The Plight of the Buyer

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.

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.

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.