Long Live the King

Cash is king and debt is the kingslayer. I can't do anything until my MasterCard's appetite has been sated with $5,000. I ought to be able to whittle that down now that the government and my accountant have been paid.
"Ought to" isn't "can." American Express is offering a 0% APR on new purchases through the end of the year...but "new purchases" doesn't include balance transfers, so first I had to pay my previous balance down to zero, which I just did on Wednesday. Now I can hypothetically steer all of my income to MasterCard while letting new debt accumulate on the Amex. 

Thing is, everyone else in the world serves the same king that I do and wants a piece of my cash flow. Two weeks ago The UPS Store got its annual $160 rent payment (down from $200, thanks to my AARP discount). Then one of those pseudo-government phishing scams reminded me that my Curio City trademark is going to expire. It's unclear whether I need to come up with $400 this year or next (or I could let the scammer handle it for a cool $900). I can't afford to enforce my service mark against various squatters who are infringing on it, but I do need to keep the legal high ground just in case a retailer ever tries to horn in. Upgrading my laptop to Windows 10 broke the print function in QuickBooks Pro 2009 so it can no longer save and email PDF forms --  a function that I don't use often, but one that I really need when I do need it. After multiple repair efforts failed it looks like I'm going to have to cough up $200-300 for the latest desktop version of QuickBooks...and I'm going to need it before I start mailing out Christmas purchase orders. (Intuit would like me to pay $24 per month indefinitely for their online version. Years of bloating QuickBooks with unwanted features and trying to squeeze upgrades and support payments from their customers have made Intuit one of the more reviled companies out there; I need their program but would rather not ever buy it again. It's a safe bet that the newest version will be overcomplicated and run poorly.) 

It's always something. MasterCard is at the front of the payment line, but it's going to be July or August before I retire my Christmas debt.

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Let us observe a moment of silence for two retired categories: I moved the last few stragglers in Home Decor and Clocks & Watches to Odds & Ends. Home Decor was big in Curio City's early days, when "nice things" were a loose product category; Clocks was huge when DayClocks were my #1 bestseller. DayClocks still exist, but discounters ultimately ruined them for Curio City. I miss them and haven't ruled out giving them a second wind someday, if I can be confident that I won't be undersold.

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Last week's Metal Earth newsletter flopped even worse than the previous week's Switchables newsletter: 383 sent, 85 opened, a whopping six clicks, and of course no conversions. 68% of those emails were opened on mobile devices, which are next to worthless when it comes to selling stuff. I should purge most of the 295 did-not-open addresses, export my mailing list, and close the Constant Contact account. Shutting it down will be hard after producing 82 newsletters in 11 years, but I'm probably the only person who will notice their demise. I can always open a new one if I can ever afford to re-implement the newsletter signup box that Turnkey dropped from Sunshop. Newsletters sent during November and December get some results, but I strongly doubt that they justify the $240+ annual expense. The only thing holding me back is not having any other way to publish coupons. Fewer than 10 of my 218 subscribers ever see my regular Facebook posts so that's a dead horse (these blog posts usually draw 20-30 views).

Some of the didn't-opens are active customers who just weren't interested in the subject line or didn't feel like shopping just now. The system uses an invisible 1-pixel graphic to track opens, so if you have disabled graphic downloads Constant Contact won't see you. I'd guess that at least 200 of those 298 didn't-opens are really dead addresses...but I'd hate to throw away 98 that potentially aren't.   
  
What do you think? Are you a newsletter subscriber? Would you miss them if they stopped?

Give Me Mediocrity Or Give Me Death!

Knowing that it was coming didn’t make parting with $1,071 worth of payroll taxes, withholding, and sales tax any easier. After scheduling the payments I was down to $400 in the bank with $2,400 owed to credit cards by the end of the month. Sales need to be a little bit healthier than normal to fill the gap. But traffic and sales both fell by half a few weeks ago. If sales don’t rally in time to avoid credit card interest charges, I risk entering a death spiral. Being a corporation doesn’t shield me personally from credit card debt, so my tolerance is very low.

I don’t need a miracle. Just returning to normal will do. I wish there was a way to force that. Advertising costs are already way over budget so I can’t kick those up. I raised up earbuds  from a subcategory of Gadgets & Gizmos to their own top-level category, broadened my AdWords bids, and created a MS AdCenter campaign. Why earbuds, of all things? The keywords are extremely competitive (everybody seems to sell them) and the retail price is low. Worse, my main vendor has this annoying practice of bundling multiple variations into take-it-or-leave-it prepacks that prevent me from fine-tuning stock levels, and they habitually import just one production run and discontinue it when it’s gone. So why flog these things? Mainly because having over 25 styles on one landing page creates a pretty good chance of converting any shoppers that I can lure in. Plus I got an iPod last Christmas and the first thing I did was replace the ill-fitting buds that shipped with it, so I kind of like them. Results so far? None.

While I was shaking things up I renamed “Apparel & Fashion” to “Lighted Caps & Apparel” and moved it to the top of the list, and added lighted caps to my index page – they don’t fit the seasonal theme, but more exposure is good. A few ensuing cap sales vindicated those ideas.

I’m actually considering skipping next Monday’s paycheck. If I do take it, it will be my smallest since last July…which is good for cash flow and the balance sheet, but it sucks to be me, eh?

Incidentally, while filing my taxes I noticed that my state unemployment insurance rate fell from 3.64 to 2.99% of payroll. They just got around to notifying me yesterday, meaning I overwithheld $40-something in Q1.

Speaking of people with their hands out, a company impersonating the US government (the “United States Trademark Maintenance Service”) tried to trick me into shelling out $469 to renew my trademark. Although it’s an obvious ripoff, it reminded me that I really am supposed to renew my trademark at some point. Sure enough, the five-year anniversary is coming up, so I have to scare up another $100 by the end of May to retain ownership of Curio City.

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As I strive to restore mediocrity, I see Quickbooks Pro 2012 on Amazon for $50 below Intuit’s price. Amazon’s reviews all complain that Intuit has again added more valueless bloat. People hate Intuit like cancer, but there’s no realistic small business alternative to QB and Intuit is prepared to coast on that fact indefinitely. I need to find another $135 this month if I don’t want an interruption in their so-called “service.”

Blood from a Turnip

Attentive readers might realize that I’m looking for a way to jazz up my sales without a lot of expense or risk – to dip a toe slightly outside my comfort zone, as it were. This month Facebook advertising flopped and I successfully resisted assimilation by the Amazon collective. I was wondering what to do next when a SEO salesman called. Ordinarily I terminate telemarketers the moment they say “How’s your day going?”, but this one’s timing was lucky. I let him pitch me the usual complementary site analysis and follow-up phone call.

Typing those letters is like throwing chum in shark-infested waters. Telephone spammers will frenzy minutes after I hit the Post button. So be it. Search Engine Optimization has been on my to-do list for years. I’m not clever enough to implement most of the free advice that I’ve been given over the years, even when I can understand it, because a PHP shopping cart isn’t as straightforward as a plain HTML website. Consequently I can’t do much more than write keyword-heavy product descriptions and plug meta phrases into Sunshop’s provided fields. I know that I need professional help if I'm ever to get serious about SEO.

Nathan satisfied me that his company is thorough, knowledgeable, and non-sleazy. They don’t use link farms or make grandiose promises. Their analysis ranked me at 53 on a 1-100 scale where anything under 40 is pathetic and 70 is well-optimized, so I’m already doing better than I would have expected. I’m quite sure that they could improve my natural search rankings and, eventually, my sales. The big question is affordability. Tight cash flow is a common lament in this blog. SEO is a long-range prospect; improvements made today don’t bear fruit for weeks and it takes months for incremental sales increases to add up, yet the bills are due immediately and in full.

We’ll talk cost next Monday. I’ve warned Nathan that I’ll have to put him on hold, if I can even do it at all. Payroll taxes are due in April. I already have nine vendors on my new product wishlist, and tomorrow’s Cavalcade of Crap might add even more. I need to reorder four of my mainstays. And Intuit wants $184 just because. That gobbles up any free cash in April and probably May as well…and then we’re in the summer doldrums. But he’s a salesman, and he smells blood.

(Incidentally, as a longtime blood donor who’s homing in on his 4 gallon pin, I offer this disclaimer from Wikipedia: A turnip cannot be coaxed, squeezed, or cajoled into producing blood. All efforts at obtaining blood from this vegetable will be futile. There's no substitute for rolling up your sleeve.)

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Reasons to hate UPS: An envelope from the UPS Dimensional Adjustment Bureau is not the exciting science fictiony thing that its name suggests. It ordinarily heralds a surcharge for a package measurement error. Miracle of miracles, this particular envelope held an unexplained check for $1.55. Why is this a reason to hate UPS? Because they issued and mailed a paper check that I had to endorse and schlep to the bank’s ATM; the bank had to process it and return it to UPS; and UPS presumably has to reconcile their account...all of which must cost more than $1.55. Why didn’t they just refund my credit card? They never hesitate to charge it when an alleged error is in their favor.

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Reasons to hate Quickbooks: For $184, Intuit would like to sell me some new bloat that I’ll never use and keep my current install fully functional for three more years. The only “services” that I use are emailing purchase orders and invoices directly through QB, and automatically downloading bug fixes. $15 per month to preserve a “service” that I might use two or three times is not exactly a good value; I can easily save documents as PDFs and email them myself. OTOH, Curio City is essentially just a website, a MySQL database, and a Quickbooks file. I feel compelled to keep those components up to date even when there’s no clear benefit. I suppose I should shop around and see if anybody sells it below Intuit’s $184.

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Here’s what $350 of Facebook advertising finally bought me:

•    391,111 impressions;
•    141 “social impressions” (impressions shown with the names of the viewers’ friends who Liked my page);
•    93 clicks (Not according to Google Analytics, but OK, if they say so);
•    4 people Liked my page;
•    And, of course 0 sales.

Big Black February Numbers

Yes, I know today’s only the 24th, and I know that this February has 29 days, and I know that I ought to add a fifth week to fiscal February instead of shifting four days into fiscal March. But a five-week February would blow my mind. March will bring the accounting calendar back into harmony with the real calendar.

February
 
Total income: +59.4%
Total COGS: +96.6%
Payroll: +8.4%
Marketing: +69%
Net Income (Profit): +60.3%

Year to Date:
 
Total income: +14.9%
Total COGS: +34.8%
Payroll: +17.9%
Marketing: +33.1%
Net Income (Profit): -23.7%

Looks like a boom to me. Two big telephone sales kicked February over the top: The Create-a-Bird kite sale at the beginning of the month, and a big Animal Print Golf Ball sale today. Excel says I’m up $700 on LY and nearly $200 over plan. Quickbooks is downright breathless (as you see above), but QB doesn’t know that an invoice that I prepared as a price quote wasn’t a sale. As far as cash flow goes, it’s not all unicorns and daisies: I had to order inventory at the usual price to supply discounted sales -- hence the scary Cost of Goods Sold increase. I sacrificed bottom-line income to pay for that extra top-line income. From another perspective: Except in Q4, I want each month’s inventory purchases to be less than or equal to the cost of what I shipped that month; this month I had to order $200 more than I shipped.

March 2011 benefited from four unusually large Panther Vision cap and Switchables sales. I’m likely to lose the ground that I gained this month unless my Facebook advertising gamble hits paydirt. I made four sales of advertised items (Panther Vision caps and Switchables) within a few hours after the campaign went live on Tuesday. Then…quiet. I’ve picked up a few new followers but my FB referral traffic has barely budged from normal and I can’t trace a single sale to FB ads. But this was a school vacation week, and that means a lot of people are stuck at home babysitting instead of at work shopping. Next week will be a better gauge. So far, though, it looks like this is going to be a short experiment.

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Reasons to hate Quickbooks: I mentioned an autoupdate that will deactivate QB unless I buy the 2012 version. Fine. Requiring an upgrade instead of making customers want it is a fascist business tactic, but Intuit gets away with it. What I didn’t bargain for was losing the ability to resize the “Make deposits” dialog. That’s right: I can change the height but not the width, so now I have to use the scroll bar on this screen that I use nearly every day. How lousy does a developer have to be to break such basic Windows functionality?

Meet the New Goals

Same as the old goals...mostly. I added a few new items to last week’s warmed-over list and ranked them by priority and likelihood.

Find awesome new merchandise. This dwarfs everything else. I’ll cover it separately next week.

Control advertising costs: My marketing budget is topped out. I need to get below LY’s overspend without cutting into sales proportionately. Ideally I’ll increase sales on the same ad spend, but if sales won’t cooperate I will have to cut the actual outlay. As a first step, I’m adding Ad Spend to my monthly reports to keep this one front and center. So far this year I’ve gotten the daily outlay down to $20, but traffic has also fallen below 150 visits and sales…well, let’s not go there.

Facelift: Sunshop’s first major overhaul in five years is tentatively scheduled for October. Its true release date will determine whether I can upgrade before Christmas or if I have to delay it for another year. I have to see the new templates before I can do a cosmetic overhaul (although if I were rolling in money I would give the existing version a facelift; I hate the prospect of waiting until early 2013). I can at least mock up a layout and color scheme in the meantime.

More video: Learn how to use my new phone’s video camera. If it’s viable, I will post at least one original product demonstration video to YouTube before the year is out.

Start using LinkedIn. This one’s easy, just pointless and tedious.

Expand Facebook: Facebook is a constant source of frustration and a periodic irritant. But I can’t just ignore it. The goal is to increase my followers from 144 now to 200 by the end of the year. Secondary goal is to update my company page.

Personal incentives: I’ll raise payroll by 0.1% of gross if net sales are up by 7.5% at the end of June. If I finish the year over plan I’ll bump it another 0.1% and buy everyone in the company a new laptop. If the first three weeks of the year are prelude to the rest, there is no danger of this happening.

Insurance? Fnd out if Kraken Enterprises needs separate liability coverage or just a rider on my personal policy, and how much that would cost…without tipping off my agent that I am running a home business or inviting some other agent to solicit me. This is a low priority only because I can’t possibly afford a monthly insurance bill.

Double Reward Points? I could permanently increase my customer Reward Point awards from 5% to 10% of full-priced merchandise sold. Many people earn points; few redeem them. If that’s because of low awareness and interest, doubling the rewards for the tiny minority who do care would just cut income without improving the incentive. If, OTOH, the program is ineffective because the points are too stingy, doubling them might encourage more repeat business at a lower cost than advertising for new business. I offered double points as a promotion once last year with no discernable effect. Personally, I find customer loyalty programs to be a huge incentive (especially in restaurants)…but I’m a famously cheap bastard. 

What would really make a difference is being able to email customers a reminder that they have x.xx points. But Sunshop can’t do that. I wonder if Brad could implement it for me. This is another question to put off until Sunshop 5 ships; I suggested the feature for the new version.

Ess-Eee-Oh: It’s been on the list for years; I’d still like to invest in professional optimization should I ever luck into both a financial windfall and a reputable company with a bargain price. Meanwhile I will keep doing the small things that I can understand and affect.

Target the rich: The middle class is shrinking and the poor are getting poorer while the ruling class consolidates the nation’s wealth. Aiming for the people who have all the money is a no-brainer. I have two problems with that: First, I’m dangling from the lowest rung of the middle class myself: I have no idea what the rich buy (Gems? Furs? Apple electronics? Designer fashions?) or how to reach them. Second, their tastes are expensive and I already can’t afford to keep my current low-end inventory in stock. So why’s this even on the list if it’s out of my reach? I can try to carry more products that are $50 and up and fewer that are under $10. Bumping up my average price point hardly takes me into millionaire territory, but it’s a step in that direction.

Target corporate buyers. My biggest scores go to golf courses, resorts, universities, businesses, even churches. Yet these sales are hit-or-miss. Institutions approach me out of the blue, and most of their inquiries come to naught because they expect personalization (imprinting or embroidering), deeper discounts than I can offer, and more pieces than I keep in stock. I can’t address the factors that discourage closure, but I might be able to encourage more inquiries. The obvious question is, How? 

Cut the handling fee: Every order invisibly pays 75 cents to cover the cost of boxes, labels, ink, paper, packing tape, etc. I raised that fee last year to slightly overcharge small orders to offset undercharges on larger ones stemming from last year’s postal rate changes. Ultimately, I collected more for shipping than I paid out LY by a comfortable margin. I could afford to cut my fee by at least 10 cents, and possibly as much as 25 cents. That cuts revenue by $10-25 in a typical 100-parcel month. But would customers notice? Maybe those who place the very smallest orders would…but they’re exactly the ones I want to de-emphasize.  Anyway, the goal for this list is to reevaluate my handling fee after this year’s postal rate hikes. Would a 10-25 cent price cut make enough difference to justify the foregone revenue?

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Time sure flies when you’re getting old. Every three years, Intuit requires QuickBooks users to upgrade to the newest version. This week’s “version 14 upgrade” notice included “changes to help you with the May 31 service discontinuation.” Would skipping the update prevent them from crippling my software or did it come with a time bomb built in? What happens if I simply continue using the 2009 version beyond their “discontinuation of service”? 

I appreciate that developers want to keep their user base current in order to avoid legacy issues. I also know that one buys a license to use software, not the software itself. Intuit is within their rights. It still pisses me off that they can demand upgrades rather than enticing users with actual improvements. Each new version of QuickBooks is more bloated than the last, and some of the changes that they introduce are arbitrary or actively cripple previous functionality. I bought my current laptop when the 2009 QuickBooks upgrade brought my old one to its knees.

I applied the update today. Just bend over and take it.

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A couple of weeks ago the subject line “domain name dispute: curiocityonline” appeared in my mailbox. A young lady named Julia wrote to tell me that 

“This email is sent by CN Network Information Center LTD. which is a registration organization in China. Here we have something to confirm with you. We received a formal application on 11th January, 2012. One company called "Aoher Imports, Ltd" was applying to register "curiocityonline" as Network Brand and the following domain names:

(Eight variations on my name with Asian domains followed)

After our initial checking, we found the names were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company had authorized that company to register these domain names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please inform us within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limited we will unconditionally finish the registration for "Aoher Imports, Ltd".”

My first reaction to something like this is panic. My second? To the Internet! Unfortunately CN Network Information Center has a legitimate looking website. Fortunately, this site came up first. Scores of complaints about emails identical to mine confirmed my hunch. Apparently they’re trying to trick me into registering all those unwanted Asian domains through them, and probably sell me other services as well. Lying to frighten someone into buying your service might not technically be a scam, just a sleazy business practice. Or maybe not: The company is not listed on InterNIC’s list of accredited registrars. Anyway, Googlebot take note: Chinese domain name scam!

Achieving the Minimum

In December 2008 I set a record of 49 sales in one day. Last Friday that record fell when those precious Whisky Stones pushed me to 51 sales. I sold all 60 pieces in 18 hours…without advertising! The local store featured in the Boston Globe gift guide must have run out within hours, and then all the frustrated people went online and found me via natural search, which is really heartening. I could have sold hundreds more if I'd had the stock. Ordinarily the sales tax drives Massholes away from my site, but last weekend brought numerous in-state sales. The big day had 461 visitors and a phenomenal 10% conversion rate. 47 people came directly to my URL without any referral.

Week 6 of the Six Weeks of Christmas is within striking distance of LY’s sales. At the moment, the Six Weeks together are exactly $17.86 behind LY. There are still two weeks to go in December, and some pent-up demand for Power Caps, so there’s a chance I’ll still pull the month out of the fire. For some odd reason traffic peaked at 581 visitors on Tuesday, when I had only 14 sales.

My optimism about a general economic recovery has soured as our household finances continue their slow slide from dire to desperate. I reduced my 2010 growth plan from 30% to 15%...and that still feels over-optimistic, at least for the first half of the year.

I earned about $10,800 in salary this year. Hitting five figures is a big psychological milestone. Kraken Enterprises should finish with a profit of roughly $6,200 (down from $7,400 LY), which is distributed to me and taxed on our personal return. (I’ll actually withdraw about $4,500, cashflow permitting, and reinvest the rest in the company). My total compensation this year will be around $17,000, vs. $16,400 in 2008. A fulltime worker earning the $8 Massachusetts minimum wage grosses $16,640. So I have finally achieved my longstanding goal of earning minimum wage – I actually earn more working for myself than I could earn working for somebody else. Wow.

We fell into the 15% federal tax bracket this year and Massachusetts takes 5% more, so taxes will take $1,200 of my $4,500 payout. If I really make my planned 15% sales increase in 2010, I could hit $20,000 in salary plus bonus next year. Since my salary and the company’s profit are almost the same thing, I’m raising payroll from 19% to 19.5% of gross effective in January. (The money paid from profits isn’t subject to Social Security or Medicare taxes, but I need more cash up front).

Just for perspective…I made $70,000 in the software industry one year during the Clinton boom, before George Bush and 9/11. Anne earned even more. It’s hard to remember that we were rich as recently as eight years ago. That was a completely different world.


Something new to hate: Facebook! The Facebook widget to your right pissed me off. While I was fixing the broken Tweeter widget directly below it I noticed that my FB feed had stopped updating. I figured out that they had changed the URL. I fixed that and the widget worked again…until Dec. 8. Grrrr. I need followers, and that’s my best way of getting some. They finally fixed it on Dec. 16.

Hey, here’s a new reason to hate QuickBooks!

We are writing to let you know about a Sales Tax Report issue related to the December 1, 2009 Release 9 (R9) of QuickBooks 2009. If you downloaded R9 earlier this month, the Sales Tax Liability and Sales Tax Revenue reports are not displaying the correct data in some cases. Specifically, this issue applies to you only if you meet the following conditions: within QuickBooks the sum total of items in your Items List multiplied by the nubmer of vendors in your Vendor List equals more than 10,000.

Naturally, the Item List doesn’t tell you how many entries it contains or explain what a "nubmer" is. If it includes inactive items, mine must be in the vicinity of 1,000...and I certainly have more than 10 vendors. I reckon I should be glad they found and patched it before I filed my tax return. But...there's a bug in the patch, too, and now they're scrambling to produce R11 before the end of the year.

What Do You Want for Christmas?

Noticing winter a-settin’ in got me a-thinkin’ about Christmas merchandise. First I attacked three piles of old catalogs and recycled all but half a dozen serious contenders. (I threw away at least 100). Then I started plowing through my six-month backlog of marginally relevant and mind-numbingly dull trade magazines. Once I’m done with that I’ll whip up some dummy orders/reorders to cost out everything. Then I’ll forecast how much I can spend, and finally pare things back until those numbers match. If this year is typical, I won’t find the best stuff until October anyway. I must resist the impulse to shoot my wad in September. It’s a small wad, after all (sing that to the tune of "It's a Small World After All").

Trade magazines aren’t written for one-man, work-at-home, technologically naïve souls like me. The articles often make me glad that my life doesn’t involve mainstream, high-stakes retailing. A few make me despair that my website lags behind the tech curve, and I’m helpless to change it. I am always at the mercy of Sunshop.

Speaking of which: On Sunday my new, post-Eric developer is scheduled to perform his first job for me, upgrading Sunshop from version 4.1.7 to 4.2.0. I’ll write more about that after the deed is done. The new version contains one major new feature, and Turnkey has promised to add some new templates that could offer me a whole new look.

I want to figure out social media before I get sucked too far into Christmas. I need to link this blog to a Facebook page and a Twitter account (both of which I have, but don’t understand), and then figure out how to use it all in concert with my email newsletters. Social media are as much about attracting media attention as actual customers. I do know how to provide a personality -- an often disagreeable personality, yes, but at least genuine.

Finally, I started using Google’s keyword tool to broaden my ad campaigns for a few products – casting a wide net for obscure but effective search terms that I’ve overlooked. I’ll have to winnow out a lot of crap in the process. This is driving up my ad costs in the short term.

Reasons to hate myself: I always log into my bank account to schedule payment immediately after reconciling a credit card statement. I’m sure that I ordered last month’s check as per my routine. But I must have forgotten to click the “Finished” button on Citizens Bank’s crappy interface, because last week I got a late-night overdue payment notice. I logged onto my Amex account and paid them online within minutes. Alas, they’d already extracted their pound of flesh. Forgetting to click that stupid “Finished” button cost me a $38 late fee and $42.81 in interest. So much for the $100 windfall I got for my old computer.

Why hate myself, rather than Amex or Citizens? Because we all know the sleazy games that card issuers play to “earn” fees nowadays. Before the Great Recession, I’d have begged Amex for mercy due to my stellar payment history; post-crash, I know better than to even ask. And the Citizens Bank interface just plain sucks. They are rolling out a redesign next month.

Reasons to hate QuickBooks: The eighth major patch for QB 2009 came out. Number of my previously tagged reasons to hate QuickBooks that were addressed: Zero. I can’t believe Intuit deliberately left the transaction-list sorting bug intact.

Winter's a-Settin' In

Thursday morning I awoke in an uncomfortably cool room. Every year at about this same time a cold front blows in a crystal blue sky...and my pollen allergies. The shadows reach some critical length, the quality of sunlight changes, my tomatoes and peppers reach a certain ripeness, and when I put that all together somehow I just know. Fall is bullying summer in the back yard. Pretty soon summer will run home crying and fall can start its annual killing spree.

“Fall blew in last night,” I told my wife. “Winter’s a-settin’ in.”

That last phrase always riles her up. My mom used to say it. She could detect those same subtle cues that I pick up on, and see the same thing. Yes, it’s still August. Yes, several more weeks of summery weather lie ahead. But the fix is in.

Naturally, Anne thinks I’m nuts. And I am nuts. But I’m right about this.

Imagine my righteous delight, then, when I came home to find an order for the LED Peace Sign tree topper waiting for me. And imagine how a subsequent order for the Recycled Motherboard Christmas Tree compounded my smugness. And then, to top it off, I got an unrelated order from somebody whose surname is “Christmas”. I’m not clever enough to make this stuff up.

Winter’s definitely a-settin’ in.

A jolt of anxiety is probably a good thing, because for the fourth year in a row I have no marketing plan or holiday strategy. Maybe lightning will strike like it did last year. I need to zero in on a few good products, erect some lightning rods, and pray to the gods of greed for a miracle. Without one, I won’t match last year’s phenomenal sales and 2009 will go down the toilet.

At least my open-to-buy is in the black and I’m well-stocked on my major lines. By mid-September I’ll have enough cash on hand to bring in a few of the products I’ve been wish-listing since spring. None of them excite me, but neither does life in general.


Something new to hate about Quickbooks: Each day, I match individual transactions in the “make deposits” window to the day’s actual bank deposits. This window used to sort transactions by date, as you’d expect. In QB 2009, it sorts them alphabetically by deposit type (so all cash transactions, then all checks, then all Discover, then all Mastercard, then Paypal, etc). Since the bank doesn’t discriminate between MC and Visa I have to combine and re-combine mixed charges until I reach an amount that matches the deposit – a minor nuisance now, but it’s going to become a real time-sink come December. The standard Windows sort-by column header doesn’t work. Intuit deliberately broke it. Intuit’s customer service/help desk board has dozens of complaints about this bug and one official reply saying (in effect) “We changed this in 2008. It works the way we want it to, so it’s not a bug. Deal with it.” Users accuse Intuit of breaking this so that we will subscribe to their payment processing service. Intuit might just be the most arrogant software developer I’ve ever encountered – and I used to work in the PC games industry, where contempt for customers is legendary.

Something else to hate about Quickbooks: The 2009 desktop has new icons for “Intuit.com Services”, “Accept Credit Cards,” and “Learn About Payroll Options.” These are advertisements, and they cannot be removed. Here’s a clue, Intuit: Do not spam paying customers.

More hatred for Quickbooks: During a routine backup QB waved its scrawny arms around and shouted “Danger Will Robinson! Your data file is damaged! You need to run Rebuild Data! Danger!” Trying to do so triggered more dire warnings – “don’t try this unless instructed by an Intuit technician!” Screw you; that costs money. You know what the repair utility found? A duplicate template. Now, *I* certainly didn’t create a duplicate template…. And of course QB won’t let me delete a template.

A new reason to hate Yahoo: As soon as I paused my campaigns, I started getting daily emails saying: “There is an issue with the analytics tag for account 'Kraken Enterprises, Inc.-US' [xxxxxx]. Data has not been received since xxxxxx. If analytics data is not received for 46 consecutive days, your analytics will be temporarily deactivated. Please verify your analytics settings and check the tags on your web site(s).”

Of course, my tags are unchanged. I re-enabled Yahoo ads for a few top products; I’ll shut them down permanently after I use up my last $70. Data is flowing, but I’m still getting the same email warning every morning, with the date incremented by one day. Of course, Yahoo’s analytics are useless anyway.

Oh well. Microsoft bought Yahoo’s search business. I hope they nuke YSM from orbit.

An even better reason to hate Yahoo: No sooner did I reactivate those keywords than I got a notice that some are being deactivated because the minimum bids have increased. Yup, they’re raising prices again. My account doesn’t tell me which ones, if any, are endangered.

Something new to hate about my Vorlon (and I really hope I won’t need a tag for this!): The headphone/speaker wire jack is in the front of the machine. Grrrrr. Maybe iPod zombies appreciate having easy access to that jack, but for those of us who keep external speakers plugged in it’s just one more thing that’s constantly in the way. The Vorlon is a great machine functionally, but the ergonomics are really screwed. You’d think Dell would know better.

Oh, and when I run a graphics-intense game, the heat output is phenomenal. I wish I’d known that before I bought the video card upgrade.

The QuickBooks Crisis Ends. I Hope.

You’d think that setting up my first new computer in four years would be fun, but business machines are so boring that I didn’t even take my new Vorlon out of the box for three days. Then I spent two days installing and customizing programs and utilities, leaving Wednesday open to deal with Quickbooks.

I started at 11:30 am. Basic installation was routine. Thanks to the warnings that I’d read, I knew enough to patch the program before converting my company file. By 12:05 pm I was ready to register – aw, CRAP! – by telephone. Even though I knew it was coming, enduring a sales pitch from India to obtain a six-digit code pissed me off -- can't computers do that nowadays? By 12:25 I was finally up and running. My 65 MB company file runs great on this shiny new computer. With the QB hurdle finally cleared and only a few minor details remaining, I moved my old Inspiron aside and put the Vorlon in its place of honor. I held a little ceremony. It was emotional.

Thursday morning the QB shortcut was missing from my desktop and from the Programs list. In fact, the QB executable was gone without a trace! The program folder was there. My company file was where QB wanted me to put it. But the program itself is nowhere to be found, not even in the recycle bin. WTF? How is it even possible? I reinstalled, and thankfully didn’t have to reactivate the program. The .exe survived the night and is running normally. Today QB asked me to reapply the big R7 patch, so if that’s what ate the .exe last time I might not be out of the woods yet.

I tried to set up the online banking feature that everyone was complaining about. It seemed to work once, but crapped out on me this morning. Maybe I just don't understand how it's supposed to work. It doesn't matter.

***********

I’ve been using Kosh long enough to pronounce a verdict on the Dell Vostro 1520. The glossy plastic lid is a fingerprint magnet, although it looks sleek when it’s clean. The onboard speakers are weak and tinny compared to my Inspiron’s robust sound. The screen is very bright and has great contrast, but (like most LCDs these days) it leaks backlight around the edges, and both of the bottom corners are shadowy. Worst of all, it doesn’t have any rear USB ports, and the side ports are near the front of the machine – convenient for changing out USB devices, but anything plugged in permanently (such as the cord for my wireless mouse receiver) is inevitably in the way. My machine is supposed to have 3 GB of RAM. Windows system info shows 2.99 GB of memory. Yet a little freeware system monitor that I installed is only reporting 2 gig. I choose to fault the utility. Functionally, the Vorlon is a great little machine so far. The real test will be how well it runs Fall from Heaven 2.

***********

I finally made good on my repeated threats to shut down Yahoo Search Marketing. Since July is doomed anyway, why watch the remaining $78 in my account slowly dribble away? I can always reactivate my campaigns when consumers start consuming again…maybe in the fall.

Readers who don’t care about numbers should skip down to the next section break.

I’ve spent $682.35 on YSM year-to-date. That bought 4716 clicks (14.5 cents/click) and 42 conversions ($16.25 per conversion). I’d need a programmer to implement Yahoo’s sales tracking code to know what those conversions were worth; I arbitrarily set their value at $20 – the price of one lighted cap -- which would be $840 in revenue. Am I really paying $16.25 for $20 worth of business? No, the numbers are more slippery than that. A “conversion” means one advertised item sold (thus a conversion can bring along piggyback dollars). Even conversion tracking itself is inexact – for example, Yahoo reports something called “assists”, which seem to be an ill-defined way of inflating their conversion count. Buyers who have cookies turned off don’t register at all. Even if each Yahoo conversion is really worth my average sale (currently $42, but falling rapidly), that’s still just $1,764 in gross sales. With advertising budgeted at 9% of gross, the $682.35 that I spent would need to return somewhere around $7,000 (I don’t know how to calculate that, how embarrassing) to be cost-effective.

It looks to me like I spent 39% of my Yahoo sales revenue on Yahoo advertising, which is to say that each Yahoo ad dollar brought in $1.61 in sales (is that right?). So the roughly $100 per month that I save on YSM should only reduce sales by $161/month.

I might improve this by completely revamping my ad campaigns, or possibly by cutting out all keywords except a dozen or so proven winners. Perhaps I’ll set myself a goal: By September, I want to reopen YSM with a stripped down, cost-effective campaign.

For comparison’s sake, here are my equivalent Google numbers: $1,718.68 bought 152 conversions, for $11.31 per conversion. If those 152 conversions were worth $42 each (the number I awarded to Yahoo), then I spent 27% of gross to drive $6,384 in sales. The same warnings about imprecision apply – if my overall advertising percentage was really that high I’d have gone under years ago.

No matter how you slice and dice it, Google ads are a better investment. I’m going to nudge my Google budget up by the $100 that I’m saving on Yahoo. Theoretically, spending that $100 on Google should drive $173 in sales, or $12 more than if I’d spent it at Yahoo. Whee!

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Traffic and sales are both plummeting now. By the end of June I was down to barely 100 visits per day – 50% below where I should be. This first week of July was even worse. Remember how I said that last week was the worst of 2009? Well, this week is going to be the worst since 2007. My next paycheck will be the smallest I’ve seen in two years. It’s breathtaking how rapidly things fell apart.

My next big project will be figuring out how to use Twitter and Facebook for marketing. Yes, I’m getting desperate. The gods know I have enough time on my hands these days.

The QuickBooks Crisis II

Prolonged contemplation kept leading me back to three thoughts: Whether I like it or not, QuickBooks is one of the key tools I need to run my business, and it will no longer run on my old hardware. As an Internet business, I need to keep my technology current. And I have a budget for “technology” that I would not have completely drained otherwise (although I am planning to pay for a Sunshop version upgrade in a few weeks).

Dell had a tempting sale on their Vostro line of business laptops (which, as a Babylon 5 fan, I simply must call the “Vorlon”). Vorlons won praise in my source for all things techy, the Octopus Overlords computing forum. The deal I was looking at expired within 48 hours. So I jumped. Yes, I bought a new computer.

On one hand, this is a bad development for all of the reasons that I laid out last week. OTOH, I haven’t had a new computer since 2005, and I’m really looking forward to moving into my new souped-up Vorlon – I upgraded the CPU from 2.1 to 2.4 GHz, added a 256 MB Nvidia video card for gaming, and upgraded to a “wide view” (higher resolution) screen. Obviously, I have to name it Kosh.

Kosh is not due to land until around July 1. I hope this will keep me current for another four years:

Vostro 1520, Genuine Windows Vista® Business Bonus-Windows XP Professional downgrade Unit Price $1,143.00 (Sale price $948, delivered)

• Operating System Genuine Windows Vista® Business Bonus-Windows XP Professional downgrade
• Processor Intel® Core™ 2 Duo P8600 (2.4GHz, 3MB L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
• Memory 4GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz, 2 DIMM
• Video Card NVIDIA® GeForce™ 9300M GS 256MB
• Hard Drive 250GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive with Free Fall Sensor
• LCDs 15.4" Premium WXGA+ Anti-Glare Display (Wide View)
• Optical Drives 8X DVD+/-RW with double-layer DVD+/-R write capability, Roxio and Cyberlink PowerDVD™ DX 8.1
• Wireless Cards Dell Wireless™ 1397 802.11b/g Mini Card
• Primary Battery 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery

ACCESSORIES
SanDisk 8GB Hi-Speed USB Cruzer Micro Drive with U3 technology

The QuickBooks Crisis

I reluctantly decided to install the seemingly unnecessary copy of QuickBooks Pro 2009 that I was tricked into buying. When I opened the package I learned that the minimum supported CPU is a Pentium 4 at 2 GHz (a tidbit that I really ought to have noticed when I was researching the software, but never mind). I have a Pentium 4 at 1.86 GHZ. Ordinarily I would figure that 1.86 is close enough to 2.0 to squeak by, but QB is a notorious resource pig. Suppose I go through the install and then find that I can’t run the program at all, or that it slows my computer to uselessness? Some of the reviews warn that one cannot revert to 2006 if the QB 2009 install goes badly. Inserting that install disk is an irreversible act that I dare not risk.

So it seems that I have two choices. I can set aside the $100 program that I bought and continue running my unsupported version until something else compels me to buy a new machine. Or I can lay out $900 for a new laptop now. Do I really need a new computer?

On one hand, it has been four years. As an internet business I do need to keep up with the tech curve. Even if my Inspiron isn’t obsolete yet, it is getting there. I do have a technology budget that probably would have gone mostly for SEO or website upgrades, had I spent it at all. And yesterday I found a sweet deal on a Dell Vostro that, with a couple of upgrades to make it acceptable for gaming, would cost just under $900 delivered. Compared to the $1258 that I paid for my old Inspiron, that's a bargain.

OTOH, spending $900 on a new machine so that I can run a $100 piece of bloatware is ridiculous. The outlay would come directly off my bottom line and reduce my year-end bonus, so even though it's coming out of Kraken Enterprises's pocket, I ultimately end up paying for it personally (although with untaxed dollars, I think). The Inspiron still works fine for everything except QB, and migrating to new hardware would entail recreating or porting over four years worth of settings and customized programs. The new machine comes with a Windows XP downgrade, but that might just be a runtime environment within Vista – might I have to “upgrade” such hoary mainstays as MS Office 2000? Once I install QB 2009 on a new machine, how tricky would it be to import and convert my QB 2006 company file from the old machine? Might I end up right where I started, with an unusable copy of QB 2009?

Crap. I don’t know what to do. That Vostro deal expires today and I am unlikely to find a better value without considerable shopping. One way or the other, it looks like my hand will be forced again, and within the next few hours.

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A nice little sales surge late last week finally convinced me to place the full $1,300 cap reorder to get the best pricing and maintain my margin. So much for reducing inventory; my OTB is back in the red, and I still have orders wishlisted. And, as you might expect, sales quickly died again as soon as I placed that big honking order. It looks like Fathers Day is going to be a big disappointment this year.

May's national retail sales actually increased over last year, but that was entirely in automobile and gasoline sales. Real retail sales shrank again. That's some cold comfort for my own lackluster May.

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Constant Contact's benchmarks for retailer mailings are 8.0% bounce rate (bad addresses or blocked), 17.9% open rate, and 3.2% click rate. The corresponding numbers from my last mailing are 0.7% bounce, 32% open, and 32.2% clicks. So I guess my results are actually a lot better than I had thought. It’s been over a year since I last purged my list of non-responsive addresses…I could drive my percentages much higher if I did that again. Of course, that wouldn’t change the number of clicks that convert to sales, which is all that matters.