Musings of a business owner

In Honor Of April 15th The Beatles Taxman

2009-04-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

(skip to about 2:40 if you don't want to watch the cheezy cartoon).

Notes: Guy Kawasaki’s How to Drive your Competition Crazy

2009-04-02T15:35:00.000-07:00

Notes from Guy Kawasaki's Keynote How To Drive Your Competition Crazy presented at the 2009 eCommerce Leadership Summit

The presentation consisted of the 10 bullet points below (11 if you include the bonus twitter topic). My notes include some ideas on how to apply the concepts to my business (in italics).

Find a mighty opposite
- 800 pound gorilla / company that is the opposite of yours and use that to highlight / market the positives about your business.
- Examples I could use
  - No restocking fees,
  - next business day shipping on in stock orders
  - same shipping on in stock and ordered by 10 AM pacific
  - no hassle returns / 90 day warranty
  - we refund return shipping cost on defective items / wrong items
Know thy self
- Have a mission statement (2-3 words that describe your business
- Examples: Wendy's Healthy Fast Food, Honda Great Engines
Truly know thy customer
- Why do customers purchase from you?
- Good value, quick shipping, good / great service
Know thy enemy
- Buy from your competitors
- What do they do different?
- What sets them apart from you?
- Where do their customers come from?
- Note how they handle returns / customer service / shipping / anything else and take the best of what works, make it your own and better
Focus on the customer / create good shitake
- Nobody buys from you to help you or hurt a competitor (they buy only for their own self interest)
- Create good stuff / service
- Great stuff usually jumps a curve (i.e. it is not 10% or 20% better but is 10 times better)
- Example of 10x improvement: Blocks of ice brought in from cold climates -> Ice Factories -> Refrigerators
- DICEE (deep, intelligent, complete, elegance, emotive) most great stuff fits in this category. I am sure there was more to it but I take lousy notes.
Turn your customers into Evangelists
- Evangelist customers have other customers bests interests at heart unlike a salesman that has only hist best interests at heart.
Create your own day
- He literally meant create your own day as some companies have done in the past but I did not write down the example company. Really not applicable to smaller companies I think but I guess it could be applied on a certain level by sponsoring a local event or running your own conference (like Infopia did with this conference).
Make good by doing good
- My notes are a big blank here. I think he pretty much skimmed / skipped over this (to focus on twitter later).
Turn your competition into allies
- Examples
  - Home Depot helped drive sales at competitors because propane refills went up for competitors
  - A knight and a dragon team up together to start a BBQ rather than fight to the death
  - JB Hunt (trucking) and Southern Pacific Railroad teamed up to offer port to door delivery.
Play with their minds
- After you have done everything else go ahead and just play with their minds
- Example: Denver pizza company offered 2 pizzas for the price of 1 of you tear the competitors ad out of the phone book and bring it in.
Use twitter
- This was pretty much about using twitter to market to potential customers using Twitter and making use of Twitter Hawk to automate much of it along with a plug for Guy's current business venture Alltop
- Tweet Deck (aggregates twitter feeds?) and Tynt (see what is being copied from your website) were other tools mentioned.

Salt Lake City / eCommerce Leadership Summit Pictures

2009-03-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-05T15:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Outsourcing Photo Taking And Logo Creation Using Elance

2009-01-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

Haven't had much time t write lately because business has really been booming the last couple of weeks. One of the things I planned to do when I created this blog was to repost the business related content from my old eBay Blog. Here is a post I made on 3/25/2007 about using Elance to have a logo created and for having photos taken of my products.

Photo Project:
Most of my photos come direct from suppliers and since they tend to be pretty good I have always neglected photo taking. However there are times when I need to take photos of my own. This is usually because the supplier does not provide one, the photo is of a similar but not quite of the same item, or it is the same item but a different color. I believe I have managed to take some Ok photos but even the good ones (see here and here) are too dark.

Since I really don't have the room to setup a proper photo taking area, I decided to post a listing to photograph 5 products on Elance to see how much it would cost to have someone take photos for me.

I was a little disappointed that there were only two bids on the listing but the requirement that the photographer be in the United States (since the products would have to be shipped back and forth) probably limited the potential bidders. One bidder shot a sample photo for me using a cable had around the house. The sample was quite good but the price he wanted ($25 per product) was too high, at that price I would have to shelve the idea completely so I went with the lower bid ($10 per product, about $12.42 per product after shipping charges).

One of the reason I wanted to run a small test project was to work out the kinks and to make sure a larger project would actually work. Some of the issues that came up:

- Full res photos are not needed (they were almost 6MB each). The photographer will instead provide slightly compressed images (about 600Kb each) that I will crop, size and compress to my liking.

- I do not need the photographer to watermark the images. Since I had to to crop and resize the images the watermark the photographer was adding was getting cut off so in the future I will just add it myself.

- Have the photographer provide the images in a zip file, downloading them from Elance is a real pain (you have to do it one by one).

- This could get quite expensive so only products I have a steady supply of and that do not change their look often are worth paying having photographed. This can be a bit of a problem since I usually don't find out about a change until I get a shipment in and inspect it.

- At best this is just a temporary solution until I have the room implement a proper photo taking setup due to the expense.

Overall I think the results of the test were quite good and I have listed another project for the photographer to take pictures of 21 products. This covers most of the products that I absolutely need pictures for (either because I am currently using my own dark pictures or because the photo is a different color than the actual product). The cost of this second project should run about $7.25 per product after shipping back and forth so the price is more reasonable than the test project but still too high to jusity having all my products photographed.

You can view the five photos from the first project here, here, here, here and here.

Logo Project:
Something else I have neglected for some time is a proper logo for use on my website, with my eBay store and on business cards so I posted another listing requesting a logo with my website name in it, a logo with my website name but without the .com (since I can't use it on eBay) and a banner that incorporated the logo for the header on my new website.

The bids on this rolled in pretty quick (a total of 19) and ranged from $55 to $200 dollars. I looked over each bidders profile to view their portfolio and get a sense of their general style. After a couple of days I narrowed it down to two bidders who sent me sample logos I liked.

One bidder was simply going to repurpose a existing logo he did for a company that went out of business. Aside from the potential copyright issues here I also thought he wanted to charge too much for changing a few colors and text on a logo (I do however give him credit for telling me what he planned to do up front) .

The other bidder had sent me a few samples that included a logo with a s-video connector in it that caught my attention (none of the portfolios I looked at had anything like it).Within a few hours of selecting him as the winner I was sent several samples to choose from and request revisions on. I ended of asking several questions and requesting 3 revisions and the project was complete in about 5 days.

I like the end result but I think I probably overpaid but the final logo it is far better than anything I could come up with (i.e. just some generic 3d text with my eBay name). You can see the final logo below.

Opted In To Google Automatic Matching Beta

2008-12-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

My adwords account was recently opted into the new Google automatic matching feature (it is still in beta). I don't remember being asked to opt in (or out) so I assume Google just enabled it on my account for some reason or maybe it was in those new feature updates I usually ignore and click dismiss on.

When I have used tools on Google / Yahoo in the past that are supposed to optimize a pay per click campagin the results have been absolutley horibble with the optimization doing nothing but increasing my cost per conversion and the amount I pay to Google / Yahoo but new option appears to be different. It looks like I was opted in around 11/08/2008 and here are the results so far.

From the week before 11/01/2008 to 11/07/2008

From the week it was turned on 11/08/2008 to 11/14/2008

And these from last week 11/30/2008 to 12/06/2008

Unfortunatley as automatic matching is rolled out to more accounts the CPC will probably go up as there will be more competition with Google displaying more ads for each search query.

eBay Auction Sell Through Rates Update

2008-12-07T11:00:00.000-08:00

Just a update to the auctions sell through rates chart I posted on 11/22. The results are still good but it looks like the rates down a bit with last weeks listings. Tuesday's (11/25) auctions came in at 30.68% and the Saturday at 30% (perhaps it has something to do with the auction listing sale eBay ran on 11/24 & 25).

Fixed price listing results after eBay puts duplicates back in search

2008-12-05T14:38:00.000-08:00

On 11/18/2008 eBay announced that identical fixed price listings would no longer be hidden in search results so I decided to run a limited number of fixed price 7 day listings to see what the sell through rates would be like. The results were pretty bad with 15 out 116 listings sold on my main id for a sell through rate of 12.93% and 12 out of 55 listings sold on my free shipping id for a sell through rate of 21.82%. The rate on the free shipping id is almost acceptable so I might trying listing a few fixed price 7 day listings here and there on that ID.

Sell through rates for eBay auction listings

2008-11-22T14:10:00.000-08:00

When the fixed price sell through rates started to tank on eBay I began experimenting with auctions listings and here are my results so far.

I also did a comparison of fixed price sell through rates to auction sell through rates on accident. I forgot to change my listings to auctions on 11/04/2008 and the following week I listed the exact same listings (plus three new ones) as auctions. The fixed price listings on 11/04 had a sell through rate of 13.41% (11 sold out of 82) and the auction listings listed on 11/11 had a sell through rate of 32.94% (28 sold out of 85).

At this point it seems worth the effort to list some of my items as auctions and I will be expanding the number of listings I put up as auctions to see if the sell through rates hold up as I add more listings.

Global Sources Direct closing up shop

2008-11-19T15:00:00.000-08:00

I received the following e-mail from Global Sources Direct today (along with a close out sales promotion).

"After 3 years of servicing wholesale customers from 144 countries with thousands of quality products, it's time to say farewell! Global Sources Direct will close its doors by the end of 2008 and will take its last orders on December 1, 2008. We will continue to provide helpdesk support to our customers until June 30, 2009."

I found Global Sources Direct through the eBay reseller marketplace but never made a purchase. The main reason I never made a purchase is that like almost everyone else targeting smaller retailers and eBay they claim to have wholesale prices but it just isn't true. As a example there is this foldable keyboard offered for $5.40 each ($108 for a case of 20) plus shipping of $111.55 for a total of $219.55 or $10.9775 per keyboard. I could (and did) purchase the exact same keyboard from a US based wholesaler for $5.05 per keyboard including shipping for a total cost of $101 and less than half the price Global Sources charged.

Falling eBay sell through rates

2008-11-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

My sell through rates on eBay sales started to drop off in mid September. Business overall was still good so I didn't dig into what was going on but I knew something was up. Near the end of October I decided to take a closer look and found hat the sell through rates on my fixed price 7 day listings had plummeted as shown in the chart below.

The slow down really kicked in the week eBay rolled out fixed price 30 day listings and I converted all my eBay store inventory listings to fixed price 30 day listings. The main reason for this drop appears to be recent changes to eBay search that keep identical fixed price listings from the same seller from showing up in search (as of 10/23 only one listing was being shown per seller other identical listings were being hidden). Because of this there is no longer any point in listing the same fixed price listing multiple times and after this week I will no longer be listing fixed price 7 day listings.

In order to do something to try and create more sales I have been experimenting with listings some of my best sellers in the auction format with buy it now. So far the results have been positive with sell through rates around 40% a week with about 50 items listed a week. However at this point I have pretty much given up on eBay. I will continue to list to get the the sales that still trickle in but all my efforts at growing sales will be focused on my website and Amazon.com.

New DAZzle Interface DLL & Keep One Listed software released

2008-10-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

DAZzle Interface DLL:
This DLL provides the Endicia integration for Order Integrator. You can download the dll and source code below. This is public domain software and you are free to use it in your own applications, modify it or do anything else you want with it. The latest update adds support for the large priority mail flat rate box.

This new version adds support for the large Priority Mail flat rate box.

Keep One Listed (for eBay Blackthorne):
Keep One Listed allows you to scan your eBay Blackthorne inventory items and automatically schedule new listings for any item that is not currently listed.

This release adds the option to use eBay fixed price 30 day listings instead of store inventory format listings for 'store listings' along with a option to choose which type of listings you want to process (regular, store or both).

The software and latest updates can be found on the Your Cable Store website at http://www.yourcablestore.com/Software_ep_38-1.html

Trying Out Google Adwords Conversion Optimizer

2008-10-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

Last week I logged into my Google Adwords account and saw a new option called conversion optimizer. I had tried something similar with Yahoo Search Marketing a while back and the results were less than stellar but I figured hey maybe Google can do a better job so I will give it a shot.

Here are some screen shots showing the results

10/14 to 10/16 (from the week before turning conversion optimizer on)

10/21 to 10/23 (results of turning conversion optimizer on)

At first it looks good with double the clicks (190) at almost the same click through rate. The real problem is that more clicks and paying more per click does not translate into more conversions. During the 2+ days I had conversion optimizer turned on I paid an extra $38.13 for one more conversion and my cost per conversion went from $2.50 to $7.59.

The one bright side is that unlike Yahoo where I had to manually edit all my bids after turning their optimizer off turning off the Google optimizer restored all my old bids and my campaign was back to normal with a single click of the mouse.

Opening post / purpose of this blog

2008-10-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

The advice I seem to get coming from everyone who talks about search optimization and what not is to create a business blog but I have hesitated to do so up until now because I didn't want to create another blog that is just outright shilling for my website, posting links to online articles that have little or no relevance to my business or posting affiliate marking links in every other post. I am not saying I won't do some of that, after all the whole point of doing this to help generate more sales for my website.

Why am I creating a blog now? In the month since fixed price 30 day listings has been rolled out my eBay sales are falling and sell through rates on my weekly fixed price 7 day listings have fallen below 15% the last three week (I will give some data in a future post). My sales are not all bad since the fixed price 30 listings are selling pretty well but this has been kind of a kick in the ass to get me motivated and try to make sure my business can survive without eBay. Right now it probably can't since 65-70% of my monthly sales are coming from eBay.

I don't really have any kind of plan just the general idea that I should stop spending so much time and energy chasing the eBay changes and concentrate all my energies into growing my business outside of eBay. To that end I have a few general ideas I am starting with and will go from there.

Create a blog and write about eBay, google and other e-commerce related issues on a regular basis.
Work on SEO and improving rankings in natural search results (blogging is supposed to help with this).
Add more of my products to Amazon.com since it has been a great source of extra sales and should a fairly easy path to growing sales (at least in the short term)
Finally get around to adding some new Google adwords ads and exploring some of more advanced options.