Long Time, No See

Wow! Has it really been a year since my last blog? In July 2008, after we stood up our new web site with the shopping cart and pretty bells and whistles, we became so busy so early in the selling season that I had to stop discontinue the blog for a while.

A lot has happened since then. Last year was our most successful year ever. Thank you for making it so! Despite the economic downturn, you, our loyal customers, continued to buy Lemax Christmas and Halloween décor in record amounts.

Nonetheless, we noticed some trends. Collectively, you have been buying smaller, less expensive accessories and figurines. That’s smart shopping! You can start with two or three and houses and buildings, add accessories (like trees or carriages), and supplement with a bunch of figurines. What you wind up with is an interesting display. Smaller sometimes is better. (And it doesn’t require as much table space!)

Because of your buying habits, we’ve changed ours as well. This year our main order included all the buildings and houses, but we ordered less of each. Hence, we may ask your indulgence if we run out during the fall. (That’s a hint to place your orders early!)

Whereas we ordered fewer buildings, we ordered more accessories and figurines. We still carry every Lemax item in current production and hundreds that are retired. This year we ordered some accessories that we haven’t carried in the past, mainly a few low-cost items and funky trees. Overall we carry between 1800 and 1900 Lemax SKUs for your one-stop shopping enjoyment.

Using the Search Feature

With all those SKUs to choose from, you may want a few tips to find what you’re looking for - faster. Of course, we prefer that you systematically view every item on every page for every category, but you may not have the time to do that. You can narrow down your process by using the search feature on our web site, www.lemaxvillages.com.

To make it very easy to see every new item – all 251 of them – for the 2009 model year, just type “2009” (without the quotation marks) into the “Advanced Search” box in the upper left-hand corner of our home page. Then click the button below that says “Search.” That will return all 251 Lemax items that are new for 2009.

Note that searching based on the year of introduction only works for 2009. I’ll try to update our web site, as time allows, so you can search for all the items introduced for model years 1991 through 2008. Give us a few weeks, at least, for that to work.

We’ve associated key words with many of our Lemax SKUs. So, for instance, if you want to find figurines featuring people of color (as many of you have asked for), just enter “people color” (again, without the quotation marks) into the “Advanced Search” box in the upper left-hand corner of our home page. Then click the button below that says “Search.” That will return 16 “hits” for the figurines depicting people of color.

A tip when searching is to include only important nouns and adjectives. Leave out other parts of speech (prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, etc.) because the search engine ignores prepositions and conjunctions but may get confused by verbs and adverbs.

Keep it simple, and start searching using the most descriptive word you can think of. The more words you list, the more restrictive the search. If you include words that I didn’t think of, you may not get any hits. Hence, you may not find what you’re looking for, even though it may be on the site. Try a synonym if your search comes up dry. You just have to experiment.

For instance, if you’re looking for items containing dogs, type in the singular form “dog”. Then click the button below that says “Search.” That will return 41 hits. If you typed in the plural form “dogs” and clicked the Search button, you would only see 13 hits. (You’d think the search feature would be smart enough to return all 41 dogs, whether you type “dog” or “dogs,” but I guess it isn’t. Go figure.)

What about irregular nouns, where the plural isn’t formed by adding an “S”? For noun pairs like man/men, woman/women, and child/children, just experiment by searching for both. I tried to use the singular forms of the nouns throughout, but I might have made a mistake or two. Note also that if you search for “man,” you’ll see all sorts of items with “man” in the title or within the list of key words. Hence, your search for “man” will also retrieve “fireman”, “policeman”, “manacle”, and so forth.

If you’re looking for skiers, search for “ski” or even “snow”. You can even get clever and type in “outdoors”, which will retrieve skiers and hikers and also that great new line of accessories associated with Lumberjack Games.

Just give it a shot. Hopefully, the keyword search feature will improve your shopping experience.

Discounts Galore!

Couldn’t resist the opportunity to get a plug in for our sale. Only a few weeks remain, so hurry! From now through August 31, 2009, if you order $350 worth of Lemax merchandise from our web site, www.lemaxvillages.com, you will receive a ten (10) percent discount.

In addition, as always, orders over $350 sent to anywhere within the 48 contiguous states will receive free shipping. And you’ll free some free merchandise (of our choosing).

Read all the details on our web site, but please hurry to take advantage of the savings. This will be the only time of year that we will offer discounts, so take advantage!

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and thanks for patronizing our site, , www.lemaxvillages.com. I’ll write again soon!

Martin and Carol Schiel

PS Did I mention that our web site is www.lemaxvillages.com and that you can find over 1800 different SKUs of Lemax holiday décor there? Yes, all the Lemax Christmas and Spooky Town villages – all the buildings, accessories, and figurines – await your viewing. Did I mention that www.lemaxvillages.com offers all the Lemax merchandise in current production, plus hundreds of retired items available nowhere else in the known universe in new, unopened condition?

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.