Salt Lake City / eCommerce Leadership Summit Pictures

I really don't have any pictures from the conference itself because of of them came out unusable so I just have the one shot below of Guy Kawasaki hanging out, chatting and signing books after delivering the keynote. The rest of the pictures are a few select pictures from walking around temple square on Friday 3/06 before catching my flight home.



Mormon Assembly Hall.


Inside the Mormon conference center across from temple square.


A picture on the roof of the conference center.


Looking at the state capitol from the roof of the conference center.


Inside the Tabernacle.


View of the Mormon temple.


View of the Mormon temple from the roof of the conference center.

eCommerce Leadership Summit Recap & Presentaitons Available

Infopia has posted a recap of the eCommerce Leadership Summit that makes many of the power point slides available. Unfortunately the slides can't include all the alibiing ad questions that go on and the two best presentations are not available (Guy Kawasaki's keynote which had very few slides and Tim Ash's Avoiding the 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design)

Google removes almost all incentives to use Google Checkout

Effective 5/05/2009 Google will be raising checkout fees. see below for the basic changes (click here for full details). I am not sure what incentive there is to offer Google Checkout after the increase. The new fee levels match Paypal and the free transaction processing linked to the amount you spend on Adwords has been removed.

Beginning on May 5, 2009, transaction processing rates will be determined by your sales volume during April 2009. Each month thereafter, we'll continue to use the prior month's sales volume to determine your transaction processing rate. Learn more

Monthly Sales Through Google Checkout	Fees Per Transaction
Less than $3,000	2.9% + $0.30
$3,000 - $9,999.99	2.5% + $0.30
$10,000 - $99,999.99	2.2% + $0.30
$100,000 or more	1.9% + $0.30

It has been a long time / eCommerce Leadership Summit

It has been a long time since I posted anything but I am sort of on vacation this week while attending the eCommerce Leadership Summit in Salt Lake City and find myself with some free time and the urge to write something.

I haven't really felt like writing the last few months, although i have had some ideas batting around my head for posts I just haven't had the time. Mostly I have been dealing with the pains of a growing business prompted by a sustained jump in sales that started near the end of October.

Just some of the problems I have been dealing with:

• Keeping enough items in stock to meet the new demand.
• Keeping enough cash on hand to make sure I can purchase inventory and pay bills without a problem as more of my business has moved to a channel that delays payments for two weeks (Amazon Seller Central)
• Increased employee mistakes with the higher order volume.
  
• Mistakes from a new employee and how to minimize them and make sure it doesn't happen the next time I add a employee.
• Increased RMA's & customer service e-mails due to volume
• Finding time to work on projects while making sure orders still ship out
• The last three weeks I have been making sure the business could run and orders would ship out while I was away on this trip.
  

Some of the things I have done to address these problem:

• Started creating a operations manual with detailed instructions to minimize mistakes and create systems that will let me offload more work to employees.
  
• Removed myself from the day to day shipping process. My shipping manager now downloads, prints and packs all orders instead of waiting for me to do it.
• Review stock levels 2-3 times a week to make sure items will not sell out
• Set aside specific times to answer customer service e-mails and specific days to deal with RMAs.
• Adding bin numbers and shelf numbers so employees do not have to rely only on part numbers that can be very similar to pick orders (this won't be live for a couple more weeks)

So far the summit has been a blast with a lot of good information and as always withe these types of things my head is filled with a lot of new ideas that I need to sort through and prioritize. Hopefully I will have some time in the next couple of weeks to type up some of my notes from the event and post them there.