the only other thing that's ever repelled squirrels: predator urine. Fox whiz is too expensive to guard the whole garden; tomatoes are still being chomped. Whether the piss pots will protect my other plants remains to be seen. As long as hunger trumps fear, I am not optimistic. 

And: Yes, the picture above is really of me and my $30 owl. 

The Few. The Proud. The Converted

July

Total income: +6.9%
Total COGS: -2.2%
Payroll: +37.4%

Marketing: +28.7%
Net Income (Profit): -68.1% (-$122)

Year to Date

Total income: +13.4%
Total COGS: +54.7%
Payroll: -36.7%

Marketing: +13.1%
Net Income (Profit): +44.6% (+$4,153)

Curio City ordinarily "closes" for a week of vacation in July (in which "closing" means putting all advertising on hold, posting delayed shipping notices on my home and new pages, and changing my order acknowledgment email to warn of shipping delays.) I'd hoped to widen my YTD lead because we couldn't afford a vacation this year. That didn't happen.

Oh well, it's just July. August's targets don't look terribly daunting, but August is really another throwaway month.

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Trivia junkies might enjoy the June statistics that Google Analytics sent me:
3,799 unique visitors seems like a lot to me. 461 were returning and 3,338 came for the first time. 72% bounced away after seeing just the landing page. The average person spent 1:16 looking at three pages. 2,901 were from the US; the UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany rounded out the rest (I typically get two or three international sales a month).

Of those 3,338 first-time visitors, 2,124 came from paid Google clicks, 586 found me in organic Google search results, 224 came here directly with no referral, and 207 came from Bing and Yahoo organic searches. I turned off my Microsoft ads last month so there was no cpc traffic from Bing or Yahoo, which I doubt that Google measures accurately anyway. Twelve hundred unpaid visits is pretty good considering that I've never done any professional optimization.

Google only reported 22 "goal completions" -- or sales, as I like to call them -- for a dismal success rate of 0.7%. Maybe Google only measures the visitors that they sent me. Sunshop recorded 58 sales, or 1.5% of my total unique visits. I'd like conversions to run at closer to 2%, but I can live with 1.5% in the dead of summer. A "normal" rate is anywhere from 1-5%.

My strategy for increasing the number of visits and the conversion rate is simple and clear, but it requires money and the cooperation of my developer...neither of which I have right now. Maybe in a few weeks. 

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Speaking of no money, I had to carry a $1,600 Mastercard balance into August with just $38 left in checking. There's very little hope of getting caught up as long as most of my sales are dropships; nearly every sale that I make increases my debt. It will take a Christmas miracle to make it all better, especially since I can't afford any new merchandise. It's weird to contemplate a final death spiral at the same time that I'm turning in black numbers.

The Prodigal Blog

I skipped a couple of weeks because it's July. There's nothing going on. After 400 posts I've run out of things to say about nothing. 

"Curio City Online fans want to hear from you!" gushed Facebook's email. Maybe they do. I wouldn't know since Facebook doesn't actually deliver my updates. It's no secret that they suppress business posts if we don't pony up money to "boost" them; fewer than 20 of my 200 followers will see this update unless it gets a few Likes, and that only ever happens when I beg (which is bad form) or during the Christmas season (when everybody's suddenly interested in a weird little retailer). 

PayPal, OTOH, has not been a waste of time, although it did take more time than it should have to get it to that point. Payment processing costs are down noticeably. Getting them to honor the deal that we negotiated took at least half a dozen emails after numerous spot-checks over a couple of months caught them slipping into their old standard terms. Trust, but verify.

PayPal conveys almost no information about my customers (like what type of credit card they used) and gives me no control whatsoever over fraud filtering. Their attitude seems to be "don't worry your lucrative little head about it." That hasn't been a problem...yet. Given the number of complaints I've read about PayPal arbitrarily taking back deposits, it's probably just a matter of time.  

My open-to-buy turned black this week for the first time since last Christmas. That's an accounting technicality since I'm currently staring down a $2,400 Mastercard bill with just $700 in the bank, but it was nice to see before a couple of deferred reorders immediately restored the customary red ink. There just ain't no getting ahead.