Christmas Is Coming

My sketchy open-to-buy calculation says that I should have $1,800 in the budget for new products. That would be a healthy number going into Christmas if it weren't more than wiped out by $3,000 in stubborn debt. Since I obviously can't buy any merchandise, the decision whether or not to support Christmas this year is moot. I'm just going to liquidate as much as I can while spending as little as possible. With some luck December might wipe out the debt.

I'm expecting my first really low-key Christmas since I started this company, even including last year's flop. Except for a relatively brief career in software development, I've worked in retail all my life, and I've hated every single Christmas. And yet, sitting this one out is already starting to feel bittersweet as my vendors start up their promotions, like the retail world is passing me by.

No: I'm passing the retail world by. My always-thin tolerance for retail is just about gone anyway. I work too much for too little, and I'm fed up with complaints and returns and voicemails -- especially voicemails; O how I hate those. I already have an extensive auto-reject list, and I never answer calls from my own area code (spammers spoof that). Now that they have figured out how to leave voicemail without ever ringing the telephone, they can't be blocked. If that becomes routine I will have to ignore voicemail entirely -- not even listening to, much less returning, calls. 

Making a list of my top 10 complaints might be cathartic. Maybe next week.

Speaking of nuisances, now PayPal wants me to put on my IT hat again:

As part of our on-going commitment to provide a more robust service, Payflow will be introducing additional IP addresses to both the production and pilot environments. To minimize potential impact, we recommend that you use Domain Name Service (DNS) host names instead of hard-coding Payflow IP addresses.

However, if you must allow particular IP addresses through your firewall or proxy servers, please review our list of Payflow IP addresses to ensure that the appropriate IPs are configured in your firewall/proxy settings before mid-October 2017.  

WTF does that even mean? Is it a server-side thing, or is it my shopping cart module? Do I even use the Payflow gateway? I don't know and I'd rather not care, but I'm going to have to find out or risk losing the ability to take payments. Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I used to find these challenges educational. Lately they're just a pain in the ass. 

I do, however, still need the paychecks. They're small, but they're regular, whereas Blue Hills is still lucrative but infrequent. A $800 kite sale made last week the best of the year to date...but Monday's paycheck was still meager because the previous week sucked. Kite sales will screech to a halt after Labor Day, and then I've got nothing going on.

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On the Blue Hills side, I priced myself out of a job for the first time. An MIT researcher wanted a quote to copy edit his 5,100-word scholarly paper. I quoted the same $50 hourly rate that I charge other MIT entities and estimated just 3-4 hours since his document was in good starting condition. Never heard back. Oh well, can't win 'em all.

I do have one fairly major project nearing the billing stage. I completed the work a few weeks ago. It will come back to me for changes within the next couple of weeks. After they accept my final changes, they'll have 30 days to pay. Mid-October should bring a nice check for work that I started in early August. Delays like that wouldn't matter if I had a steady stream of projects ripening, but there's nothing else in the pipeline right now.

Another Summer Slips Into the Past

We had a hot and humid summer with oppressive humidity accompanied by the worst drought in 10 years here in New England. Summer was my favorite season when I was young, but this year I'm glad to see it go. Thanks, Obama. 


Summer business was actually pretty good, led by bird kites, but this August stumbled. Four big sales had made last August the second-best ever, and that lucky streak didn't reproduce this year (at least not yet; there is still a week left for a $1,000+ miracle to appear). I did have two bulk golf ball inquiries and one for bird kites. The 240-ball minimum for imprinting killed one inquiry. The other one went like this:

SHE: "Hi, I'd like to buy $1,100 worth of balls!"
ME: "Great, I can get them to you for $934 with free shipping. That's about 20% off."
SHE: "I only have $600."
(ME, to myself: Then you don't want to buy $1,100 worth of balls, do you?)
ME: "How about some nice loose balls? You can get 216 for $594, also with free shipping."
SHE: (crickets)

The bird kite guy ignored my repeated suggestions that he place his order online, so we played telephone tag wherein he kept repeating the same "I want to buy some kites" voicemail for a week while refusing to actually buy the kites. I did finally connect by phone and land his $175 order. 

To make things more challenging, Jackite ran out of poles shortly after they restocked eagle kites. Poles typically cost as much as, or even more than, the kites themselves, so that cut off a lot of my routine higher-end sales.  

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The ongoing AdWords technical saga goes on, as ongoing things do. On Tuesday I reset my complaint to the beginning with a carefully documented email using only one-syllable words and short sentences suitable for a Millennial. It worked. Yesterday the kid told me he's referring it to his "specialist team" -- presumably meaning somebody who knows what they're doing. Progress! 

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My first Sunshop upgrade in a couple of years is underway even as I write this. I haven't delved into the change log in detail, but I know it includes a lot of goodies that I want. There might even be a new template in my future. Apart from that, I'm getting my newsletter signup dialog back.

Working In a Coal Mine

This week is noteworthy for what didn't happen: Today should be the second day of my traditional summer vacation. We opted not to take a vacation this year after dental bills siphoned off thousands of dollars. Besides, we didn't want to abandon two young cats who have never been alone for more than a few hours. On the plus side, Curio City could pick up a few hundred dollars of revenue by not shutting down, and that would put an extra $40 or $60 in my own pocket (there's no such thing as "paid time off" for a one-man business). On the minus side, profitability will take a $75-100 hit from not suspending those ads. 

I'm not really fond of vacations anyway, and we are going to celebrate our anniversary with a four-day weekend in August. 

You'd think that would give this July a leg up on LY, but not really. A $600 golf ball sale and a $300 Switchables sale plumped up last July. This July will come up short by around $400 without at least one similar lucky strike.  

Golf balls used to be a solid summer staple. Then, a few years ago, my supplier launched a new consumer-direct website. They also raised their wholesale price from $5 to $5.50 on half of their designs, making me choose between raising my retail from $9.99 to $10.99 or swallowing a smaller markup. Since profitability is already on the ropes I went with the price hike...and for good measure I raised the price on all styles to give myself a little extra markup on those that still cost the original $5. The vendor held the line at $9.95, which search engines had already recognized as lower than my $9.99. Their shipping charge is also lower than mine and a buck or so below the actual cost of shipping. I still sell a few golf balls here and there, but not like I used to. Because of their cost advantage, a vendor who decides to sell direct will outcompete retailers every time. 

Switchables, OTOH, are as random as always. I'll sell scarcely any for a couple of months and then enjoy a nice run on them over a few weeks. These hiccups come without any pattern, but they do happen fairly reliably.

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I successfully imported my 157 "good" email addresses from Constant Contact into Mailchimp yesterday, and tentatively started the long and tedious process of learning a new interface and creating a newsletter template. Learning new things at my age is bullshit.

Long Live the King

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear of Flying

Last September I upgraded my website and started the Christmas season on its journey down the toilet. That creates an opportunity to blow away LY's anemic numbers for the all-important Q4, starting right now. 

Bird kite sales are my be-all and end-all from spring until now. Summer is pay-as-you-go for kites, with everything else dribbling out too slowly to replace. Come fall, my old standby Panther Vision caps, Switchables, and golf balls miraculously rise from the dead just as kite sales tank, so now I need to quickly replace all of that stuff that dribbled. At the same time, I need to start bulking up for Christmas.

I need a lot of cash in September and October to do that. If sales crash now like they did last year, I'll be crippled for the rest of the year. I've already run up a big credit card bill replacing most of those dribblers. I'll start laying in Christmas as soon as my credit card statement period rolls over on the 13th.

But there's an obstacle: My first-ever September vacation begins next Tuesday (meaning no blog post next Friday, btw). This is an obligation, not a choice.  

Over the past 10 years I've fine-tuned a July vacation routine: Shut down my advertising, post a delayed-shipping warning on my news page, make a vacation-delay banner for the front page, and insert the warning into the order acknowledgment email. I take my laptop to the Berkshires with me and monitor business daily. Sales usually fall by 50-75% but those customers who do come through know what to expect. 

I'm reluctant to do the full shutdown routine next week, when the stakes are so much higher. I'm going to post the usual warnings but keep running my ads. That means I'll inevitably pay to lure some customers who'll bounce away when they see the delay notifications. Worse, some will order because they didn't read the warnings (shoppers -- especially those on mobile devices -- are terrible about reading), then get pissed off and cancel. But I'll only be gone for six days rather than the traditional 10, and I only need to keep the warnings up from Tuesday through Thursday.

The other big problem is mostly in my head: I'm reluctant to haul my laptop along with me. During July vacation it goes from my desk to my car's trunk to our cabin. Next week's trip is far more nomadic. I'm especially stressed out about my first airplane ride in 11 years because I know that travel conditions have deteriorated significantly in that time. Having my computer damaged or (worse) stolen would be a disaster; Jungle Disk backs up my key files automatically, but I honestly don't know how to recover them from a different computer. 

Instinct tells me to leave the computer home -- I'm not likely to have any gaming time, and it seems like a huge hassle just to babysit Curio City. I can access the Admin interface and perform limited functions from my smartphone with some difficulty. I haven't figured out how to snag my email yet. On my laptop, Outlook vacuums up six accounts and dumps them into one inbox every 15 minutes. Trying to set up the mailboxes on my phone just returns a "failed to connect to server" error message with no helpful details. If I can solve that, then the only thing I really can't do is change the warning banner...so if I don't post that to begin with, I could conceivably manage my business from my phone. 

I haven't been without a computer for more than a day or two in at least 20 years, so the separation anxiety of leaving it behind is as frightening as the danger of lugging it through airports. If I can solve the email challenge, though, I'll probably default to the path of least resistance and leave it home. Many young people rely on their phones exclusively, but I'm not a young person. The phone is a toy. I need a real computer. Losing or damaging my phone would be an expensive inconvenience, but I don't need it for anything except, you know, phone calls.     

I still don't know what I'm going to do. It depends on whether or not I can solve the email problem.  

I'm old enough to remember when flying was a pleasant experience...but that's a whole other subject. Nowadays there's nothing more stressful than air travel.