Lord Yabinghoo

First, an anecdote for those who won’t reach the end of today’s post:

A lady with a proper British accent called to inquire about a quantity of mini-briefcase business card holders. I was relieved that she wasn’t angling for a discount; processing fees and the hassle of preparing the shipment already cut my margin on international sales. No, she just needed help because Sunshop’s shipping estimator was being fussy about accepting her postal code. Rather than work it out over the phone, I asked for her order information so that I could process it offline. Name, please?

“The Earl of A____”

Um. The What of Who now? Yes, I heard correctly: She was the secretary for an English noble. In fact, Lord Arthur A_____ himself picked up the phone to ask some questions about the product and emphasize the need for speedy shipping. He intends to present the mini-briefcases to some visiting members of the House of Lords. “That’s our upper house of Parliament, similar to your Senate”, he explained to this dumb provincial.

I'm ordinarily cold toward the famous and fortunate and especially unimpressed by unearned privilege. I have zero interest in heredity or genealogy. But Lord A_____’s ancestor came over with William the Freaking Conqueror in 1066, for crying out loud – that's just plain interesting. I’d link to his estate’s website if I weren’t uncomfortable with the breach of privacy.

I’ve sold nearly 500 of this flagship product (SKU #16) and am running low again. Every time I reorder them the wholesale price goes up, and a minimum order quantity of 200 pieces makes them a hefty investment. It’s worth it, though. I'll bet I can get another buck for them after their brush with nobility.

******************

Microsoft is assimilating Yahoo Search Marketing into its own lackluster adCenter, which serves their Bing search engine with ads. I know this because Yahoo’s been emailing me about it twice a month with increasing breathlessness. Together, paid and organic Yahoo searches deliver about 10% of my visitors – not a lot, but nothing to walk away from, either. I guess Yahoo will still be a search engine. I think it will be technologically identical to MS’s Bing. But MS will start calling the advertising shots next month. Presumably capitalists behind the scenes have this all figured out. For me, the name on my charge bill will change and I need to learn a new interface to manage my little campaigns.

Dismayed by my foot-dragging, Yahoo started robo-calling me. I hate to admit it, but it worked. I finally tackled the 85 compatibility problems on their list just to stop those irritating calls. First I deleted such esoteric line items as “Geo-targeting, Network Distribution, Demographic Bidding, and Ad Scheduling will not be transition to adCenter. You need to set these up in your adCenter account” and “This attribute will not be imported into adCenter. In adCenter, the concept of Alt text more accurately corresponds to {Param2}.” By the gods, this is pure boredom.

Forty remaining warnings were about ads that don’t fit adCenter’s tighter size limit. I deleted a few old keyword groups and truncated a few ads. The drudgery finally out of the way, I hit some minor snags when I went to adCenter to complete the migration. Nothing worth relating here, though.

Can the merged Bing/Yahoo (Yahbing? Binghoo?) give Google a run for its money (or rather, for my money and yours)? It’s hard to imagine them denting Google’s 75% market share, but one dismisses MS at one’s peril. Maybe this merger of numbers two and three will threaten Google’s near-monopoly.

Now I just sit back and wait for new hordes of shoppers to storm the castle.

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.

Here We Go Again

This is it. My third Christmas. Curio City should collect literally half of its annual income in the next seven weeks. Half of November’s business will come during Thanksgiving week alone. LY’s sales numbers are formidable and plan looks insurmountable. Every day during this period needs to pull the weight of five non-Christmas days.

It’s too late now to affect the results very much. All I can do is strap myself in and manage the wild (I hope) ride. I pulled out all the stops this week, taking my open-to-buy back into deep red ink, raising the spending limits on my ad campaigns, and increasing many keyword bids. Traffic obligingly rose from a post-move nadir of 121 visits to peak at 213 on Tuesday.

Wheeeee! How’s it going so far? It depends on what you expect.

If maintaining my YTD growth rate and reaching plan is the goal…not so well. I’d need to do an impressive amount of business to do that. The economic news keeps getting grimmer by the day. Expecting dramatic year-over-year increases is not at all realistic right now.

If matching LY’s results is a reasonable goal, then things are going better. I might squeak that out this week. Then the targets for the next two weeks get a little bit easier.

My wife still intends to send out the product-announcement email that I created for newspaper gift guides. If she does that, there’s a slim chance that one of the 50-or-so recipients will give me a little ink. Even one small media mention would be a huge deal…assuming that I can get stock. Two of my new vendors are having trouble filling orders.

Reasons to hate Yahoo: A Yahoo muckety-muck sent out an email reassuring advertisers about Yahoo’s strengths in light of their collapsed agreement with Google. She does not explain, for us in the peanut gallery, exactly what that agreement was – a merger, I suppose. But messages of reassurance from on high almost invariably mean that a company’s circling the drain. Lo and behold, the minimum bids on another 25-30 keywords rose last week to ridiculous heights. I deleted most of them. It looks like they’re milking the biggest players for all they’re worth, and everyone else can go hang -- who the hell can make any money while paying 75 or 90 cents a click? I still regard 30 cents as an absolute ceiling, and anything over 25 cents is a hard sell. And yet, rather than fold my Yahoo tent once and for all, I instead increased my daily spending limit (see “pulled out all the stops” above) and nudged up a few bids. If I’m going to hit my numbers, I need every click I can get. Even the expensive ones.

Wacky Ideas

First, the weekly sales report.

While Wall Street continued to crash and burn and all the economic indicators took a dive…while NPR aired a show about what to do with all the vacant stores after the upcoming “retail Katrina”…Curio City blithely turned in another nice week. With a day and a half left to go, I’m only $40 short of LY and within striking distance of plan. Having already demolished LY and achieved plan, October is certain to be one of my best months yet. Enough cash is flowing again to bring in another new product or two before I have to switch to reorder-only mode. I intend to order something cool from a new vendor next Monday -- without relying on credit.

When you put these last two strong weeks together, my paycheck is the fattest I’ve seen from routine business since mid June. It’s still not a lot of money (as I always hasten to add). It works out shy of $4 per hour, which is just half of minimum wage. But still…that’s about twice what I was making at this time LY. If Curio City can keep on defying gravity, I could be earning minimum wage by this time next year. That would be quite a milestone. (And as I also hasten to add, this doesn’t include the year-end profit that I’m going to pull out of Curio City this year to pay my personal taxes).

My pay-per-click advertising charges are growing, too, so these sales are not coming without a cost. Yahoo has nearly doubled, thanks largely to some new-product keywords that I added. You have to spend money to make money, but Yahoo’s own tracking says that the $150 I spent there last month delivered only nine sales. That’s more than $15 per conversion! If their report tells the whole story – if there aren’t indirect or uncounted conversions – then Yahoo Search Marketing is clearly a losing proposition.

Which leads me to my first wacky idea: Discontinue YSM. Although killing it would definitely reduce traffic and sales, my metrics say that YSM is not cost-effective. My average sale is $44.21. Those nine Yahoo sales should therefore have grossed roughly $400 (I’d need a developer to customize their tracking code to capture the actual dollars). My advertising budget is 10% of gross. Therefore, $400 worth of Yahoo revenue would justify $40 in ad spending. I actually spent 37.5% of my YSM gross on ads. Losing nine sales and $400 per month would be regrettable. Saving $150 would not.

Next week I shall follow through with testing FaceBook’s PPC advertising. Perhaps that will replace Yahoo. I don’t have any tracking code or analytics for Facebook, but as I currently get zero traffic from them, I ought to be able to deduce the results well enough for comparison.

OK, maybe that idea’s slightly heretical, but something grounded so firmly in numbers is hardly wacky. Let’s go a little farther out.

I get periodic requests for imprinting or embroidering merchandise. Such inquiries are often for large quantities to be given to employees or customers. How hard can it be?

The most frequent request is for embroidered caps. An embroidery machine can cost anywhere from about $1,000 up to $16,000, with the median being around $7,000. There are supplies to buy, and a learning curve to overcome. I’d certainly ruin some of my merchandise until I became expert with the machine. It would take up considerable space that I don’t have. The customer making the inquiry invariably expects a hefty quantity discount as well as customization, so the markup is comparatively low. But sheer volume makes it tempting – these people typically want at least 100 pieces, and sometimes as many as 1,000 (or so they say; the likelihood of actually closing the sale decreases in proportion to the quantity that the person supposedly wants). It could potentially bring a lot of dollars over the transom, even if the markup is poor. But I would need to sell one shitload of caps to recoup a $7,000+ investment.

Assuming that I could get around the space problem, is that a good way to spend my time? How many hours would it take me to set up the machine for a job, feed it 100 or more caps, and then package them all for shipping? What happens to this embroidery machine and supplies after the cap business peters out? Do I become a novelty T-shirt store to justify my investment? No thank you.

Imprinting might be more realistic. A decent hot-stamping machine can be had for $3,000 or so. The space requirement and materials look a little bit less intense than embroidery, although they’re still substantial. The main drawback here is that the things people want imprinted come prepackaged. I’d have to remove them from their factory packaging, imprint them, and then shrinkwrap or otherwise repackage them. Again, this could get really time-consuming, and the markup isn’t there unless I’m buying enough pieces to import them directly.

The bastard child of imprinting is stickering. Customers like stickers least of all, and the investment is correspondingly lower. If I were going to test the customization waters, I might start with stickers. You might be able to do that with the same machine that does imprinting.

After mulling it over for ages, I decided to sell suction cups with my most recent Switchables reorder. They cost $0.15 each. I hope to get $0.50 each as a product add-on. The potential income from these things is less than staggering, and keeping them stocked might become a hassle if they sell better than I expect. But that hefty markup makes them worthwhile over the long haul. While I was going through my Switchables pages I discovered a couple of products that I’d taken off-sale some time ago, so fixing those was worth the time.

Selling batteries is another idea that keeps popping up. Many of my products require batteries. I could make a hefty markup selling them at the prevailing retail store price. Some customers might regard it as a convenience. Their limited shelf life is what always stops me. Batteries start to fade after a year or so, and I’d need to buy large quantities to get that attractive markup. I sell products that take C, AA, and AAA batteries, not to mention various coin cells, so it’s not like I can just stock generic “batteries.” And they’re heavy. They would inflate my shipping rates by more than I care to do. Still…it’s tempting. It could be easy money.

Importing stuff directly from China tempts me every now and then. The minimum order quantities are huge, and so is the risk if I make a bad bet. But the merchandise is extremely cheap (shipping usually accounts for half its value), so the potential reward is correspondingly huge. Becoming an importer has lost some of its appeal since the financial meltdown – my operating budget won’t generate that much open-to-buy, so I’d certainly need to use credit for that. End of discussion (for now).

Last, and probably least wacky of all, is looking into Google audio ads and display ads. Once again, the costs are considerable and I have no experience with them. But PPC advertising keeps getting more expensive, too, and it’s taken me about as far as it’s going to take me. I need to break out of that somehow.

Forthcoming:

• SCORE!

Let Us Now Praise Famous Products

My DayClock (product #37) tells me that it’s Friday again already. I don’t have a blog post on the hook for today. Let’s see what I can whip together out of fragments.

I intended to pay homage to products that have passed on. My inspiration was the Mini-Briefcase Business Card Holder (product #16). It took over two years to sell 63 of them. The retail started at $5.99. I gradually raised the price to $9.99 as my supply dwindled. Then, just as I got down to two pieces left, I discovered that the wholesaler had restocked. The cost went up from $3.02 to $4.25 apiece, but as I’m sure that I can still get $9.99 for them, I brought in 50 more.

Since that’s as far as I took this idea, I’m going to leave it there for today. This post will now degenerate into unfocused rambling.

The jewelry vendor that I found at last Spring’s Cavalcade of Crap decided that she cannot profitably work on a special-order basis, and it would surely fail as a non-customizable stock item. So it looks like it’s going to fall through after all this time. It’s a pity; it would have done quite well and enhanced my product mix. Google tells me that two other vendors are using the same concept. One sells rings and bracelets ranging from $50 to over $1,000. The other sells cheap bead necklaces for $14. Both of them do custom orders. My vendor would have filled the wide niche between those extremes. We could have hit that one out of the park. I’m not going to reveal the concept today because the jeweler has not yet replied to my last-ditch pitch, and I’m still not 100% convinced that the deal is dead. She just has to decide whether she wants to sell online or not. Her stock pieces will probably do OK in stores, and she might be content with that.

Is the summer slowdown finally here? After a stellar couple of months, last week was the first disappointing week in ages. Right now, it’s nip-and-tuck whether I will even beat LY. I think the government stimulus checks and tax refunds have all been spent, and the economy is about to catch up with me. Or maybe not...the occasional off week is inevitable. One nice hefty sale could change my tune at any moment.

Now I’ve got to mow the lawn. After lunch I’ll process some orders and make a run to the post office and UPS Store. A large shipment of caps awaits me there, along with a couple of smaller boxes. My wife unexpectedly needed her Forester in Framingham today, so I can only retrieve one Miata load…and that ain’t much.

Reason to hate Yahoo: Same old reason: They raised the minimum prices on a total of 43 of my keywords in three separate batches. I deleted 30 of them. Nice going, Yahoo! If this keeps up, their only clients will be eBay and Amazon...which, I imagine, would suit them just fine. Oh well, at least they’re freeing up money that I can use to cover Google’s ever-rising prices.

• The Zombie Store
• Legal Extortion

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

I'm Too Busy to Work

I was too busy with personal chores to do much work for Curio City most of last week. I laid in a lot of project supplies, then scraped the old flaking paint from the trim in back of our house and primed our new porch. Today a third consecutive day of rain postponed my plan to hoe the garden and mow the lawn. I’ve used these enforced office days to spend a lot of money on supplies and reorders, even though that deepens my open-to-buy hole further. I hope it will recharge next week.

As soon as the rain ends, I need to hoe-and-mow, plant my last few tomato plants, erect my bean towers and plant those seeds, replace the pepper plants that died, put in another hill of zucchini, paint the top coat of the porch and surrounding trim, paint the decking, paint the porch chairs, and put in a couple of new flower beds. I figure that’s a solid week’s worth of daily chores, and possibly closer to two. After today, Curio City goes back on autopilot for a week (or until it rains again!).

Reason to hate Google (a little less): Google Checkout fixed their parcel post bug again, but as of two days ago they were still undercharging for UPS. That might be fixed now; I haven’t tested it. They aren’t going to offer first-class parcel rates at all because that service is not in their implementation spec (although media mail is…go figure). About a third of my orders go out via first class, saving customers anywhere from $2 to $4 over the next cheapest method. Its omission from GC is unfathomable. Was it a simple design oversight? Or a sinister plot by USPS to sell more priority mail? I'm not even sure whom I should hate here.

Reason to hate Yahoo (a little less): Yesterday I sat in on the first of Yahoo’s three weekly “webinars” (what a stupid word) about Yahoo Search Marketing, which regular readers will recognize as the very soul of evil. If Yahoo delivers on their promise to pay me $20 in ad credits for completing a survey at the end of each webinar, I'll make $60 for roughly four hours, and pick up a helpful tip or two in the process. Given that Curio City only pays me $2 per hour, I can’t pass that up. Once I finish my personal chores and get cracking on Curio City again, I’m going to overhaul my YSM campaigns to use some of these tips. Maybe I'll even rebuild and restructure the whole thing.

Sales these past couple weeks have been very good. Thanks in large part to one very substantial Switchables night light order, I just earned my biggest paycheck so far this year – a bit over $3 per hour, based on a 40-hour week…in fact, since I only worked half-time last week, my real hourly rate approached minimum wage! Truly, the big bucks are within reach.

So far this year, shipping and handling fee collections have exceeded actual shipping expenses by about 5%. Therefore I took the bold step of cutting my handling fee by 5 cents per order. Customers won’t notice that, but it’s a symbolic move for me. Someday, when my volume grows sufficient to cover a structural postage deficit (or when I qualify for volume shipping discounts), I will drop the handling fee entirely. For now, it’s easy to justify: The $160 that I spent on boxes, mailers, and packing tape yesterday wiped out my postage surplus.

Coming Attractions:

• Running with the Big Dogs
• The Zombie Store
• Legal Extortion

Where Are Y'All From?

Where Are You People?

Courtesy of Google Analytics, here’s where 14,257 people came from so far this year.

• Search engines: 71.5%
• Google pay-per-click: 30%
• Yahoo (both PPC and organic): 18.5%
• Google organic: 14.5%
• MSN organic 4.5%
• Referring sites (links): 21%
• search.ebay.com
• rs6.net (say what?)
• turnkeywebtools.com (Sunshop’s tech board)
• clothing.listings.ebay.com (say what?)
• radgames.com (the Monopoly Super Add-On)
• dogpile.com (say what?)
• octopus overlords.com (now defunct, once my favorite haunt)
• airandaqua.com (a reciprocal link)
• amazon.com (say what?)
• zombiegames.com (obviously for Zombie Fluxx)
• Direct traffic: 7%

I need to take yet another hard look at the PPC campaigns that drive between a third and a half of my business. Sales are up nicely this year, but so are advertising costs. (See the end of this post).

My blog doesn’t show up until #15. My “new” message boards, Gaming Trend and Popehat, are #27 and #44. But I’ve only been posting there since OO died, so they will probably rise.

Purely for trivia’s sake…my best day so far this year was May 6, with 153 visitors. The low point was March 29, with only 60.

Once a month, I upload a file to Google Base (formerly Froogle). Their online report shows a lot of clicks on various items, but I don’t know where one finds Google Base listings or how those visits are aggregated into the numbers I gave above. Google Base doesn’t cost anything, so I take it on faith that it’s making some mysterious contribution.

This post was inspired by the question of where, geographically, my customers are located. How this question arose shall remain secret for now. I had a hunch that certain cities in New Mexico, Colorado, and California were delivering a disproportionate amount of business. So I went at my database from several different directions.

First I looked at all of my 1,525 customer accounts. No single zip code is home to more than three account holders. The most popular zip codes are:

• 95648 Lincoln CA (3 users)
• 95401 Santa Rosa CA (3 users)
• 90266 Manhattan CA (3)
• 78664 Round Rock TX (3)
• 62249 Highland IL (3)
• 60187 Wheaton IL (3)
• 60068 Park Ridge IL (3)
• 49503 Grand Rapids MI (3, including family and friends)
• 48439 Grand Blanc MI (3)
• 33496 Boca Raton FL (3)
• 22124 Oakton VA (3)
• 22003 Annandale VA (3)

Then I looked at shipments. In terms of the number of boxes sent, the most popular zip codes were:

• Grand Rapids, MI (8, includes family and friends)
• Boca Raton, FL (6)
• Grand Blanc, MI (5)
• Lincoln, CA (5)
• Abingdon, MD (5)
• Burlington, VT (5)

It would’ve been interesting to run a comparison based on dollars, rather than account holders and shipments. But even my patience for number-crunching is finite. Combining those two zip code lists yields these top five:

1. 49503 Grand Rapids, MI
2. 33496 Boca Raton, FL
3. 95648 Lincoln, CA
4. 48439 Grand Blanc, MI
5. 22003 Annandale, VA

Because most cities have many zip codes, I also looked at city names. Here are the top 10 cities for Curio City accounts:

• Chicago, IL (15)
• New York, NY (12)
• Brooklyn, NY (10)
• Dallas, TX (9)
• Silver Spring, MD (8)
• Grand Rapids, MI (8)
• Los Angeles, CA (8)
• Wash DC (8)
• Portland, OR (8)
• Houston, TX (8)

If I had the knowledge and patience to combine suburbs and exurbs with their parent cities, the list would change. But no matter how you slice it, my hunch about New Mexico, Colorado, and California did not pan out. Are you disappointed that your community didn't make this list? Don't despair! Just place a few orders, and get your neighbors to do the same. ;)

***************

More reason to hate Yahoo: After receiving another email about keywords going inactive, I deleted 10 of the 12 affected phrases...all of them from campaigns that I deleted ages ago anyway. WTF? Thanks, Yahoo! A few days later I got a report of 30 more words whose minimum bids now exceed my offer. I deleted half of them, raised the ones that only rose by a few cents, and let a couple go idle (in case the minimum drifts back down someday). From May 1-22 I paid $87.74 for 718 clicks that yielded a whopping four conversions. Yes, four. My Yahoo results went downhill dramatically after their last upgrade/stealth price hike. I really ought to shut it down completely, at least until Microsoft buys them. Nobody in their right mind would pay 40-50 cents per click for these keywords. They must be deliberately trying to make small advertisers drop out.

More reason to hate Google: Google Checkout is still undercharging for UPS shipping two full weeks after they acknowledged the bug that I reported. I have now lost at least $25 to shipping undercharges, versus the $9 that they have saved me in payment processing fees. Every single GC customer is choosing UPS. That makes me suspect that the old parcel post bug returned to GC after the USPS rate hike (just as it did in Sunshop). I can’t generate GC test transactions without setting up a complicated way around their prohibition on selling things to myself. And why am I the only merchant in America doing QA for Google, anyway? GC is supposed to be saving me money. Instead it’s costing me money, time, and aggravation. Get it together, Google.

Finally, the monthly sales wrapup: May was phenomenal. I credit the economic stimulus checks that everybody’s receiving. Sales more than doubled LY, and I blew my plan out of the water. YTD total income is up 97.8% over LY. Gross profit is up 105.7%. Payroll (that’s me!) is up 93%. The bottom line profit is up 388.4%! As always, I must remind you that the actual dollars involved remain small. But I could not ask for a better trend. My chronic open-to-buy hole is down to three figures again; I can reorder some lighted caps before they run out. My buying strategy for the rest of this year is to replenish stock when absolutely necessary, and bring in new merchandise only when I can do it without deepening the OTB hole. I hope to claw my way back up to zero in time for the Christmas season.

June will be a lot more challenging.

Coming Attractions:

• Running with the Big Dogs
• The Zombie Store
• Legal Extortion

Focus, Juice. Focus

Back in the Olden Days, when I spent my miserable days earning real money at a real job, and we could afford real vacations, we once sallied forth from a booze-soaked villa in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, for a Blue Mountain Bicycle Tour. We rode a wheezing bus to the top of the Blue Mountain Peak, whence we would coast downhill for two hours. Some previous visitors had tipped us off to make sure we rode “the Juice bus”, and so we did. Juice (the driver) kept up a patter that made the two-and-a-half-hour drive along Jamaica’s narrow, potholed roads entertaining and informative. As the bus started its 7,000-foot ascent up a winding, goat-infested road without guard rails, his monolog started to trail off. At each increasingly perilous turn of the steep switchback, Juice admonished himself: “Focus, Juice. Focus.”

As our sleepy New England spring slowly yields to the lazy summer, I have to repeat that mantra to myself more and more often. When business is slow, it’s easy to lose interest in Curio City, put it on autopilot, and spend my time gardening, doing yard work, or just frittering time away on the internet.

And business is slow – in fact, it flatlined for two consecutive days…the first back-to-back shutouts of this year. This week is on track to be my worst since May 2007. In 2006, the corresponding week was among the year’s best. Last year was no great shakes, but still delivered at least a small Mothers Day bump. This year…nothing. Once again, I failed to do any kind of marketing for it, and this year’s recession can’t be helping – shoppers who can afford gifts at all are probably buying “mom stuff” instead of my merchandise.

What do you do when there are no orders to fill, no inventory to reorder, no new stock to bring in, and no investments to make?

Focus, Juice. Focus.

A while back, I identified three strategies for this year:

1. Increase and improve my merchandise selection;
2. Increase the number of visitors; and
3. Increase the percentage of visitors who buy something (conversions).

A wife-induced financial error conspired with the price of last year’s profit to drain some of my startup money for a substantial 2007 personal income tax bill. And I still need to divert some of my Kraken money to a long-deferred and desperately needed home repair (in fact, contractors are coming to bid on the job this afternoon). So much for beefing up my merchandise. This is not a huge setback; nothing on my wishlist is especially exciting. Infusing cash to buy marginal merchandise would be foolish. Even though I know that making this business grow faster is going to cost me, I would far rather pull money out than put more money in. Curio City can carry its own weight while I wait out this trough. My second bank CD matures in June.

I had one serious merchandise disappointment: The artist behind the new jewelry line that I found at the Cavalcade of Crap is facing a potential health crisis. At best, introducing her jewelry will be delayed for some weeks. That was the only thing that I was enthused about. Now I've got nothing in the works.

Focus, Juice. Focus.

If priority 1 is becalmed, how about priority 2? I know of four ways to increase traffic:

1. Get more referrals from other websites;
2. boost my organic search placement (which means the Search Engine Optimization topic of which I’ve written 100 times);
3. improve my PPC ad results; and
4. buy display advertising.

A few link exchanges have brought in a wee bit of new traffic, but nothing significant. The Boomer Marketplace is still under construction (no link because its creator has not unveiled it yet), and only a few of my products fit there anyway. Daily traffic has historically hovered between 60 and 100 visits; lately that range has risen to 80-120. With a 2% conversion rate, I should be averaging two sales per day. People just aren’t buying like they should. Conclusion: Referrals are great, because referrals are free. I could do more in this area. But link swapping is never going to amount to very much. The visitors that those links deliver are less motivated than ad-driven customers.

Every time I look at SEO, I get depressed by chronic low rankings that defy my clumsy efforts at improvement. Even where I have a hazy grasp of principles, I can’t put them into practice because I don’t know how to change my PHP templates. It’s the same old programmer dependency of which I’ve also written 100 times. Most SEO experts are strictly HTML people. I did put out a feeler to a new developer this week, but it went nowhere. Conclusion: I can’t spend on SEO until I have the technical ability to implement recommended revisions.

PPC ads keep getting more and more expensive while delivering roughly the same results. Writing new ads, adding and subtracting keywords, and adjusting bids sometimes brings measurable results…but OMG, what a tedious process, and the gains are short-lived as competitors quickly adjust their bids and improve their ads, too. The only winner in this game, of course, is Google.

Yahoo finally rolled out the new pricing scheme that retailers have long been dreading. I fared pretty well at first; only four minor keywords were knocked out of competition. That rose to 22 keywords a few days later, as competitors adjusted. I got out the ax. Yahoo Search Marketing never delivered very good results, and it’s gotten worse with each revamp. My ads and word groups need to be more granular. If Yahoo’s objective is to drive out small companies and rape the big spenders for all they’re worth, they are on the right track – I deleted at least 25% of my campaign, and I’m sure that more of my remaining 350 keywords will fall away. I don’t know if Yahoo will win at this game; I do know that small retailers are the losers. Conclusion: There’s always room to improve PPC, but it’s getting too expensive to justify putting more resources here.

That leaves buying display ads. I have zero experience with that, no plans, and even less enthusiasm. I’m skeptical that a clumsy, amateurish print ad would drive enough business to do more than just pay for itself. I suppose I ought to explore it. Focus, Juice.

Finally (#3 in my main list), there’s increasing conversions:

My conversion rate ranges day-to-day from 0 to 5.75%, and averages around 2%, which isn’t bad. Website improvements are the best way to increase that. I added PayPal Express and Google Checkout, and got the new shipping estimator working. There isn’t much else I can do without design changes or new features (see “programmer dependency”).

Screw it. I can’t focus. I think I’ll line up another contractor or two to bid on my back porch.

Coming Topics:

• Social Networking Sites
• Rearranging the Deck Chairs
• Running with the Big Dogs
• Kicking It Out
• Legal Extortion
• Where Traffic Comes From

Potpourri

Last weekend Eric upgraded my site from Sunshop 4.0.8 to 4.1.0. It did not go as smoothly as one would hope. At first sale prices didn’t appear at all, and now they’re displaying incorrectly. But I finally have Google Checkout hooked up (if still untested) and the shipping calculator is installed (although turned off because it's missing its text label). I hope those details can be cleaned up very soon. My April strategy depends on sale pricing.

Except for one telephone sale, I haven’t sold a single lighted cap for five days now. Traffic plunged yesterday to 65 visits from its usual 85-100 level. My best keyword ad is still at the top of Google’s search page. I don’t see any new competitors or significant price undercutting. Has America tired of lighted caps? Is the American consumer finally played out? Or is this just a natural dip? This is the same week as LY’s record-setting six-day shutout. Easter is probably to blame. Many Christians take a long holiday weekend…and when people aren’t at work, they aren’t shopping. I wish I could force sales when a slowdown like this hits, but all I can do is wait it out.

Despite the past few days, March is already in the bag. I doubled LY and beat my ambitious sales plan, with a full week left to go. This is what “making hay while the sun shines” means. April will be more challenging.

The organic search result for my best cap keyword doesn’t appear until page 5, far below many less-relevant sites. While investigating, I realized that Google displays the META description. It’s presumably looking for keywords there. So I inserted them a couple more times without making it read too unnaturally. We’ll see if that page creeps up at all in coming months. Remember that improving organic search results is one of my top priorities for this year, even if I have to hire somebody to do it for me. We’re going to come back to this subject repeatedly.

Speaking of the telephone…

I hate the telephone. I have trouble following conversations. By the time you reach the end of your sentence, I’ve forgotten the beginning, and if you’re going to string three or four sentences together, forget about it. My mind has wandered on to something else. I don’t quite grasp the etiquette of when I’m supposed to talk and when to listen, so I often blurt out thoughts and interrupt people. Lousy cell phone sound quality routinely causes misunderstandings on both ends. I try to compensate by taking notes during the conversation, but I still hate using the phone. I don’t even like F2F conversations. I’m a written-word kind of guy. You can imagine how popular I am at parties.

Some online shoppers prefer to order by telephone. Some find the web technically challenging – and I know that my site is slow and unreliable sometimes. Some think that ordering online is insecure. Of course, that’s just plain wrong. When you submit an order online, your encrypted payment info passes from your computer through my host’s web server through Authorize.net to the acquiring bank, all unseen by human eyes. When you give me your information over my cell phone (which anyone can intercept) I write it down on a piece of paper. Then as soon as I hang up, I enter it into the website exactly the same way you would’ve done…except now I have your credit card info on a piece of paper. So much for improved security.

But even people who don’t order by phone find a prominently-displayed toll-free phone number reassuring. Knowing that you can easily ring up some kid in a call center in India means that you’re dealing with a big, successful company. My phone number, OTOH, is buried on the “About Us” page. You have to dig to find it. If you do call, you get my cell phone. If you’re lucky, your call will go to voice mail. If you’re unfortunate enough to reach me live, you will think you’re talking to a blithering idiot. You will not be far off the mark.

Displaying my telephone number could conceivably increase sales measurably. I’m going to have to do that eventually if I hope to achieve “Curio Metropolis”. Not an 800 number, yet. And not on the front page, yet. But I should probably make it easier to find, even now. I can always hide it again if nuisance calls become too burdensome. Maybe I’ll do that when the 4.1.0 fallout settles.

A new reason to hate Yahoo:

Yahoo Search Marketing is finally getting rid of the 10-cent minimum keyword bid that’s always made them a second-rate service. Yay! But they’re also changing the formula for pricing keywords. The general consensus is that this will amount to a big, behind-the-scenes price increase. Boo! (If you click that link, be sure to scroll down past their marketing-speak to the Comments section.) I write good ads and sell relevant products…but so do my real competitors. I’m going to have to overhaul my Yahoo PPC campaign again, and very likely reduce its scope as some keyword prices spiral out of reach. Ah well, I’ve been leaving PPC on autopilot lately anyway. Shaking it up won't hurt.