Retractions. Corrections. Life’s full of them.
Sorry I haven’t posted in over a week, but I’ve been correcting deficiencies in our web site in my spare time recently. (There weren’t that many errors, but they were time-consuming to fix.) There hasn’t been much spare time, because you (our wonderful friends and customers) have been keeping us busy with an influx of orders. Customer sentiment remains overwhelmingly favorable toward www.lemaxvillages.com.
And I need to retract one tidbit of erroneous information. The Oct-o-Squeeze is actually part of the Spooky Town village collection, not the Carnival Series. (Actually, you can use it in either line.) It’s a spooky carnival ride and pairs well with the Spooky Town Fun House.
The menacing octopus is whirling around riders who bear striking resemblances to Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula. If you use it in your “normal” Carnival Village, just tell your friends there’s a convention of movie monster look-alikes in town this week. (Yes, that’s plausible. Just look at all the Star Wars and Star Trek conventions that have taken place in the last four decades. Frankie and the good Count have been around twice as long!)
The Plight of the Buyer
What’s the most difficult part of on-line retailing? Pricing? Logistics? E-commerce? Customer service? They’re all tricky, but I think prognosticating how much to order is right up there among the most challenging aspects of retailing.
When I was but a pip, still wet behind the ears and fresh out of college, I spent 18 months working at a world-class men’s retail clothing store in New Orleans. What I hadn’t learned about sales from the school of hard knocks up to that point, I learned at Rubenstein Brothers, corner of Canal and St. Charles. (Stop by and say hi to Mr Andre [Rubenstein] for me.)
I was chummy with the head buyer for the men’s furnishings department and spent a lot of time with the Rubenstein Sister, Miss Gertrude, who bought men’s ties. Because of the enormous selection, whenever they’d return from a buying trip, they’d mention how hard it was to choose what and how many of each to buy. The evidence of their failures was manifest during the semi-annual clearance sales. If they mis-bought, we had lots to stuff to move at lower and lower prices. The message was clear: buy the right stuff in the right amounts.
Comparatively speaking, our job is a lot easier than theirs. Although the Brothers wouldn’t fire their sweet sister, the head buyer’s neck was, theoretically at least, on the chopping block. Carol and I buy virtually every new item that Lemax releases each year, so what to buy is cut and dried: everything (with few exceptions).
But how much to buy is the $64 question. We have certain rules of thumb that we employ, and those have served us well over the years. Our goal is to have enough left over after Christmas and Halloween to carry us over till the next container arrives on that slow boat from China. We started this current selling season with just under 2000 stock-keeping units (SKUs), and we’ve sold out of several dozen items, so we carry around 1900 SKUs as of this writing.
Our container has landed, the merchandise is on the shelves, and we’ve placed our (final) follow-on order for this year. (The factory stops making more products in September each year so they can re-tool for the following year’s items.) We’ve used previous years’ sales figures to forecast current year sales, by SKU. We use spreadsheets and graphs, diving rods and tea leaves. We approach the art of buying very scientifically.
Then, someone comes along and blows all that out of the water! I’m not complaining, believe me, but a customer this past Saturday bought me out of two varieties of trees that we sell. She ordered 24 of one and 20 of the other.
Rationally, it doesn’t matter to whom we sell our stock. Rationally, we want to sell completely out of everything. Hence, ideally, every year we would sell exactly the number of each SKU that we order, and we would have no pent-up demand, no unsatisfied orders. Of course, that never happens.
Irrationally, we hate to be out of any item, especially this early in the selling season. (Fortunately, these weren’t the most popular or sought-after trees in our inventory.) We pride ourselves on having the largest number of Lemax SKUs in the known universe, so we hate to disappoint any customer.
Anyway, short of ordering a million of each SKU, I guess there’s no good solution to an occasional anomalous order that entirely depletes our supply of that item. We should rejoice, and we are. We shouldn’t fret about 1/10th of one percent of our inventory, but nonetheless I wonder what Adrian Monk would do in this situation.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Presenting the Brand New Lemax Oct-o-Squeeze!
Every once in a while, life presents us with golden opportunities. We’re fortunate to be one of Lemax’s three preferred retailers. We’re very proud of that and do everything we can to live up to their trust.
Every once in a while, our close relationship pays off (mutually) . . . like a loose slot machine!
The other day we received an e-mail message from Lemax, Inc. to explain a rare and wonderful opportunity. They were planning to release a new item into general circulation next year, but they had a number of advance copies this year that we could buy and then resell to our customers. The item is called the Oct-o-Squeeze and is part of the Lemax Carnival Series. Because all pieces in the Carnival Series fly off our shelves, it didn’t take Carol and me long to jump at the chance to buy some Oct-o-Squeezes for you, our loyal customers.
Big and purple and menacing, looking like a 1950s B-movie by-product of atomic radiation, the Oct-o-Squeeze slings riders around in its tentacles while surreal music plays over the loudspeaker. ‘Come ride, if you dare, the Oct-o-Squeeze!’ the creature taunts. To make the Oct-o-Squeeze even more realistic, Lemax gave him (her?) a slightly tacky texture. It’s wild! Check out the video below, and I apologize for the poor sound quality.
Now, here’s an added bonus. Because the Oct-o-Squeeze is not yet in mass production, Lemax is testing every one of them to insure that each works satisfactorily. Even though each one has been thoroughly tested, Lemax, as always, stands behind every one of these Oct-o-Squeezes. So, they’re factory-tested and guaranteed to work. Talk about peace of mind!
Anyway, we’ve ordered a bunch of these Oct-o-Squeezes, and we should receive them in early August. (Lemax needs time to test each item and then ship them to us.) If you own one this year, you’ll be in with the In Crowd. You’ll go where the In Crowd goes. You’ll know what the In Crowd knows. Okay, I’ll calm down. I’m just a little excited!
We love this piece, and we’re sure you will, too. So, if you’re interested, check out our web site in the coming weeks to learn when they’re available to buy. That URL again is http://www.lemaxvillages.com/.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Plight with New Web Site
Before we examine the next series of Lemax Christmas and Halloween villages, I thought I’d whine a little more about our new e-commerce site. I discovered, quite by accident, that ProStores doesn’t do two things related to international shipping costs. First, internationally, they only support “automated” shipping costs for Canada. Second, they require a separate merchant-defined shipping table for each international country that you wish to ship to.
First things first, let’s address Canada. If ProStores dynamically links to the USPS site to obtain shipping information about Canada, then it doesn’t make sense to me that they can’t obtain shipping rates for any and all other countries that the USPS ships to. Unless there’s something wacky going on behind the scenes at the USPS (and that’s always a possibility), then ProStores and the USPS should be able to pass between themselves the shipping rates for any countries. (This comes from ten years as a programmer and 31 years in information technology overall.) The more we sellers sell, the more commission ProStores will rake in, so it makes good business sense to facilitate the shipping process.
Next, apparently the ProStores idea of a work-around for this is to permit merchants to define their own shipping tables for specific countries and to use a default shipping table for all other countries.
ProStores permits us to import and export information in our hosted databases. Products, customers, orders, and a variety of other information can easily go to and fro. Why not allow the shipping tables to be imported? That way, we sellers could create a spreadsheet that we could manipulate and change around easily.
Instead, we must sign into the ProStore and change the 1-pound rate, the 2-pound rate, the 3-pound rate, . . . the 44-pound, etc. for each country – 45 entries in all per country. Most European countries share the same shipping charges for packages weighing up to and including 44 pounds. I cranked in 20 different tables for 20 different European countries. Then, I added a table for Australia and another for “everywhere else.” If you live “anywhere else,” the rate probably isn’t accurate. (But all the others are up-to-the-minute!)
Guess what happens when there’s a rate change? Yes, every one of those tables needs to be updated! What a nightmare! If they’d just link to the USPS published rates available on USPS.com, then all this could be avoided. I wouldn’t have to close down my site for hours while making these changes. And you would be spared the inconvenience of another web site under construction right when you want to place an order!
Ah, if I ruled the world!
I don’t want anyone to think that Im negative about ProStores. I really think it’s a good e-commerce solution. They have most bells and whistles any retailer needs, and the features are easy to tap into. Everything’s customizable. If you know a little HTML, you can make your ProStore dance. But, straight from the box, it’s a very usable service for most retailers. As I learn more, I’ll share it.
Next time, we’ll delve into Caddington Village, the Victorian Christmas village from Lemax.
Check out what’s happening at www.lemaxvillages.com.
First things first, let’s address Canada. If ProStores dynamically links to the USPS site to obtain shipping information about Canada, then it doesn’t make sense to me that they can’t obtain shipping rates for any and all other countries that the USPS ships to. Unless there’s something wacky going on behind the scenes at the USPS (and that’s always a possibility), then ProStores and the USPS should be able to pass between themselves the shipping rates for any countries. (This comes from ten years as a programmer and 31 years in information technology overall.) The more we sellers sell, the more commission ProStores will rake in, so it makes good business sense to facilitate the shipping process.
Next, apparently the ProStores idea of a work-around for this is to permit merchants to define their own shipping tables for specific countries and to use a default shipping table for all other countries.
ProStores permits us to import and export information in our hosted databases. Products, customers, orders, and a variety of other information can easily go to and fro. Why not allow the shipping tables to be imported? That way, we sellers could create a spreadsheet that we could manipulate and change around easily.
Instead, we must sign into the ProStore and change the 1-pound rate, the 2-pound rate, the 3-pound rate, . . . the 44-pound, etc. for each country – 45 entries in all per country. Most European countries share the same shipping charges for packages weighing up to and including 44 pounds. I cranked in 20 different tables for 20 different European countries. Then, I added a table for Australia and another for “everywhere else.” If you live “anywhere else,” the rate probably isn’t accurate. (But all the others are up-to-the-minute!)
Guess what happens when there’s a rate change? Yes, every one of those tables needs to be updated! What a nightmare! If they’d just link to the USPS published rates available on USPS.com, then all this could be avoided. I wouldn’t have to close down my site for hours while making these changes. And you would be spared the inconvenience of another web site under construction right when you want to place an order!
Ah, if I ruled the world!
I don’t want anyone to think that Im negative about ProStores. I really think it’s a good e-commerce solution. They have most bells and whistles any retailer needs, and the features are easy to tap into. Everything’s customizable. If you know a little HTML, you can make your ProStore dance. But, straight from the box, it’s a very usable service for most retailers. As I learn more, I’ll share it.
Next time, we’ll delve into Caddington Village, the Victorian Christmas village from Lemax.
Check out what’s happening at www.lemaxvillages.com.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Lemax Spooky Town Halloween Villages
Now that our new web site seems moderately stable, let’s look at some of the products we sell. Lemax manufactures Christmas and Halloween villages. I love the Halloween line, called Spooky Town. There are buildings, houses, figurines, and accessories that you can combine in nearly infinite combinations to achieve the right look.
Lemax produced the first Spooky Town merchandise in 2000, probably as an experiment. The line was very popular, probably more popular than they were expecting. Being a conservative company, Lemax (I suspect) wanted to see the sales figures before producing more of the line. (This happened again in 2004 with the nascence of the Carnival Series.)
Because of production lead times, Lemax couldn’t react to the popularity again until the 2002 season, when they produced the next batch of Spooky Town products.
From then on, the Spooky Town series has seen 50 to 100 new products annually. For the past few years, in fact, Lemax has produced enough Halloween merchandise to warrant having a Halloween catalog separate from their Christmas catalog.
The Spooky Town series began as two lines: one tame and the other more macabre. By the advent of the 2003 merchandise, the two lines offered enough variety that collectors could specialize in one or the other. Snow-less houses, costumed adolescent trick-or-treaters, and fright-free accessories appealed to one target audience. Those more gruesome collectors preferred the horrific houses, frightening figurines, and action-packed accessories.
Some collectors even customized their collectibles, adding more gore to suit their tastes. Over the years we’ve sponsored quite a few Lemax village decorating contests, but I can’t readily find photos of the winners. There are some doozies, believe me!
In 2006 and 2007, Lemax began deemphasizing the milder Spooky Town houses (to the chagrin of collectors). New lines began to emerge. Today, there are several strong themes, including pirates, ancient Egyptians, the Wild West, and famous monsters from the movies. Each of these lines has enough buildings, figurines, and accessories to create distinct villages entirely based on one of those themes.
There are now three pirate ships (including the Jolly Roger), a Pirate Island centerpiece, and dozens of figurines and accessories.
Ancient Eqypt is well represented with a pyramid, a chariot, palm trees of various sizes, plenty of accessories and figurines, and a plethora of other buildings.
The Wild Western line is coming along with a saloon, a buckboard manned by skeletons, dance hall girls, and a dozen or so other pieces large and small.
Whether you prefer Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf-Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or the Mummy, you’ll find a great selection of movie monsters.
The Spooky Town line is long and strong, with dozens of wonderful, repugnant, hideous, shocking pieces to suit all tastes. Halloween has become the second most-decorated holiday in the United States. People enjoy displaying their Lemax Halloween villages right up till its time to decorate for Christmas.
If you enjoyed reading this article, please share it with a friend. To see the entire line of Lemax Spooky Town merchandise, please visit www.lemaxvillages.com.
Lemax produced the first Spooky Town merchandise in 2000, probably as an experiment. The line was very popular, probably more popular than they were expecting. Being a conservative company, Lemax (I suspect) wanted to see the sales figures before producing more of the line. (This happened again in 2004 with the nascence of the Carnival Series.)
Because of production lead times, Lemax couldn’t react to the popularity again until the 2002 season, when they produced the next batch of Spooky Town products.
From then on, the Spooky Town series has seen 50 to 100 new products annually. For the past few years, in fact, Lemax has produced enough Halloween merchandise to warrant having a Halloween catalog separate from their Christmas catalog.
The Spooky Town series began as two lines: one tame and the other more macabre. By the advent of the 2003 merchandise, the two lines offered enough variety that collectors could specialize in one or the other. Snow-less houses, costumed adolescent trick-or-treaters, and fright-free accessories appealed to one target audience. Those more gruesome collectors preferred the horrific houses, frightening figurines, and action-packed accessories.
Some collectors even customized their collectibles, adding more gore to suit their tastes. Over the years we’ve sponsored quite a few Lemax village decorating contests, but I can’t readily find photos of the winners. There are some doozies, believe me!
In 2006 and 2007, Lemax began deemphasizing the milder Spooky Town houses (to the chagrin of collectors). New lines began to emerge. Today, there are several strong themes, including pirates, ancient Egyptians, the Wild West, and famous monsters from the movies. Each of these lines has enough buildings, figurines, and accessories to create distinct villages entirely based on one of those themes.
There are now three pirate ships (including the Jolly Roger), a Pirate Island centerpiece, and dozens of figurines and accessories.
Ancient Eqypt is well represented with a pyramid, a chariot, palm trees of various sizes, plenty of accessories and figurines, and a plethora of other buildings.
The Wild Western line is coming along with a saloon, a buckboard manned by skeletons, dance hall girls, and a dozen or so other pieces large and small.
Whether you prefer Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf-Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or the Mummy, you’ll find a great selection of movie monsters.
The Spooky Town line is long and strong, with dozens of wonderful, repugnant, hideous, shocking pieces to suit all tastes. Halloween has become the second most-decorated holiday in the United States. People enjoy displaying their Lemax Halloween villages right up till its time to decorate for Christmas.
If you enjoyed reading this article, please share it with a friend. To see the entire line of Lemax Spooky Town merchandise, please visit www.lemaxvillages.com.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Problems with Our New Web Site
When we left Pauline, she was dangling over a cliff by a frayed rope that was coming unwound. Strand by strand, she was nearing her inevitable plunge to the chasm below. Sorry, different story. As I recall, we were recounting the problems we were having with our new web site.
Pointing the URL from the old to the new web site went surprisingly well. Two calls each to ProStores and Register.com ironed out all the details. At 2100 CDT on Sunday, our URL began propagating throughout all the Domain Name Service servers across the globe, a process that could take 24 to 48 hours to complete. At 2102 CDT at our house we were viewing our new ProStore when we typed in www.lemaxvillages.com. Slowly we received reports from as far away as the Philippines about the new site.
The system administrator sobered up long enough to restore some capability to the wounded server, but it still wasn’t hitting on all cylinders on Monday, July 7 – the day of the grand opening. Fortunately, people weren’t complaining about slow response. In fact, most comments were highly favorable. (What? They didn’t like our old site?)
Despite two years of testing, despite trying to anticipate every contingency, when we went into production, we encountered a few bugs. We’ve always offered free shipping on orders over $350. We had also been offering a temporary ten-percent discount on all orders over $350 until August 31, 2008. We learned the hard way that ProStores doesn’t permit two concurrent storewide promotions. After missing two $400 sales early Monday morning, four phone calls to tech support uncovered a workaround, but it required the buyer to enter a promotion code at checkout time. Now, we had to notify our buyers somehow about this promotion code, which led to the second problem.
We decided (and ProStores tech support agreed) that we needed to prominently display the promotion code on the home page and also on the checkout page. Updating the home page was a snap, but there are multiple checkout pages: one for buyers who wish to register themselves on the site, another for buyers who had previously registered, and the third for buyers who couldn’t be bothered registering. (Just let me place my order so I can get on with my life!)
Apparently, when I updated two of the three checkout pages, I put the text smack-dab in the middle of an IF statement, which caused lots of problems. That took an hour or so to resolve, but the solution made sense. The universe was once again in balance.
Not that anyone from ProStores is reading this blog, but I should probably apologize to the entire tech support staff. (This also sets the stage for the next problem we’ll address below.) They all probably needed an extra shot or two of whiskey last night to calm their jangled nerves. I wish I had a dollar for every time I asked them, “What do you mean my ProStore won’t . . . (fill in the blank)? I’ve read the manual cover-to-cover four times, and it plainly states that it will . . . (fill in the blank).”
The next issue wasn’t noticeable to buyers, but it affected us. Our warehouse is laid out with products in numerical order by SKU. We primarily handle Lemax Christmas and Halloween villages, but we also sell ornaments from Kurt S. Adler, On30 scale trains from Bachmann, some A Christmas Story items from NECA, and Toy Presidents (talking action figures that include presidents, first ladies, and notable world leaders). An eclectic mix, each cluster of which is laid out in numerical order by SKU.
To pick an order efficiently, I need a list of items sorted numerically by SKU. So, how is the ProStores picking list organized? It isn’t. The order is random. I called tech support and asked how to sort the list numerically. “Oh, Prostores can’t do that,” she offered. I protested, “Hey, wait a minute. I was a programmer for ten years. It’s a simple matter to sort things.” She retorted, “Well, then, go into the HTML code and sort it yourself.” I asked to make this a formal request for version 9.1.0.250 of the ProStores software. She gave me an e-mail address to send my request to.
Until I can get around to making this (potentially dangerous) change to the underlying code of ProStores, I’ve trained Carol to copy and paste the list into a spreadsheet and sort it there. Then she can print the page, and I’ll use it to pick the order. Aaargh!
Monday, while I was at work, Carol called me frantically. “The shipping is too low on the first few orders we’ve gotten.” I investigated, and all I can tell is that when the store links to UPS to get a shipping quote, it’s retrieving the cost to ship to a business, not a residence. UPS adds a hefty surcharge to each package bound for a residence. Also the shipping quote ignores the weight of the box and shipping materials. I had to make some quick adjustments to the shipping algorithm, but our first five or six customers got a heckuva bargain on shipping.
All things considered, the glitches we’ve encountered so far have been fairly minor. The lesson here is to test, test, and test some more. You don’t need to spend two years testing, but you need a good test plan on paper that exercises every line of code. Test the credit card payments. Test the credit card refunds. Test the reasonableness of the shipping costs. Test, test, test whatever makes sense in your case.
Cosmetically, make sure you have no broken links. (That little red “x” indicates broken links.) Insure all your products have images. Insure all the thumb-nail images are the same size and the full-size images are the same size. Anyway, you get the idea: spend a little time insuring the site looks professional.
If you’d like to see the site for yourself, click here www.lemaxvillages.com. If you find any broken links or missing images, drop me a line.
Pointing the URL from the old to the new web site went surprisingly well. Two calls each to ProStores and Register.com ironed out all the details. At 2100 CDT on Sunday, our URL began propagating throughout all the Domain Name Service servers across the globe, a process that could take 24 to 48 hours to complete. At 2102 CDT at our house we were viewing our new ProStore when we typed in www.lemaxvillages.com. Slowly we received reports from as far away as the Philippines about the new site.
The system administrator sobered up long enough to restore some capability to the wounded server, but it still wasn’t hitting on all cylinders on Monday, July 7 – the day of the grand opening. Fortunately, people weren’t complaining about slow response. In fact, most comments were highly favorable. (What? They didn’t like our old site?)
Despite two years of testing, despite trying to anticipate every contingency, when we went into production, we encountered a few bugs. We’ve always offered free shipping on orders over $350. We had also been offering a temporary ten-percent discount on all orders over $350 until August 31, 2008. We learned the hard way that ProStores doesn’t permit two concurrent storewide promotions. After missing two $400 sales early Monday morning, four phone calls to tech support uncovered a workaround, but it required the buyer to enter a promotion code at checkout time. Now, we had to notify our buyers somehow about this promotion code, which led to the second problem.
We decided (and ProStores tech support agreed) that we needed to prominently display the promotion code on the home page and also on the checkout page. Updating the home page was a snap, but there are multiple checkout pages: one for buyers who wish to register themselves on the site, another for buyers who had previously registered, and the third for buyers who couldn’t be bothered registering. (Just let me place my order so I can get on with my life!)
Apparently, when I updated two of the three checkout pages, I put the text smack-dab in the middle of an IF statement, which caused lots of problems. That took an hour or so to resolve, but the solution made sense. The universe was once again in balance.
Not that anyone from ProStores is reading this blog, but I should probably apologize to the entire tech support staff. (This also sets the stage for the next problem we’ll address below.) They all probably needed an extra shot or two of whiskey last night to calm their jangled nerves. I wish I had a dollar for every time I asked them, “What do you mean my ProStore won’t . . . (fill in the blank)? I’ve read the manual cover-to-cover four times, and it plainly states that it will . . . (fill in the blank).”
The next issue wasn’t noticeable to buyers, but it affected us. Our warehouse is laid out with products in numerical order by SKU. We primarily handle Lemax Christmas and Halloween villages, but we also sell ornaments from Kurt S. Adler, On30 scale trains from Bachmann, some A Christmas Story items from NECA, and Toy Presidents (talking action figures that include presidents, first ladies, and notable world leaders). An eclectic mix, each cluster of which is laid out in numerical order by SKU.
To pick an order efficiently, I need a list of items sorted numerically by SKU. So, how is the ProStores picking list organized? It isn’t. The order is random. I called tech support and asked how to sort the list numerically. “Oh, Prostores can’t do that,” she offered. I protested, “Hey, wait a minute. I was a programmer for ten years. It’s a simple matter to sort things.” She retorted, “Well, then, go into the HTML code and sort it yourself.” I asked to make this a formal request for version 9.1.0.250 of the ProStores software. She gave me an e-mail address to send my request to.
Until I can get around to making this (potentially dangerous) change to the underlying code of ProStores, I’ve trained Carol to copy and paste the list into a spreadsheet and sort it there. Then she can print the page, and I’ll use it to pick the order. Aaargh!
Monday, while I was at work, Carol called me frantically. “The shipping is too low on the first few orders we’ve gotten.” I investigated, and all I can tell is that when the store links to UPS to get a shipping quote, it’s retrieving the cost to ship to a business, not a residence. UPS adds a hefty surcharge to each package bound for a residence. Also the shipping quote ignores the weight of the box and shipping materials. I had to make some quick adjustments to the shipping algorithm, but our first five or six customers got a heckuva bargain on shipping.
All things considered, the glitches we’ve encountered so far have been fairly minor. The lesson here is to test, test, and test some more. You don’t need to spend two years testing, but you need a good test plan on paper that exercises every line of code. Test the credit card payments. Test the credit card refunds. Test the reasonableness of the shipping costs. Test, test, test whatever makes sense in your case.
Cosmetically, make sure you have no broken links. (That little red “x” indicates broken links.) Insure all your products have images. Insure all the thumb-nail images are the same size and the full-size images are the same size. Anyway, you get the idea: spend a little time insuring the site looks professional.
If you’d like to see the site for yourself, click here www.lemaxvillages.com. If you find any broken links or missing images, drop me a line.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
How (Not?) to Set Up an e-Commerce Web Site
How (Not?) to Set Up an e-Commerce Web Site
Have you ever watched Monk on television? If so, you’ve noticed he’s very particular (to say the least!), and he has problems making decisions. Actually, I guess he doesn’t have problems with making decisions, because he simply can’t make them.
Well, for several years, my wife and I had been wanting to change our web site from the archaic, HTML-based version that had served us well for so many years to a glitzy, glamorous e-commerce solution replete with a shopping cart, automatic shipping calculation, on-line payment acceptance, etc., etc.
We searched and searched, at first just looking for tools to cobble into our existing web site. Later we searched for an entirely new full-service provider. Like Diogenes looking for an honest man, we plodded along, seeking the perfect solution.
Perfection, however, was evasive. This site lacked this; that site lacked that; this one too hot; this one too cold. At a trade show two years ago, we thought we found two excellent choices. Infopia was too pricey, but was acknowledged as the Mercedes-Benz within the industry. (For our lower-priced figurines we would have lost money on each sale.) We reluctantly rejected them without a trial. MarketWorks seemed the second-best alternative, and we took them for a 30-day test drive. 31 days later we cancelled our arrangement and resumed our search for the ideal e-commerce site. (For one thing, the MarketWorks people never heard of the word “security” or how to apply it in an IT environment. On top of everything, they billed us $.95 for that extra day beyond the 30-day test, which I thought was chintzy.)
At the trade show, we had also investigated a company called ProStores. (We actually investigated six or eight different e-commerce providers.) I dredged up their literature, gave them a call, and opened an account.
At first I was frustrated. With 1500 SKUs (at that time – now we’re over 2000 SKUs), I didn’t want to have to key everything in from scratch. Had I had only a few dozen SKUs, brute force would have saved time. However, with so many SKUs and so many fields associated with each SKU, I wanted to import whatever information I could.
Navigating through the ProStores Store Administration area was a bit of a challenge. It’s far from intuitive. Ultimately, I read one of their 200-page manuals four times and their other 200-page manual three times. After the second reading of each and a few calls to tech support, I felt comfortable maneuvering around the Store Administration area.
I tried every import technique they offered, including some that were alleged to import from eBay. We had 600 SKUs in an eBay Store, so I hoped I could at least import this chunk to save a little time. Of course, nothing worked. The bulk importing techniques burped when they encountered HTML code. They belched when they saw the funky codes that are embedded within Microsoft Word documents. All the imports failed.
I called tech support. I had them on speed dial. I recognized a couple of them by their voices. Some of the technicians were very sharp, and some were the opposite. ProStores had just hired a bunch of new staff, and the new-hires were still learning. When I got a seasoned veteran, I would pump him or her for all the information I could learn. I made progress, but I didn’t get the store up and running before the busy selling season hit in 2006. Not wanting to throw away what little handiwork I’d accomplished to that point, I kept paying the monthly fees to ProStores until the summer of 2007.
My wife gave me an ultimatum (my mate ulti-mated me – sorry, I digress). “Get the ProStore up and running before busy season, or die a slow, painful death.” From her perspective, everything she did was manual. People would visit our old web site, send us a list of what they wanted to buy, she would compose an invoice and send it to them, and they would pay via Paypal, check, or money order. All the correspondence was via e-mail, unless the customer wanted to pay with paper. On a typical day she would get dozens of orders, plus another two dozen or more inquiries from shoppers in our eBay Store. All this correspondence was driving her mad. It was repetitive and dehumanizing on the one hand. On the other hand, she really enjoyed the interactions with people and made numerous friends over the years. This new e-commerce site with ProStores would give her her life back. At least she was clinging to that hope.
Heading into the summer of 2007, I had just about figured out everything associated with launching our ProStore. All the products were uploaded into our new store, and I just had to finalize how to handle shipping. Like Monk, I got wrapped around the axle with some very arcane shipping problems. I lost sight of the fact that a gazillion on-line retailers are selling stuff on-line, so the shipping calculations must work reasonably well. I spent quite a few hours at the ProStores booth at that same trade show in 2007 working on shipping-related matters.
Well, you may have guessed, I missed Carol’s deadline. We went sailing into our selling season in 2007 using the old web site. That winter was the coldest recorded in Oklahoma since 1889. We even had an ice storm in December. (Now, that’s a story unto itself!) I didn’t think one woman could affect the climate so dramatically. Yessir, that’s my baby!
This year there would be no excuses, only executions. Forewarned, I got the ProStore primed and ready before the annual trade show. I spent the first two mornings at the show this year speaking with the ProStores staff, finalizing the store for the grand opening. The staff was gracious. I worked with four different people this year, including one of the original software developers, so he knew the code inside and out, all the tricks, and where the skeletons were buried. We went over every setting in my store and found two that were set incorrectly. Those poor ProStores people were sick of me, I’m sure, by the time I left, but I had my store ready to open.
When I returned from the trade show (Carol decided not to go), we set the date for the switch-over. We updated our web site to warn people that we would cut over on Monday, July 7. One week before the grand reopening, we sent out 4,000 e-mail messages to our closest friends and customers. Then, this past weekend, we put the finishing touches on the new web site, updated the on-line inventory, and adjusted the home page.
On Sunday Carol recommended some last-minute changes. So I signed onto ProStores to make the changes. However, things weren’t working right. Changing between screens was taking ten minutes. (That’s worse response than when we had dial-up Internet access!) I called tech support, and they said that our server was malfunctioning, but the on-call system administrator had been called, and, as soon as he sobered up from his Fourth-of-July celebrations, he would come out and take a look. (Okay, I’m embellishing a little.)
Holy #%^$! One day till D-Day, and the &*%^*@# server isn’t working! What else can go wrong? Well, stay tuned . . .
www.lemaxvillages.com
Have you ever watched Monk on television? If so, you’ve noticed he’s very particular (to say the least!), and he has problems making decisions. Actually, I guess he doesn’t have problems with making decisions, because he simply can’t make them.
Well, for several years, my wife and I had been wanting to change our web site from the archaic, HTML-based version that had served us well for so many years to a glitzy, glamorous e-commerce solution replete with a shopping cart, automatic shipping calculation, on-line payment acceptance, etc., etc.
We searched and searched, at first just looking for tools to cobble into our existing web site. Later we searched for an entirely new full-service provider. Like Diogenes looking for an honest man, we plodded along, seeking the perfect solution.
Perfection, however, was evasive. This site lacked this; that site lacked that; this one too hot; this one too cold. At a trade show two years ago, we thought we found two excellent choices. Infopia was too pricey, but was acknowledged as the Mercedes-Benz within the industry. (For our lower-priced figurines we would have lost money on each sale.) We reluctantly rejected them without a trial. MarketWorks seemed the second-best alternative, and we took them for a 30-day test drive. 31 days later we cancelled our arrangement and resumed our search for the ideal e-commerce site. (For one thing, the MarketWorks people never heard of the word “security” or how to apply it in an IT environment. On top of everything, they billed us $.95 for that extra day beyond the 30-day test, which I thought was chintzy.)
At the trade show, we had also investigated a company called ProStores. (We actually investigated six or eight different e-commerce providers.) I dredged up their literature, gave them a call, and opened an account.
At first I was frustrated. With 1500 SKUs (at that time – now we’re over 2000 SKUs), I didn’t want to have to key everything in from scratch. Had I had only a few dozen SKUs, brute force would have saved time. However, with so many SKUs and so many fields associated with each SKU, I wanted to import whatever information I could.
Navigating through the ProStores Store Administration area was a bit of a challenge. It’s far from intuitive. Ultimately, I read one of their 200-page manuals four times and their other 200-page manual three times. After the second reading of each and a few calls to tech support, I felt comfortable maneuvering around the Store Administration area.
I tried every import technique they offered, including some that were alleged to import from eBay. We had 600 SKUs in an eBay Store, so I hoped I could at least import this chunk to save a little time. Of course, nothing worked. The bulk importing techniques burped when they encountered HTML code. They belched when they saw the funky codes that are embedded within Microsoft Word documents. All the imports failed.
I called tech support. I had them on speed dial. I recognized a couple of them by their voices. Some of the technicians were very sharp, and some were the opposite. ProStores had just hired a bunch of new staff, and the new-hires were still learning. When I got a seasoned veteran, I would pump him or her for all the information I could learn. I made progress, but I didn’t get the store up and running before the busy selling season hit in 2006. Not wanting to throw away what little handiwork I’d accomplished to that point, I kept paying the monthly fees to ProStores until the summer of 2007.
My wife gave me an ultimatum (my mate ulti-mated me – sorry, I digress). “Get the ProStore up and running before busy season, or die a slow, painful death.” From her perspective, everything she did was manual. People would visit our old web site, send us a list of what they wanted to buy, she would compose an invoice and send it to them, and they would pay via Paypal, check, or money order. All the correspondence was via e-mail, unless the customer wanted to pay with paper. On a typical day she would get dozens of orders, plus another two dozen or more inquiries from shoppers in our eBay Store. All this correspondence was driving her mad. It was repetitive and dehumanizing on the one hand. On the other hand, she really enjoyed the interactions with people and made numerous friends over the years. This new e-commerce site with ProStores would give her her life back. At least she was clinging to that hope.
Heading into the summer of 2007, I had just about figured out everything associated with launching our ProStore. All the products were uploaded into our new store, and I just had to finalize how to handle shipping. Like Monk, I got wrapped around the axle with some very arcane shipping problems. I lost sight of the fact that a gazillion on-line retailers are selling stuff on-line, so the shipping calculations must work reasonably well. I spent quite a few hours at the ProStores booth at that same trade show in 2007 working on shipping-related matters.
Well, you may have guessed, I missed Carol’s deadline. We went sailing into our selling season in 2007 using the old web site. That winter was the coldest recorded in Oklahoma since 1889. We even had an ice storm in December. (Now, that’s a story unto itself!) I didn’t think one woman could affect the climate so dramatically. Yessir, that’s my baby!
This year there would be no excuses, only executions. Forewarned, I got the ProStore primed and ready before the annual trade show. I spent the first two mornings at the show this year speaking with the ProStores staff, finalizing the store for the grand opening. The staff was gracious. I worked with four different people this year, including one of the original software developers, so he knew the code inside and out, all the tricks, and where the skeletons were buried. We went over every setting in my store and found two that were set incorrectly. Those poor ProStores people were sick of me, I’m sure, by the time I left, but I had my store ready to open.
When I returned from the trade show (Carol decided not to go), we set the date for the switch-over. We updated our web site to warn people that we would cut over on Monday, July 7. One week before the grand reopening, we sent out 4,000 e-mail messages to our closest friends and customers. Then, this past weekend, we put the finishing touches on the new web site, updated the on-line inventory, and adjusted the home page.
On Sunday Carol recommended some last-minute changes. So I signed onto ProStores to make the changes. However, things weren’t working right. Changing between screens was taking ten minutes. (That’s worse response than when we had dial-up Internet access!) I called tech support, and they said that our server was malfunctioning, but the on-call system administrator had been called, and, as soon as he sobered up from his Fourth-of-July celebrations, he would come out and take a look. (Okay, I’m embellishing a little.)
Holy #%^$! One day till D-Day, and the &*%^*@# server isn’t working! What else can go wrong? Well, stay tuned . . .
www.lemaxvillages.com
Monday, July 7, 2008
A Few Words about Trust
This morning (as I write this) over my bowl of Shredded Wheat, I was pondering the subject of trust. (Yes, sometimes I have deep thoughts! It’s usually when I’m mowing or packing a shipment, but this morning it was while eating cereal.)
Specifically, why would any buyer buy anything from any seller (specifically Carol and me) over the Internet? I decided two issues come into play: convenience and trust. To sit in air-conditioned comfort and place an order beats the heck out of driving all over town, burning up $4-a-gallon gas.
We grasp the convenience angle, so here’s where trust enters the mix. In the early days of on-line shopping, it seemed like many people feared to place orders. They were afraid their credit card information would fall into the wrong hands, and some bad guy would run up lots of charges on their card. For years now, virtually all on-line retailers use secure socket layer (SSL) technology to safeguard your sensitive credit information. But, enough of the IT mumbo-jumbo.
Returning to the subject of trust, eBay has a system of feedback that has morphed over the years. Imperfect, it’s still a good relative indicator of an on-line retailer’s overall performance. Over her nine years on eBay, my wife Carol has over 4200 positive feedbacks from different customers. On the other side of the scale are 7 negative or neutral feedbacks. What’s common in all seven of these transactions is that the disgruntled customer didn’t tell Carol there was a problem and didn’t give Carol a chance to correct the problem. Carol’s a great problem-solver.
Other than eBay, where can you, the buyer, find out about the reputation of a seller on the Internet? There aren’t many places to look.
Which leads us to: what really separates one retailer from another? We all proclaim we’re interested in customer service. (I’ve never heard any retailer say he wanted to treat customers badly.) We can come up with a laundry list of discriminators: free shipping over a certain purchase amount, good communications, accurate descriptions and clear images of what’s for sale, and so on.
Maybe the secret of life, the universe, and everything that pertains to on-line sales comes down to trust. And we can build trust by building a relationship. Now, this won’t appeal to all our friends and customers. Some people want to place their orders and get on with their hectic lives. That’s fine. We respect that. But you want more. That’s why you’re reading this.
So, that’s one of the reasons we’ve decided to share our thoughts with you. We want you to understand who we are, so the trust will come over time. You won’t agree with everything we say, and you can post comments to the contrary. But we’ll try to share our philosophies, stories, and thoughts with you. And please reciprocate. Nothing brings Carol up from the doldrums faster than a nice note from one of you. We really feel like many of you are our friends. We like hearing what’s going on in your lives.
So, in the spirit of openness, here’s a little about me. I started my first business when I was 12. I sold comic books via mail order way before the days of the Internet and personal computers. I ceased that when I went off to college to study math. I’ve been an information technology weenie for over thirty years. I’ve always had some little business on the side just to stay connected with the world.
Carol and I met twenty years ago and got married a year later. I wanted an anniversary date I could remember, so I suggested April 15th. She decided Valentine’s Day was more appropriate. I happily agreed when I figured I could probably get by with just one card for both occasions. (Here, honey, it’s your combined anniversary/Valentine’s Day gift!) We have a four-legged child, a Weimaraner named Echo.
I prefer tennis to golf, baseball to football. I’d rather be warm than cold. Eating is a passion, and all cuisines intrigue us. (Although I’m not real partial to Ethopian food or duck feet when I’m having dim sum.) Carol’s a great cook. Because of her years spent in south Louisiana, she makes the best crawfish etouffee on the planet, and her several varieties of gumbo (depending on her whim and the availability of ingredients) surpass the offerings of the most noted Cajun chefs. Hopefully, our new web site will automate some of her more mundane tasks, freeing her to cook and bake more in the future.
We like to travel, but we try to limit our travel to the off-season. Consequently, from January through June, we only ship twice a week to allow us to take weekend vacations around. My work-related travel comes in spurts and sometimes interferes with the busy season, but we try to post notices well in advance of any absences. Always, if you need something shipped quickly (because of a birthday or anniversary or some other reason), please let us know. We’ll do our best to accommodate you. (Of course, it never hurts to plan ahead.
Initial Post
Welcome to our first post of our first blog ever. We hope to blog at least weekly. Our next post will follow later this week, as lots of things are going on right now to comment about.
We will gear this blog toward our on-line business: selling Christmas and Halloween villages. You know, those houses, accessories, and figurines that you assemble into highly personalized tableaux that resemble villages. You may recognize the Department 56 brand, but we handle the products of a competitor, called Lemax.
Most of the houses are approximately 6 or 7 inches in each dimension. The accessories and figurines are sized to fit that scale. Lemax also manufactures products that Lowe’s, K-Mart, and other retailers sell as their own house brands. The scale is the same across product lines, so Carole Towne (Lowe’s) coordinates well with Lemax. Department 56 uses the same scale, so you can mix and match seamlessly.
One of the other continuing themes will be on-line retailing in general. The timing is great, in that we (just today, as a matter of fact), moved our web site from our old host to our new host. We discuss some of the “fun” we had leading up to this momentous day: all the testing, all the phone calls to tech support, all the face-to-face meetings with the tech support staff over a period of 12 months, etc.
Finally, we hope to share a little about ourselves, to help you in the buying public trust us enough to plunk down your hard-earned cash buying Christmas and Halloween villages. More about us in the next installment, which I’ll post soon.
In case you’d like to visit our web site, you can find us at www.lemaxvillages.com. Remember, Lemax merchandise makes great gifts, especially for hard-to-buy-for people, such as men and women.
If you like our service, please tell a friend. If you have a problem, please tell us first.
We will gear this blog toward our on-line business: selling Christmas and Halloween villages. You know, those houses, accessories, and figurines that you assemble into highly personalized tableaux that resemble villages. You may recognize the Department 56 brand, but we handle the products of a competitor, called Lemax.
Most of the houses are approximately 6 or 7 inches in each dimension. The accessories and figurines are sized to fit that scale. Lemax also manufactures products that Lowe’s, K-Mart, and other retailers sell as their own house brands. The scale is the same across product lines, so Carole Towne (Lowe’s) coordinates well with Lemax. Department 56 uses the same scale, so you can mix and match seamlessly.
One of the other continuing themes will be on-line retailing in general. The timing is great, in that we (just today, as a matter of fact), moved our web site from our old host to our new host. We discuss some of the “fun” we had leading up to this momentous day: all the testing, all the phone calls to tech support, all the face-to-face meetings with the tech support staff over a period of 12 months, etc.
Finally, we hope to share a little about ourselves, to help you in the buying public trust us enough to plunk down your hard-earned cash buying Christmas and Halloween villages. More about us in the next installment, which I’ll post soon.
In case you’d like to visit our web site, you can find us at www.lemaxvillages.com. Remember, Lemax merchandise makes great gifts, especially for hard-to-buy-for people, such as men and women.
If you like our service, please tell a friend. If you have a problem, please tell us first.
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