Week 5: Crest of the Wave?

With 14 sales, Black Friday tied for the busiest day of the year up to that point, but since they only averaged $21 it wasn't all that lucrative. As much as I'd like some $100+ orders to bring the average up, that's OK; little sales are a bit more profitable due to a Sunshop fluke that overcharges for First Class postage. Nickels and dimes, my friends, it's all about those nickels and dimes. November ended as the best since 2012 and came in 6th overall. 

But that was Week 4 and this is Week 5, LY's high water mark and probably this year's, too. Sunday's 17 sales raised both the "busiest day" bar and my hopes for Cyber Monday. After a slow start a  late-night surge pushed it to 19 sales, but once again the average amount was surprisingly miserly. I had sent out a newsletter advertising free shipping for $50+ orders. I posted it to Facebook (all of three people reached...thanks, Facebook), and that post also appeared in the Twitter feed at the bottom of my store's front page. For good measure I added the promotion to my News page and personally emailed some friends whom I suspect are blocking my newsletters. For all of that, only two people used the coupon. 

Fine. Eating the shipping costs slashes profitability by 15-20% and I'm already running in the red. A front-page banner would have been effective, but one only ever sees the same old sliders unless one empties one's browser cache. Returning customers wouldn't be able to see the new slider at all and new visitors would see it every time they came back. That makes it too dangerous to use sliders for temporary promotions, alas. I wonder if smartphones have caches that work the same way. 

Anyway, Monday's 19 sales stood as the busiest day this year, if not the most lucrative, until another late-night blitz pushed yesterday to 21 -- again, mostly in the $15-20 range. This week as a whole has tracked LY pretty closely. As of this writing I can't tell if Week 5 will beat LY or come up short; I need a huge Friday, and it's not encouraging so far. I sense that people have completed most of their shopping and are down to small, fill-in purchases -- if so, that's happening nearly two weeks earlier than expected, and it's going to be a serious problem. I shouldn't see much tapering for another 10 days yet. 

One fellow sent me this message: "Tried to order some hats and couldn' ".  Hmm, not very enlightening; can you give me details? "Couldn't place my order. I would like 6 of those hats with lights." Believe me, I would very much like to sell them to you, but "couldn' place my order" tells me exactly nothing. I asked him to either tell me the exact error message or call me so that I can place the order for him, as I'm sure it was either user error or an invalid credit card. That apparently was too much to ask. Pity; I would have liked his $114.   
      
The $1,833 that I invested in Metal Earth has now returned $1,068 -- better than halfway to break-even (not counting advertising, which I don't even want to think about), but it's slowed to a trickle as the most popular models are gone. I know what I did wrong and will rectify that next year. I'll get around to a "lessons learned" post after Christmas limps across the finish line. 

Last year Week 6 fell just a whisker short of Week 5 and December depends on that happening again this year. My last shipment of Panther Vision beanies, due on Wednesday, might help, although those have been disturbingly quiet for the past few days. We shall see.

I'm Not Dead Yet

Reading about week-to-week sales week after week is boring, I know. But this slow-motion train wreck has become perversely fascinating. October is setting all kinds of records for suckage, not least of which was my smallest paycheck in years. This week finally hit normal for the first time in a month, led by a surprise resurgence in Panther Vision caps. Maybe the mysterious curse is lifting.  

Mysteries beg for investigation. Google Analytics says I'm getting slightly fewer daily "sessions" in October than in September. Analytics reports that September's conversion rate was 1.63% -- below my 2.0% target, but not dramatically so;  October's running at 1.54% so far. September conversions averaged $55.98; October's are $48.09. 

So traffic is basically normal. Slightly fewer visitors are buying anything, and those who do are spending a little less. I can think of three possible explanations:  

1. The website redesign is driving people away; or
2. They don't want what I'm selling; or
3. The quality of visitors has fallen.

I don't  think there's any question that the new design is visually superior; nobody's going "Ew!" and bailing because they don't like the look. The new layout is slightly easier to shop, not harder. One customer called to ask "How the heck do I check out?" The stylized shopping bag icon that replaced the traditional "shopping cart" isn't at all intuitive, and the "Checkout" text link that used to be above the category list is gone. So I added a "Shopping Cart/Checkout" menu item (pat on the back for figuring out how to do it without breaking anything) to make that obvious and fix the only design flaw that I can see.

It didn't help.  

The second possibility, product selection, is my main suspect. Curio City flew through the spring and summer on the wings of Bird kites. Those always fall to earth in the fall, which explains a lot; losing the expensive kite pole dropships explains the shrinking average sale all by itself. However, that doesn't explain the year-over-year decline since kites crash every fall. Ordinarily lighted caps, Switchables, golf balls, and a smattering of miscellaneous stuff rise up to fill the void. Golf balls have been inexplicably dead all year and lighted caps just came back a few days ago.  

I replenished $550 worth of Switchables. I ordered $1,000 worth of mostly new gifty novelties for Christmas from Gama-go. I replenished and expanded Lexco cigarette cases to the tune of $650; they were selling reliably despite the sanctimonious do-gooders at Google and Microsoft who won't allow ads for tobacco-related products (I can't even get around their prohibition by playing them up as marijuana accessories because they forbid advertising illegal products, too, and cannabis still qualifies). I'm going to put more than the usual number of eggs in the Metal Earth basket -- another product line that sells well during Christmas, but only during Christmas. I need to spend at least $1,000 there.

Another $1,500 worth of gifty novelties from DCI and Fred will load me up for Christmas except for a few smaller vendors. By the end of November I'll be about $6,000 in debt. That's OK if I match LY's anemic $18,000 in November-December sales...but this worst October since 2007 makes me nervous. If I can't pay off the debt Curio City will be finished.  

As for the quality of visitors...my site is supposedly mobile-friendly now. It's well known that smartphone users don't buy. Google avers that they go home and use real computers to buy the stuff they saw on their phone. Maybe. By itself mobile traffic is low-quality traffic. So has that increased?

In September, desktop users were 58%, mobile were 28%, and tablets were 14% of all visits. In October, desktop users were 57%, mobile went up to 31%, and tablets were 12%.  

Bottom line: Traffic is down a little bit. Smartphone users are up a little. The percentage of people who buy anything has fallen, and the amount that they spend is down. None of those things are drastic individually. Together, they explain October. 

It's probably a stupid mistake, but I turned my Microsoft ads back on. In the recent past I've spent $75-100 monthly there without any results. But Christmas is nearly here.... I also discounted my keyword bids by 20% for mobile users to discourage them, saving those ad dollars for more lucrative visitors. So much for having a mobile-friendly site design.  

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I'm up to 204 Facebook followers. Exactly nine of them saw my last post. I was not among the lucky nine. I'm only still posting there because the posts appear on Curio City's front page. By itself, Facebook is completely worthless. For comparison, a whopping 13 people typically read my blog posts.

Like It Or Lose It

Is it time to abandon Facebook? This video blog post (on the bottom of that page) recently accused Facebook of suppressing unpaid posts. Only 10% of the author’s 118,000 followers ever see his stuff. Unless you actively engage with my content by liking or sharing it, Curio City will quickly disappear from your news feed -- unless, that is, I bribe Facebook to promote my posts.
 
The accusation and Facebook’s dissembling isn’t new, but my numbers back it up. If you’re reading my blog after clicking a Facebook link, you’re among the 15 of Curio City’s 196 subscribers who will see this post. My wife won’t see it because she doesn’t visit Facebook very often and she’s stingy with the Like button. Even I have to scroll way to the bottom of my personal news feed to see my Curio City posts. If I want my other 181 followers to see my posts –people who clicked Like for that reason – I have to pay the Facebook. 

Facebook is a terrible advertising platform with only a 0.5% click rate. Nobody goes there to shop. They hold our posts hostage because they can’t sell advertising. Sites like Cracked.com and I Fucking Love Science stay in people’s news feeds by adding tons of unique and interesting content every day to get clicks to their own sites, where they’re selling advertising. That would be pointless for me since my store is a store, not a humor or news site, and I don’t sell ads.   

I used to ponder killing my email newsletter because it’s no sparkplug, either. Email looks a lot better now that Facebook is suppressing posts. Last week I sent out 402 emails. Eighty-five unique opens gave me a 22% success rate, ahead of the 18% industry average but below my own 26% history. The 12 resulting clicks (14%) matched the industry-wide benchmark but fell behind my own 21% track record – granted, it wasn’t my best newsletter ever; I cranked it out in one morning and made the mistake of putting Valentines Day in the subject line, which automatically turns a lot of people off. The two sales that I got from those 12 clicks is a great conversion rate. Constant Contact costs me $16/month and I don’t use it every month, so it’s not exactly cost-effective. On top of that, I lost money to coupon redemption. But there is value in merely appearing in people’s inboxes every now and then…and I’d need something like 1,200 followers to reach 85 people on Facebook. 

Back to my original question: Is it time to abandon Facebook? No, since it costs me no money and very little time. Reaching 15 people for free is better than nothing. My occasional “likes” and very rare “shares” can put a post in front of 30 or 40 people. And every business needs a Facebook page for credibility, even if nobody ever visits it. It’s time to stop thinking that Facebook = marketing, but not time to abandon it completely. 

With Facebook constantly getting worse, I decided to see if the Pinterest page that I made two years ago is still there. Lo and behold, people have pinned nearly 100 of my products with absolutely no encouragement from me. The value of that is questionable; the four different people who pinned the Peace Sign Veggie Peeler generated exactly zero sales. I don’t think I can delete or hide pins by other people, and I get lost trying to navigate my own page(s). But I have a feeling that investing time in this will pay off a lot better than Facebook if I can hold my nose long enough to figure it out. Maybe next week I’ll put some hours into Pinterest. 

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The post office denied my $8.99 claim against a “2-Day” Priority Mail package that took 16 days to reach its destination. As far as they’re concerned, they met their obligation by delivering it at all…and that’s technically true, since Priority times aren’t guaranteed. (I’ve already written about my opinion of the USPS’s estimated delivery times.) I appealed with documentation showing that the replacement shipment cost me a $14.50 loss. 

Their verdict on my e-filed claim came in a paper snail-mail letter. They will undoubtedly deny my appeal the same way. The USPS hates email.

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This week I sold my 500^th Create-a-Bird kite. Some people buy them to fly as-is; more buy them as a craft project for children; but with Easter looming, most will be stage props in church plays. At half the size of the Dove kite (135 sold, btw), Create-a-Bird is best for small indoor stages. 

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And finally, I sold four more Tunes for Two splitters, doubling my sales to $82.89 -- still a loser, but not as big a loser.

Random Reprise

It was the Fall of 2011. Edge Magazine, a publication for rich New Jerseyites, included Curio City’s Science Clock in their holiday gift guide. I braced for an angry horde when I couldn’t back up the mere three clocks that I had on hand…and ultimately sold exactly one (and I still have the other two left). The magazine is primarily print, its online gift guide was hard to find and harder to navigate and didn’t use hotlinks, and they just displayed my main store URL rather than the product page. That’s a fail on every level from my point of view. 

So I was less than excited when the Edge editor was kind enough to notify me that she’s including the LP Record Bowl in the March issue of their magazine. Sure it’s a nice product, but it’s at least seven years old and stopped selling entirely a couple of years ago. So…a magazine with a disappointing history is featuring an old product in a non-holiday gift guide? I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I'm not bracing for an onslaught this time. I’ll be happy if I sell any of the seven pieces I have in stock.

(And with that attitude, I’ll probably get hammered by demand I can’t fill.)

Speaking of media randomness…I think that the NetworkedBlogs problem that I’ve been writing about is fixed. My last post appeared on my Facebook wall (or timeline or whatever it’s called), but it didn’t show up in my personal newsfeed. Given that readership remains stuck in the low single digits, I assume that it doesn’t show up in anybody else’s news feed, either, so it’s probably Facebook’s fault. Nothing I can do about that.

If you do happen to see this in your Facebook feed, click the Like button to let me know. Please? It’s not like it costs you anything.

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Anxiety over the big tech update that I wrote about earlier consumed most of this week. The last couple of days I've been tracking down some wonky settings and lost customizations, but the upgrade went more smoothly than I'd feared. I haven’t seen the bill yet; all other expenses are still on hold…which is an especially good thing in light of this week’s terrible sales numbers. Right now I'm running 80% behind LY. Bleah.

The Red Queen's Race

Sometimes it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place. 

Last week I noticed that NetworkedBlogs had stopped autoposting my weekly blog entries to Facebook back in December. That explains the falloff from 30-40 readers per week to six or seven. Turns out that the app needs its permission to post renewed every 60 days. I don’t know why this never came up before in all the years I’ve been using it, but…OK, whatever. After much head-bashing I think I finally got it configured so that this post will show up on the Facebook. Guess I’ll find out in a few minutes if it works. If it doesn't, I'll give up.

I hadn’t intended to upgrade Sunshop version 4.x anymore because Sunshop 5 has been right around the corner for a year now. (Sunshop is my shopping cart program – what you perceive as my website.) Being a software industry refugee myself, I’m usually compulsive about keeping all of my programs updated. But I have to pay my contract developer to upgrade Sunshop and the cost is not trivial. Neither of the past two version upgrades added anything significant, so I passed them by.

Now my web host (MDD Hosting) announced that they’re upgrading all of their servers from PHP 5.2 to 5.3 because 5.2 is no longer supported. (PHP is the programming language that Sunshop runs under.) Programs that were developed for 5.2 won’t run under 5.3 and vice versa. Fortunately, Turnkey publishes Sunshop in both formats. Since I need to change the format that I’m running I might as well upgrade to the latest release at the same time. How much more expensive could that be?

Potentially a lot more. My developer freaked out when I first pitched the job to him. He subsequently calmed down some, but he still anticipates a huge, time-consuming job and, in fact, he can’t block off the time to do the work before MDD’s scheduled changeover next Friday. MDD figures that a month's notice ought to be plenty and won't extend their deadline. 
 
So unless my developer can make the time between now and next Friday, or MDD runs behind schedule, Curio City is going to go dark. Visiting my URL will show an error page. I’m financially paralyzed until I pay for this unwanted upgrade of unknown cost. Since disruption's inevitable, I'd like to move up to Sunshop 5, but alas, Turnkey's still being coy about their release date. So I’m going to pay big bucks to upgrade a program that’s supposed to become obsolete later this year anyway.

I haven’t paid my corporate registration or annual report fees or had my tax returns prepared yet and I’ve completely stopped buying merchandise, so I’m slowly building up cash despite lackluster sales. If my store doesn’t go dark and if the upgrade doesn’t bleed me dry, I’ll be able to make up lost time when I come through the other side.