A Summer Miracle

Apparently "summer miracle" is an anime show, hence this week's cryptic picture. 

Miraculously, August was another winning month. I don't think I had any Blue Hills activity to throw off the numbers, so here they are in the traditional format. 

August

Total income: +5%
Payroll: -7.4%

Marketing: -35.1%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: +93.7% (+$157)

Actual Profit/Loss: +$304

2017 YTD

Total income: +66%
Total COGS: +9.4%
Payroll: +263.6%

Marketing: -30.4%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: +257.7% (+$5,072)

Actual Profit/Loss: +$3,104

I said "miraculously" because I am putting no effort whatsoever into marketing and I've cut my ad spend considerably. The fact that I beat LY anyway just shows you how badly I suck at self-promotion.

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Back in the day, I swore that I would never gouge my customers on shipping. If you've been around long enough, you have seen me debate nickel-and-dime handling fee hikes and cuts, always trying to cover my costs as accurately as possible. 

Times change. Now that so much of my stock is marked down to cost, postage overcharges are often the only place I make any money at all. I have come to rely on collecting anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks more than it will cost me to fill orders.

And so it's a bigger deal than you might think that the USPS broke my shipping module (again) with yet another rate change. These USPS changes always catch Turnkey flat-footed. When I was more engaged, I used to proactively post on their forums to make sure that the modules would be updated promptly. Turnkey usually denied that any changes were required. Then, when the modules broke, they were at least be alerted to take quick action. 

This time the USPS broke First Class Package rates -- last time this happened, it was because they renamed First Class Parcels. Packages up to 13 ounces (nearly all of my non-kite sales, and probably half of my total business) can take advantage of these cheap rates. When they suddenly go away, so does a lot of my business. I suspect that they might have broken Priority Mail rate lookups, too; the last several packages that I shipped cost me more than I collected.
I hope that Turnkey will update Sunshop on Tuesday or Wednesday, and things should get back to normal. I used to get seriously bent out of shape when I lost three or four days' business to software problems, but as long as it gets fixed reasonably quickly I'm beyond caring very much.  

September ought to be a terrible month as kite sales fall to nothing. Ordinarily I'd see early Christmas orders starting this month, but I don't expect that to happen at all this year. Losing all of Labor Day weekend to a broken shipping module isn't going to help; in fact, the month's net sales are negative at the moment, and there is a $150 kite return hanging over my head. 

I am expecting one tiny Blue Hills paycheck this month and I should be able to bill out a more substantial job, although that won't pay off until October.

Cutting My Own Throat

I officially recused myself from the Dr. Oz promotion when I learned that the doctor expects 70% of the show’s viewers to order their Corn-n-Tater Bags over the Internet. That’s a lot more than the 20% that I had guessed – potentially 35,000 orders, not the 10,000 that were already freaking me out.

I might have been able to set up a second website dedicated to those orders. It would’ve cost me around $1,200 to do it and my developer’s availability was iffy. But even if I could have gotten it done in three weeks, I had no way to stress test it. Based on a $1 per order commission, I might have earned as much as $35,000 – pretty damned good for a $1,200 investment, on the face of it, until you realize that my payment processing cost would’ve wiped out most of it (35,000 orders times $17 gross times 3.25% processing fee equals $19,335 right off the top), and the consequences of dropping the ball would have been devastating. The Healthcare.gov debacle is the latest example of what happens when a busy website launches without sufficient testing...something the game industry has known for a long time.

Passing up a break that was far bigger than I have ever wished for might seem stupid and self-defeating. Homecooked Shortcuts is going to divert their link to a professional fulfillment house for a few weeks of pure insanity. Steve promised to restore the link to Curio City as soon as volume falls below 100 orders a day. That’s still twice as many orders as I’ve ever shipped in one day, and it could go on for days or even weeks. Even without that, I’ll still get spillover sales from people who find me through search. So I still stand to reap considerable reward from the Oz thing without cutting my own throat. If this pans out, I’ll still set new records for November and December.

This all assumes that product is available. Homecooked is “only” producing 25,000 bags on the assumption that Dr. Oz is exaggerating. That’s a huge investment for them. If the doctor’s results match his projections, though, those bags will all be gone in a few hours. My $2,000 gross from the 150 that I have in stock will be the end of that. I guess I should place one more reorder before the Nov. 13 air date, even though the 150 that I already have looks like an awful lot.

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I lost interest in the Google Analytics training after the first two lessons proved to be aimed at big companies that employ marketing and web development specialists. I wanted some tips that I could use; instead I got a lot of general information that would be relevant to Wal Mart. The third of six sessions started getting a little more practical, but I ran out of time to complete the course. Oh well. I didn’t really need to know how to segment my data among web and mobile applications and create data sets customized for my international sales force. I might still complete the remaining lessons by the Oct. 30 deadline if I unexpectedly find myself with nothing else to do.

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WTF Google? 

“In your Merchant Center account, you have selected the ‘Carrier-calculated’ 

shipping option at the account level; however, you have not provided item level ‘shipping weight’ attribute values for all of the items included in your feed or via API. Shipping weight values are required in order for the ‘Carrier-calculated’ shipping option to calculate and display shipping costs on Google Shopping.

“Starting on November 5 2013, we'll begin verifying that all accounts using the ‘Carrier-calculated’ shipping option are including ‘shipping weight’ values for each item. Items using the ‘Carrier-calculated’ shipping option that do not include ‘shipping weight’ values will generate errors during insertion and the items will not be eligible to display in Google Shopping.”

Good old Google, always making compliance harder for little players. Obviously, all of my items have the weight attribute; I couldn’t ship them otherwise. The problem lies in Sunshop’s data feed. I don’t know how this never came up before but I am once again at Turnkey’s mercy…please don’t make me lie to Google and tell them I’m using an arbitrary fixed shipping rate of, say, $6.

Is There Anybody Out There?

It looks like Facebook’s latest interface upheaval killed the Networked Blogs app. Last week’s post appeared on my wall and my Twitter feed as usual, but the “number of impressions” fell from 200-ish to 25.  A manual wall post made on the same day appeared under “Top Stories” and got the expected exposure, so I have to think that autoposts from Networked Blogs aren’t making the cut, even though they look normal to me.

Sigh. Sometimes I wish the Internet would stop being such a prima donna and be pre-Madonna instead. Should I reinstall Networked Blogs? Look for a new app? Hope it automatically fixes itself? Post blog links manually? I don’t know. Ken White’s Popehat promos often inspire me to click through -- but their posts are inherently more interesting than mine. 

So why not make Curious Business more like Popehat? In the first place, I’m not a collective of writers. In the second place, it’s hard to be fresh and witty after writing about the same narrow subject (namely, Curio City) for five years. And in the third place, I’m simply not clever enough to come up with “You Wouldn’t Say That If A Terrorist With An Expired Registration And Six Tons Of Ammonium Nitrate Drove Onto Sesame Street, Killing Big Bird And Elmo, Would You?”

Betcha all 25 of my readers will click on that one.

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Last week’s Sunshop upgrade didn’t quite rise to disaster status, but it sure stretches the definition of “upgrade.” What should have been the most visible improvement – the Flash image viewer – doesn’t actually work in a typical Internet Explorer install (and Apple products famously don't support Flash at all, but I already knew that). Neither did Turnkey’s fallback routine, at first; I spent a lot of time figuring out why IE8 was being petulant. To my dismay, Sunshop dropped support for the old rollover thumbnails, so my product display took a great leap backwards. 

I decided to try the Flash viewer despite these drawbacks, and promptly went 36 hours without a sale. Wednesday became my first shutout since late August; the corresponding day last year was $588. I reluctantly turned it off again on Thursday (sorry, Firefox users) and within five minutes a sale came in. Coincidence? I’m sure not going to test it any further to make sure. This week's shortfall mostly wipes out my gains from the past two months.

The much-delayed random act of media finally yielded exactly one sale…from a New Jersey resident who bought some Switchables. So much for the ravening hordes I greedily anticipated. I never sold a single Science clock. I didn’t know that any publicity could flop so completely, even for a year-old product that had already proven itself a turkey.

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In the Nobody Cares Department: I have decreed that payday shall fall on the Monday following the close of the pay period, rather than Friday, as before. I originally delayed payday in case the cash flow wasn’t there to support it; that concern has ebbed. Advancing payday by five days should bring in one more paycheck this year than last.

Good Riddance to Bad Elves

Christmas finally died last Tuesday after a long illness. It will not be missed. After a second consecutive December decline, I’d love to hibernate until Valentines Day…but when the self-employed rest, we lose. I am already pondering how to better cash in on next year’s spending orgy.


Since my past few posts were so number-heavy, and since I'll have the year-end wrap-up next week, and since I’m currently suffering yet another lousy week, I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty today.

I only lost one Christmas shipment this year, sending a $10 item to West instead of East (Whatever) Street in NYC. UPS apparently lost a 2nd-Day Air shipment this week, although I haven’t confirmed that yet because the customer fell silent after her initial complaint (she’s traveling). Otherwise everybody’s packages got where they were supposed to go. That’s 235 packages in November and 410 (so far) in December. With one more crappy week left in this crappy month, I should end up very close to LY’s 705 shipments – the monetary decline reflects the Curse of the Small Orders that I identified a couple of weeks ago, not an absence of customers. (I’m sorry, I said I was going to skip the statistics!)

The three thefts and two cellar floods that washed more than $1,000 off my bottom line were this year’s lows. New fraud control will prevent those scams from being repeated, albeit at the cost of rejecting some legitimate sales – APO addresses in particular usually fail the metrics (sorry, soldiers). Pray to Neptune that global warming won’t raise the waters again next year.

At the beginning of 2010 I had set myself the goal of acquiring 100 Facebook “fans” by the end of the year. As of today I’m at 112. FB changed “become a fan” to “Like” midway through the year because “liking” something is a lesser commitment than “becoming a fan” of it. The effect is the same, but the goal was easier to reach. FB seems to be spreading of its own accord now – not that I don’t still need the active support of my FB “likers”.

Other items on my 2010 agenda were:

Drop international shipping: Nope, didn’t do it. I was sorely tempted after this year’s thefts (all of them by foreigners), but I’m still reluctant to cut 1-2% off my top line. I'll reconsider if sales recover beyond expectations.

Drop Google Checkout: Nope. In fact, my GC business grew slightly last year. That’s fine; their processing fees are slightly lower than the competition. I hate to see so many of those customers drastically overpay for shipping because of Sunshop's flawed GC integration, but I’m not going to lose sleep if it doesn’t bother them.

Drop Giftwrapping: Nope. In fact, I sold $8 more worth of giftwrap this year than last despite lowering the fee and removing the option from many products. The $124.50 that it brought in is trivial when merged into general sales…less so when committed directly to payroll. Unfortunately, the floods forced me to replace $94 worth of destroyed paper, so the company barely broke even on the deal. I am dropping it from everything that’s bulky or odd-shaped, though.

Cosmetic Facelift: Nope, the unexpected expenses torpedoed that. It's probably for the best, since Turnkey seems to have abandoned the Sunshop template that I was going to adopt. It’s still on my wishlist for next year.

Discontinue Greeting Cards: Yup, wrote those suckers off and folded the department. I might not have done so if I’d known about the other losses 2010 had in store…but I’m glad they’re gone.

Another Raise: Yup, I increased payroll in two steps from 19 to 20% of net. That’s why my paycheck set a record this year despite lackluster sales.

In a couple of weeks I’ll publish a similar punch list for 2011.

Although I don’t celebrate Christmas myself, neither do I fight it like I used to. Why try to harsh everybody else’s buzz? In observance of the holiday (and the impossibility of accomplishing anything this weekend anyway) I’m taking this afternoon off. I’m finally going to finish moving into the new computer that arrived just before Thanksgiving. I might even treat myself to a new game next week...it would be my first in years.

Next week: Counting the money and planning the plan.

I Fought the Web (And the Web Won)

Technology seldom beats me outright. Oh sure: constant change, complexity, and expense bedevil me as much as the next guy. I don’t understand smart phones at all, for example, or why we need to pay $110 a month for dumb cell
phones on top of $120 for normal phone/cable TV/internet. I know only the rudiments of using the DVR. I don’t own a MP3 player and I rarely take my cell phone out of my office. I haven’t been able to run a new game on my 7.5-year-old gaming PC for at least three years now. I have never seen a Blu-ray disk. I am, in short, permanently stuck circa 2005.

And yet, the years that I worked in software development equipped me with the basic skills to muddle through this whole internet thing. When I can’t solve a problem myself, I know where to seek help. Persistence and money usually bend technology to my will. Usually. Some problems can’t be solved.

The PayPal Checkout Loop goes back to at least 2007, but that’s a Sunshop bug – there’s nothing I can do about it. Turnkey can’t fix it because I can’t reproduce it, and since nobody but me has ever reported it it is likely to endure forever.

The Admin timeout bug has plagued me ever since I moved to MochaHost. It’s caused by an operating system setting on my shared server that they refuse to change – unless I upgrade to a dedicated server or change hosting companies, I must continue logging in every 24 minutes for the rest of eternity, like Desmond pushing his button. At least the island doesn’t move when I blow it off, Brother.


Now we can add USPS shipping times to that short list. Here’s the background that I wrote back in February:

In January the USPS raised rates on Priority Mail and Express Mail; First Class and Parcel Post rates stayed the same. Customers usually choose the least-expensive Parcel Post option, and I've always upgraded those orders to either UPS Ground or Priority Mail. The upgraded price is still at or below my actual cost, the customer gets better service than they paid for, and everybody’s happy.

Or was until now. Priority Mail rates went up and Parcel Post did not. That means that my shipping costs rose while the fees I collect – which come from rate table lookups -- didn’t. The advent of zoned pricing sometimes makes West Coast upgrades a losing proposition. Shrinking the small spread between fees collected and costs paid out is harming my bottom line.

To rectify that, I could:
1. Raise my handling fee. But that penalizes my First Class, UPS, and east coast customers.
2. Increase product weights. But that punishes my most desirable customers – those who buy multiple products at once.
3. Eliminate Parcel Post. But taking away the lowest-priced option would make my shipping charges visibly higher and harm a competitive advantage.
4. Leave everything unchanged and accept the smaller spread. But that makes it more difficult to reach my sales plan (which I calculate based on net sales after shipping costs) and ultimately comes out of my pocket.
5. Actually ship via Parcel Post more often. But shipments that now take 2-3 days would take 7-10 days. Customers won’t like that.

An attentive reader suggested a sixth solution: Show customers the transit times. If they see “Priority Mail: 2-3 Days” and “Parcel Post: 4-10 Days”, most will pay the incremental cost for Priority, my rate spread will be covered, and profitability will improve. Brilliant! I just need to edit the shipping method dropdown list that appears in the shipping estimator and at checkout. That’s, like, five minutes’ work at the most, right?

Yeah, about that. USPS domestic, USPS international, and UPS each have a shipping module consisting of a single small file. When I edit them in Textpad my UPS text shows up immediately. USPS text never does. So is it stored somewhere else? The independent developers in Turnkey’s Modifications forum keep referring me back to the same USPS.php file that’s not working. Turnkey itself remains silent; they’re not obliged to support user mods. In one last shot at ending the stalemate, I prevailed upon my developer to investigate. His verdict:

Usps.php has an install method that clearly writes this stuff to the database when the module is "installed" and it looks like checkout is calling a function in global.php called "get_shipping" which really looks like it's reading from the database to generate dropdown options... but I don't know how any of this stuff ties together... so I could be way off base.

I do see something that looks like it might be setting up a http call and parsing a response in usps.php as well... so maybe it's a web call. *shrug*

I'm fairly confident it's not reading values from USPS.php (that would be... extremely idiotic)

Turnkey hasn't made this very straightforward... so it’s not trivial to figure out how that's being generated.

If you want me to figure this out I will, but you're going to have to give me a few weeks to find time to do some hardcore reverse engineering and put up with me hacking up (and very likely breaking) your shipping functionality for a bit while I troubleshoot.

Higher shipping charge receipts would eventually recoup the cost of hiring Brad to reverse-engineer this function – assuming that he can “fix” it at all; if the text is being passed from the USPS server along with the rates, I’m just screwed. And “eventually” is a long time; I can’t afford any more unplanned expenses in a year that’s already been hammered by them.

So I am back to Square One. Right now I’m still absorbing the increased costs. If sales were running anywhere near plan I might remove the cheap Parcel Post option; very few other shops offer it. But sales have still not crawled out of the crapper that I plumbed last week; I can’t risk doing anything that might flush them deeper.

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Speaking of last week…Forget everything I said about Facebook advertising. Turns out that I can advertise products directly, so I started with an ad for my old warhorse, Panther Vision caps. After a week my exhorbitant 75-cent bid bought 5,555 impressions without one single click. Crap. On Monday I added Switchables and Buckyballs to my campaign. On Tuesday I reordered golf balls and started advertising them. As of this morning Switchables has racked up 54 clicks, golf balls have 45, Buckyballs have only six, and Panther caps remain stuck at 0. FB’s tracking code is in beta, so I can’t be sure, but I don’t think that the $27.75 I spent this week brought in a single sale. Click-through rates are abysmal on FB, and the cost to buy impressions is very high. As nice as it is to see overall traffic spike past 300 daily visits (!), I can’t afford this for very long.

FB’s infamous intrusion on its members’ privacy is its main appeal to advertisers: I can target my ads very narrowly based on the interests that users willingly reveal. I’ve decided to cough up $50 of my own to prolong this experiment for another week; if I can figure out how to use this precise targeting to reduce my cost, it's worth flogging through Christmas.

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Speaking of the crapper…Christmas is finally starting to crawl out of it. For the rest of this year I’m throwing plan out the window; I just need to match LY. At the moment sales are running 22% behind last year with a day and a half (21% of the week) left to go. It’s going to be tight, but I might just barely make my nut for this important first week of November. It’s a fairly big nut.

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Now that the voting is over I can get back to being my usual level-headed, moderate self. After one parting shot at politics, that is.

After spending $250 million on midterm campaigns, corporate America has got the Congress it paid for. I’ve cut next year’s planned sales increase by 50% to reflect the two additional years of economic stagnation that voters just ratified. There will be no second stimulus package. There will be no more unemployment benefit extensions. The economy has been cut loose.

Americans did not vote the Republicans in so much as they voted the Democrats out. Republicans owe their gains to two factions (apart from the Tea Party’s billionaire backers), and the fate of their party depends on which one they reward. Their main support in 2010 came from the same independent, moderate voters who flocked to Obama in 2008. These swing voters expect them to work with the Democrats on solving this country’s real problems, and they will desert in 2012 if they don’t see tangible progress. Republicans would be wise to deliver it. The other faction -- Tea Party extremists – promised conflict and confrontation. Their uncompromising ideological purity, if indulged, will ensure that nothing gets done. Republicans certainly owe them some grand symbolic gestures, like introducing a doomed health care repeal bill, but they would be unwise to give them anything substantial. Tea Partiers have no alternative to voting Republican so the party need not kowtow to them.

This struggle for control over the Republican Party is fascinating fallout from their recent victory. I’d actually feel sorry for Republicans if the poor and middle class weren’t going to be the main casualties of this power struggle.

My home state of Massachusetts successfully fought off the Republican wave entirely. They did not win a single position of consequence here. Our Commonwealth remains solidly blue and unashamedly liberal after roundly rejecting budget cutters and tax cutters. So I’m somewhat insulated from whatever shenanigans they pull in Congress – except inasmuch as the harm that they do to the national economy drags Massachusetts down with everyone else. Nobody’s going to take away our universal health care or gut social programs or repeal our rights here, so I can be sanguine about developments that are alarming progressives elsewhere.

From Curio City’s point of view, two more years of tepid economic growth are the most chilling result of last Tuesday’s election. This business was predicated on rapid growth to bootstrap from zero to a living wage. The Great Recession already trimmed my sails; Republican-induced stagnation could ultimately sink the ship. It just depends on how much longer I’m willing to keep bailing.

Zounds and Gadzooks!

This week Turnkey released an important Sunshop security upgrade. Mildly peeved because I just upgraded last month, I asked Brad to work his magic again. He quickly set things up to do the deed this morning.

But first, to Turnkey’s Support forum! I found a couple of doozies.

First, the new password encryption will invalidate existing customers’ logins. I have more than 1,500 accounts (although most people who create one never come back, so only a few hundred of those are active). That's a shame, but into each life a little rain must fall, right? It's worse than that, though: the Forgot Password link won’t work for them. The Admin (that’s me!) has to reset their accounts manually. Those who create an account and return to it are precisely the people whom I least want to alienate. Zounds!

Second, this upgrade (and all future versions of Sunshop) requires the server to have a particular superpower. Mine apparently doesn’t. If we’d upgraded as planned, my site might have stopped working entirely, possibly for days. Gadzooks!

A user-created fix for the first issue will make everything work as intended. Existing users can still use their old passwords, new accounts will use the new method, and everyone can change their password normally. The problem is that if I make this modification I’ll have to carry it forward manually through all future version upgrades to maintain support for old passwords. Zounds!

For the second issue, my web host proposed moving my site to a server that has the necessary support. Moving is not at all trivial. Then they backpedaled and said that my server has the necessary module installed after all. I lack faith in their support department and won't strike my Gadzooks until Brad confirms it.

This morning Turnkey published a repack that should solve the password problem. We'll reschedule the upgrade for next week. Meanwhile, I'm watching the forums for any new developments.

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Last week’s appeal to my Facebook followers grew my legion from 82 to 84. Can you feel the excitement building? Not to seem ungrateful – any growth is good -- I wish it was translating into sales. Next week’s numbers report won’t be anything to crow about.

Saved By the Stones

Remember how I expected Week 4 to finish thousands of dollars behind LY’s corresponding week (which benefited from a free mention in the NY Times gift guide)? Instead, I finished less than $100 down. 2008’s stroke of marketing luck moved about 300 Recycled Motherboard Christmas Trees at $10 a pop. (I just sold out of those this morning, btw). This year I moved 150 of the surprise bestseller Whisky Stones at $20. I made the same amount of money on half the work. Sweet! Maybe next year I’ll find a $40 product that’s good for 75 units.

Week 4’s unexpected success crippled Week 5. First Panther Vision tied one hand behind my back by selling completely out of Power Caps. I effectively ran out on Wednesday and can’t get more until next Friday, Dec. 18…optimistically. Then I tied my other hand by underestimating the run on Whisky Stones; I ran out on Monday. Sales fell when I stopped advertising my nonexistent products and continued to slide all week. Week 5, which should have been the single biggest week of the year, threatened to deliver the huge setback that I had expected in Week 4 – it was struggling to reach 50% of LY. And then, another last-minute miracle saved my bacon again. My last 60 packages of Whisky Stones came in. I sold 18 sets within two hours -- without advertising. While this week will still be down, it won’t be as bad as it looked this morning.

What’s bizarre is that my workload remains heavy, with 15-20 sales per day. They’re all small orders. I’m getting almost none of the grab-bag orders that I’ve seen in years past. People aren’t impulsively putting a dozen items in their cart this year. Because the process of putting things in boxes is only a small part of the labor in filling an order, one $10 item is nearly as much work as a $200 order with a dozen products. I know I ought to be grateful for all these little sales, but I’ll admit that I cringe every time one comes in.

Well, at least my on-hand inventory is shrinking. I’ll be effectively out of old 2-LED caps by the time my Power Caps finally show up. I have less than $18,000 worth of stuff in the cellar. If only it weren’t the most desirable stuff that’s gone!

With only one week left, nothing that I do now can affect the outcome. The caps either will arrive in time to make a difference, or they won’t. Whisky Stones are out of the picture. Customers either will flock to something else (save me, Switchables!), or they won’t. Week 6 either will reverse some of Week 5’s slide, or it won’t. December either will completely cancel out the previous 11 months’ sales increases, or it won’t.

The Boston Globe’s holiday gift guide mentioned two products that I carry: Whisky Stones (moan) and the Pop Quiz Blackboard clock. That clock was actually introduced a year ago; it’s the white “graph paper” version that’s new. I only have three left in stock; should I panic buy? Hardly. The Globe only promotes stuff from bricks-and-mortar stores within the city limits, and their readership has fallen to barely 200,000 people (from over 500,000 just a few years ago). It was worth a Facebook bleat, but nothing more. I’d be happy to move the three that I have left.

Here’s something cheerful: I have a new reason to hate Sunshop. Or maybe it’s just more venom for old hatred; I didn’t check my own post archive.

A customer flipped out after I shipped her order correctly. She had entered different ship-to information in the PayPal interface, but Sunshop ignored it. The ship-to on my packing list was her default PayPal address. It turns out that I had reported exactly the same bug in October 2008. Ah, nostalgia! Turnkey replied then that “we may have to take a look at this”. This year, they invited me to add it to their bug tracker. I swear I feel like I work in software QA again. I wish I was earning that kind of money.

Yahoo and the Royal Scam

I was too busy with personal chores again last week to do anything beyond caretaker work for Curio City. I finished painting the new porch, repainting the deck of the front porch, and painting the rocking chairs. A can of half-dried-up porch paint made the job more challenging; being cheap and stubborn, I couldn’t just throw away a $35 can of paint, so I had to painstakingly apply and smooth out the granular pasty stuff before finally caving in and buying a new gallon.

It took me four times longer to paint the porch than it took the contractor to build it. Sometimes when I contemplate the wreckage of my professional job history, I wish that I had learned a useful trade instead of wasting four years studying nothing worthwhile in college. Then I realize that I’d have failed as a tradesman, too. I am too slow and not very skilled.

Today I need to clean up after the paint project, and then hit the garden. There is a dead tomato plant to replace, a second hill of Gadzukes! zucchini to establish, bean towers to erect, and bean seeds to plant. This afternoon I have to hit my parcel drop at the UPS Store and receive some of the stuff I ordered last week, so Curio City will at least get one afternoon out of me. This weekend, I have assorted small chores to catch up on.

I did “attend” Yahoo Search Marketing’s second “webinar” yesterday. It felt good to sit and do nothing for an hour. I should get back to near-fulltime work next week.

The “Reasons to Hate” series of posts could be their own blog. There’s always so much material, and it’s always popular. Given all the painting, how did I find time to hate anybody last week? With companies like Google and Yahoo around, it’s never hard.

More Reason to Hate Yahoo: A customer used my Contact form to ask about a Steely Dan Record Purse. After some delay, the vendor sent me a short list of available Dan albums, which I sent to the customer. She liked The Royal Scam. So far, so good. I sent her instructions for ordering the purse. Silence ensued. A day or two later, I got another email pleading for unspecified assistance ordering her purse. Then I noticed: She has a Yahoo.com email address. Oh, no.

As I learned in February, Yahoo sends my email to its customers’ spam folders, and they won't white-list me. My Contact page warns customers to check their bulk items folders if they aren’t seeing my replies, but not everybody reads that or knows what a junk mail folder is. I sent the purse customer several more emails from different accounts and addresses (Kraken Enterprises at GoDaddy, rather than my Curio City addresses at MochaHost). The trail cooled as more days passed; how frustrating! This customer wants an expensive item that I can supply, and I want very much to sell it to her. She didn’t create an account or send me her phone number, so all I have is her email address. I must have gotten through at least once or she would not have known that we could supply The Royal Scam. So what was it about the message that got through?

Links. It didn’t have any hyperlinks! As a test, I sent one of the customer emails to my own Yahoo address – once with the links intact, and once with them removed. Sure enough, the “clean” email went into my Inbox and the one with hyperlinks went into my Bulk folder. Mystery solved! I immediately stripped all hyperlinks out of the email and sent it, yet again, to my customer. But by now a week had passed. I don’t know whether that email ever got through or not. I never heard from the customer again.

Well, at least I learned something: Don’t include helpful links for Yahoo customers, not even those in my signature. Thanks, Yahoo! That lesson cost me $58 and a customer.

More Reason to Hate Google (now with Sunshop bonus hatred!): Another Google Checkout shipping fiasco! A GC order for a $10 item came in with a $19 charge to send the 0.35-pound package via priority mail. When I recovered from the shock that somebody had actually paid nineteen bucks to ship less than half a pound, I refunded the overcharge and contacted Google yet again.

They determined that the USPS considers a package weighing less than 0.375 pound to be “nonmachinable”. When their rate lookup routine fails to find a valid rate, it uses a default supplied by the client software (Sunshop).

Now, the correct behavior would be for GC to consult the nonmachinable parcel post rate table and find that rate, rather than use some arbitrary default that’s buried somewhere in the bowels of Sunshop where I can’t easily change it. Google's representative agreed with that much, although whether he'll do anything about it is an open question. Priority mail is more ambiguous. I think it should have defaulted to the minimum 1-pound charge. That’s logical, and it’s how Sunshop behaves. But Google feels that using the default rate is the correct way to avoid making a rate decision better left to their customers. Since I had never heard of a minimum weight for priority mail before (that’s what first-class mail parcels are for – oh wait, Google refuses to offer first class), I don’t know whether a nonmachinable rate table for priority mail even exists, and therefore I can’t objectively tell Google what the proper behavior should be.

I tried to make clear how much business GC will lose by their serious shipping overcharges (if you’ve been reading the “Reasons to Hate” series, you know that they have a chronic problem with this). The person I’ve been working with is an engineer; I don’t know if this design flaw will be addressed, or if my complaint died when it turned out not to be a technical problem. For now, Google Checkout customers are just plain screwed if they order something weighing less than 0.375 pound.

Why hate Sunshop? Well, given that Google will not fix their design flaw, the best band-aid would be to set a minimum package weight of 0.4 pound. Sunshop does not support that. The second-best band-aid would be to set the default rate to something more reasonable, since it is never used for anything else; Sunshop does not have an interface for that. To be fair, I have not yet taken the time to write this up on the Turnkey support forum. I assume that they will deliver their standard “Not our problem” response (never put engineers in charge of design). So I'm advancing a little hatred toward Sunshop. If it turns out that there is an easy backdoor fix, I’ll eat these words.

Coming Attractions:

• The Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow
• Running with the Big Dogs
• The Zombie Store
• Legal Extortion

Rearranging the Deck Chairs (Part 2)

After spending hours deconstructing my categories one-by-one, I ended up with one of the most mind-numbingly boring posts ever written. Still, the work will prove useful if I really do restructure my store one day. So here you go. If it’s still not a riveting post, at least it’s mercifully short. Compared to the first draft, I mean.

If you just plain don’t care, skip to the end of this post for a couple of new entries in the ever-popular “reasons to hate” series. I won't be offended.

New Products, Specials, and Bestsellers are no-brainers. They’re built right into Sunshop, and everybody expects them. Those all stay.

Games, Toys, & Puzzles has always underperformed expectations. Games that are genuinely fun and well-produced become popular and get wide distribution, which takes them off Curio City’s radar – why would I sell something you can find at Kay-Bee Toys? The more obscure games have cheesy production values and/or lousy markups. A few products like Fluxx hit that sweet spot of being great games with good production and poor distribution. Such games keep the category alive.

Kites & Other Outdoor Toys just ought to be Kites. I sell just enough bird kites to justify the category, and it's only one or two new products away from awesomeness. They’d do better if they were more visible.

Gadgets & Gizmos is my most popular category and the heart of my original Curio City concept (before I learned that the evil ThinkGeek already owns that niche). I would like to strengthen it.

Timekeeping is also very strong, thanks to two of my inaugural products: DayClocks and the Stonehenge Watch. The Bicycle Parts Clocks subcategory only exists to provide a targeted landing page for PPC ads and improve my search engine results. There is no rational reason to separate them out. I should give DayClocks a landing page, too, purely for SEO.

Living Spaces was always an awkward, nearly meaningless catch-all. Sweep it away! Night lights have sold well thanks to two things: the Lava Lamp nightlight (another of my original products) and the entire Switchables line. I’d probably make Nightlights a top-level category, and give Switchables its own landing page.

Incidentally, while researching this paragraph I discovered that none of my Switchables appear in Google’s first 20 pages, even though the basic fixture is my #5 all-time bestseller! That’s horrible. My product titles and descriptions consistently used “Switchable” (singular). So I changed all references to the plural. SEO comes down to details like that. Such a silly simple thing should improve my placement a few weeks or months from now. (Another SEO footnote: people search for “nightlight” and “night light” just about equally. “Nite light”, “Night lite”, and even “nitelite” come up occasionally. I therefore use both “nightlight” and “night light” on my product pages, even though the inconsistency offends my sense of style.)

Bed & Bathroom currently holds only the Big Schnozz line and the Periodic Table Shower Curtain. I think I still need this category, even if the name is generic. Living Spaces is another nonsensical name. I could rename it “For the Home” and make it a catch-all, or I could obliterate it and distribute its products elsewhere. Not sure what to do there yet.

The Art of Sybil Shane is a relic of my wife's push to carry "nice things". Fine arts didn’t work out so well and are on the way out. Bzzt! Sorry, Sybil. Sorry, Anne.

I like the idea of pet products, but I haven’t found enough unusual items to support it. I thought that the dog Frisbee would be a sure thing. It wasn’t. I can't even sell them at a deep discount. The AntWorks did OK at first, then died. Maybe being buried under a non-label like “Living Spaces” killed this category. I’d like to elevate it, and see what happens...but I’d need more product to justify that.

Kitchen & Grill is very difficult. Although there are gadgets aplenty, price competition is fierce. The Microwave Popcorn Bowl was one of my inaugural products, and one about which I felt strongly. But there are competing products for less money, and the wholesale pricing is just awful. Last spring I got briefly enthused about high-tech grilling accessories, like a solar-powered LED grill light and a remote temperature sensor, until I discovered just how competitive that market is. Home Depot and Target can have it. I still want to keep this category, even if I lack a good rational reason for it.

Vinylux is only there as a landing page. After multiple requests finally got me a link directly from the company’s website to my subcategory page, I’m sure not going to change it now.

Office & Workspace should be among my stronger categories. Except for the Mini-briefcase (another very early product) how do business card holders fit the Curio City concept? Right now I’m down to 10 mini-briefcases left, with no replacement waiting in the wings, so this subcategory is going to die soon unless I luck into something new. Even ordinary business card holders have sold well, so I just need to bring in enough to keep a pulse in the category until I find another great one like the mini-briefcase.

Magnets belong in the “WTF was I thinking?” category. It took me a while to learn that people won’t pay for shipping on small, cheap items. I think I would need to stock hundreds of designs to make them a viable impulse item, and their Curio City connection is weak anyway. Mark ‘em down and get ‘em out.

Outdoors & Travel serves only as an umbrella for its subcats. For Beach or Poolside is just a handful of beach towels. They have sold slowly, but reliably, and the markup is good. Main problem here is that my supplier is erratic. I haven’t decided whether to expand it or kill it. For the Garden fills a personal interest, so it lives. It would sell better if more prominent.

I thought golf-themed stuff would do very well. It doesn’t, except for the golf balls. For Travelers started because my wife was looking for a particular Travelon jewelry case that she couldn’t find. I sold those out fairly quickly, then couldn’t get more. I just don’t like this company for various reasons. I know that I have an audience for Travel, but I lack sufficiently unusual products.

After Hours helps define Curio City as an adult-oriented store. You would think that wine accessories would sell well, but the marketplace is flooded with products, few of which are clever enough to fit the Curio City concept. The category lives on more for its promise than for its performance. Smoking accessories have a more interesting history. In one very early concept, Curio City was going to be a mainstream head shop. Most of the stores that sell paraphernalia are pretty seedy looking, so there was (is) a niche for a more respectable seller. My first sale was a stash jar for a cancer patient’s medical marijuana. Tobacco is so discredited now, and smokers are such pariahs, that few stores court them anymore. I can buy some smoking keywords for as little as two cents per click. So this category stays. In fact, I need to reorder my bestselling cigarette cases and commit to remaining in stock on them.

I’ve struggled with Jewelry ever since supply problems killed off Typewriter Key jewelry. That was a perfect Curio City product – quirky, very individual, artsy, and recycled. Jewelers who will dropship enable me to offer a wide assortment without owning any inventory. I won’t repeat what I said in the Comments section of this post about my current jewelry lines. Suffice it to say that I am still actively trying to develop a new line that fits my store’s theme.

I created Apparel & Fashion specifically for lighted caps, because calling them “gadgets” is a stretch. This category lives on that strength alone. I’d like to expand it, eventually.

Seasonal is a weak name, but necessary as a catchall for holiday-themed items. I’d like to elevate each individual holiday collection to a top-level category and activate it only at the appropriate time, but that is a SEO no-no – if I want those theme pages to be indexed by the search engines, they have to be permanently active. And given the prohibitive cost of buying holiday keywords, I do need whatever organic ranking I can get. Do you have any idea what it costs to get on the first page with popular phrases like “Mothers Day gift”?

I don’t know if The Mayor’s Choice has ever convinced anybody to buy a product. It does support my Mayor character gimmick, and it has probably drawn attention to products that shoppers might not have noticed otherwise. There is no reason to kill it off.

Giftwrap and Greeting Cards might be two ideas whose time has passed. I planned Curio City as a one-stop gift shop. Customers would have their purchases giftwrapped, add a personalized card, and ship directly to the recipient. It still sounds like a reasonable concept, but it never worked out that way. In 2007 I sold all of $67.50 worth of giftwrapping, down from $103.50 in 2006. It’s a trivial amount of money, and it imposes extra work during my busiest season (virtually all giftwrap jobs are for Christmas sales). Due to poor software design, adding giftwrap options to new products is more time-consuming than it has any reason to be. More important, you can’t add products that have options to your shopping cart from the category page – you have to enter the product page to take the default “No giftwrapping”. That imposes an extra click to buy most of my merchandise. In favor of giftwrap: I still have about half of my initial giftwrap purchase left. The occasional giftwrap sale is pure profit. And the very few people who do take advantage of the service must appreciate it. So my executive decision is to keep this category alive until I sell out of one or more paper styles, and then end it.

Cards are a much easier decision. They hardly sell at all. This is another category, like magnets, that would require a much, much larger selection to become viable. I’m going to mark them down and get rid of the category when most of them are gone.

So that’s how I’d dispose of my existing structure. Now what about adding new categories, or shaking up the existing ones?

I keep flirting with ceramic tiles. There’s one vendor that I see at the Cavalcade of Crap every year whose stuff I really like. I’m sure it would sell steadily, if unspectacularly. What holds me back is a weak fit with the Curio City concept, especially since I more or less ruled out carrying art objects. There’s nothing particularly unusual or clever about them. And so the vendor’s catalog never moves from my to-do pile. I could bring in a few to test, but do they merit a category?

Sex is the one vice that’s noticeably absent from After Hours. A line of (tasteful) “marital aids” could add a little fun and edginess to Curio City. But I’m an old married man. It’s outside of my experience since perversion went mainstream and porn became ubiquitous. I don’t have any suppliers or merchandise in mind for it. It’s just a theoretically good idea, if I ever blunder into the right merchandise.

Americans are being told that we can consume our way to a better planet. Why not capitalize on greenwashing with a new Recycled Products category? I already sell a few recycled items like Vinylux and the Bicycle Parts stuff. All I’d have to do is move them to a new category. I already explained why moving Vinylux is problematic, though – I don’t want to break the link that took me so much nagging to get.

Party Supplies are another small After Hours subcategory that will need a new home if I kill off their parent category.

NEW STRUCTURE, assuming I can get my subcat flyouts. (I hope the formatting survives Blogger’s lousy interface).

• New Products
• Specials
• Bestsellers
• Gadgets & Gizmos
• Games & Toys
• Kites
• Card Games?
• Board Games?
• Toys?
• Clocks & Watches
• Bicycle Clocks
• Day Clocks
• Night Lights
• Switchables
• Bed & Bathroom
• Big Schnozz - New landing page
  
• Pets & Animals (?) – Needs more products
• Kitchen & Grill (?) – Needs more products
• Vinylux
• Ceramic Tiles (?) – Possible new category.
• Office & Workspace – no content of its own
• Business Card Holders – Needs more products
• Desk Toys (other than globes).
• Levitating Globes
• Magnets (just until they sell out, then kill it)
• Beach & Poolside (either beef them up or get rid of them)
• Gardening
• Sports
• Golf
• Baseball
• Other sports (I don’t have enough football, soccer, etc to make this any more granular)
• Travel – Needs more products.
• Beer, Wine, & Spirits
• Party Supplies
• Smoking
• Jewelry
• Apparel & Fashion
• Seasonal
• Valentines Day Ideas
• St Patrick’s Day Ideas
• Mother’s Day Ideas
• Father’s Day Ideas
• Summer Items
• Fall (or Back to School)
• Winter Holiday Suggestions
• The Mayor’s Choice
• Giftwrap Choices (might discontinue)
• Cards (to be discontinued)

NEW STRUCTURE, if I raise everything to the top category level. Subcategories exist solely as landing pages for SEO.

• New Products
• Specials
• Bestsellers
• Gadgets & Gizmos
• Kites
• Games
• Toys
• Clocks & Watches
• Bicycle Clocks
• Day Clocks
• Night Lights
• Switchables
• Bed & Bathroom
• Big Schnozz - New landing page
  
• Pets & Animals (?) – Needs more products
• Kitchen & Grill (?) – Needs more products
• Vinylux
• Ceramic Tiles (?) – Possible new category.
• Business Card Holders – Needs more products
• Desk Toys (other than globes).
• Levitating Globes
• Magnets (just until they sell out, then kill it)
• Beach & Poolside (either beef them up or get rid of them)
• Gardening
• Sports
• Golf Balls
• Travel – Find more products, or eliminate
• Beer, Wine, & Spirits
• Party Supplies
• Smoking
• Jewelry
• Apparel & Fashion
• Seasonal
• Valentines Day Ideas
• St Patrick’s Day Ideas
• Mother’s Day Ideas
• Father’s Day Ideas
• Summer Items
• Fall (or Back to School)
• Winter Holiday Suggestions
• The Mayor’s Choice
• Giftwrap Choices (possibly to be discontinued)
• Cards (to be discontinued)

If you plowed your way through all of that, I would like to hear your thoughts. Are either of these proposed structures enough of an improvement to justify the considerable work involved, and the loss of my existing page ranks?

A reason to hate Sunshop:

On April 28, I posted a message asking Turnkey if we were going to need a new USPS module for the May 12 rate increase. On May 2, I asked again, and was told that they were looking into it. On May 8 I asked again. On May 12, Turnkey explained that they had just gotten new specs from USPS; these had probably been published well in advance, but they were too busy to check. They would have a new USPS module for us the next night. Today is May 16, and we are still waiting. International shipping is broken (yay!), and I suspect that faulty USPS lookups contributed to this week’s weak sales results (although I’d expected a slow week anyway).

A reason to hate Google:

I’ve had enough experience with Google Checkout to notice a trend of undercharging customers for UPS shipping. I ordinarily do very little business with UPS because their rates are so high, but most of my GC customers choose UPS. After a customer was undercharged more than $10 for next-day air delivery, I analyzed the problem. Sunshop is looking the rates up correctly, but GC appears to be omitting the fuel adjustment and residential delivery surcharges (which are substantial). This more than offsets the free transaction processing that’s GC’s main benefit. When I reported this to Google, they tried to blame Turnkey. Turnkey correctly washed their hands of this one, so I went back to Google again. This time they referred it to engineering and discovered that, gosh, there is a bug in their UPS lookups. To their credit, they thanked me for my report and assured me that they’re fixing it. Did I ever mention that I also found and reported the parcel post lookup bug to Google a number of weeks ago? Getting them to acknowledge that one took considerably more work. How in the hell am I the only retailer in America that noticed this??? Google ought to be paying me for QA.