LAND OF
ODDS - Jewelry Design Center
Beads, Beading Supplies, Books
-- For the Bead and Jewelry Making Artist and Craftsperson
From time to time, we have decided to relate and share some of our e-commerce experiences with our customers and friends. Doing business on the Internet is a new thing, a wonderful thing and something not quite the same as running a regular store, and not quite the same as operating a mail-order print catalog business. The Internet is very democratic, and we feel our on-line store should mirror some of the aspects of Internet culture. The Internet is very "information-centered" as well, and our store should also be. We want to chronicle our successes, trials and tribulations.
Some of our goals have changed, since we became a primarily-on-line enterprise, and closed our main store.
Our goals for our catalog include:
Since our last progress report, we've been inundated and overwhelmed with technical issues associated with the on-line catalog. The catalog gets 6000 unique visitors each day. They place 20 or so orders on-line, with an average of 15 items per order. Our current set-up can not technically handle the volume. In March 2002, our host again took our catalog off-line, because it was overwhelming the system. We worked out some band aid solutions to keep the current set-up going, while we upgraded to our own server, and began to redesign the whole catalog using a much more sophisticated -- and a lot! more expensive -- shopping cart system. We've been working since last March to upgrade everything, and it looks like we will have our new set-up operational by April 2003.
What a job!
The volume of orders continued to increase about 5-10% each month, until September 2002. It first plateaued, and then declined for a few months, before increasing again. It feels much more like we have a very stable, and more definable "customer market". The number of orders each day is very steady, and not subject to steep highs and lows. In many respects, because predicting customer behaviors has become easier and more straightforward, the catalog "feels" much more like managing a real store. It is much easier to predict what items customers will want. Because of this, it has been much easier to maintain a higher in-house inventory. And subsequently, our turn-around time from receipt of an order to shipping an order has improved considerably. About 75% of our orders are shipped within 1-2 days. Most of the remainder ship within 3-5 days. Very few orders remain to be shipped after 7 days.
Our wholesale suppliers continue to disappoint. While some seem to be making an effort to modernize and get better organized, most cannot. In our initial conception of our "system", we wanted to rely on our suppliers to create a type of "just-in-time" process. Overall, this doesn't work well. We continue to cherry-pick who we keep as our suppliers, and a lot of our decision making today depends on how well they have integrated their own operations into the internet.
In our current system, we have not kept up with raising prices at all, or keeping the product lists adequately updated. In our new-to-be system, this should no longer be a problem. This is a much simpler task to achieve in the new system.
Shipping costs are raised each year by UPS and the Post Office. We rely more on the Post Office to ship the least expensive packages. Shipping costs to rural areas are over $8.00 now!
We will be discontinuing our Frequent Shopper program -- Land of Odds Advantage Points. Few people took advantage of it. It did not seem to stimulate business. Only the very wealthiest customers really benefitted by it, and overall, they didn't seem to care, if they got the extra discounts or not.
In our new set-up, we will be considerably tightening up our Return policies and terms. Too many customers order lots of things, with no intention of keeping them. They just want a care package to look at some things, and to pick one or two items out. It's very expensive and time-consuming to have to restock our shelves.So we've instituted a variety of fees.
We created a Retail Minimum Order of $10.00. Small orders were becoming a nuisance and an expense. Given the time it takes to pick and pack an order, the costs of the box, packing materials, invoice slips, and time to run the shipping and catalog the orders, we were losing lots of money on small orders. The $10.00 mark is closer to a break-even point, but we don't make any money on these small orders. Given the huge increases in shipping costs, it's amazing that so many people place $10.00 orders to begin with. Setting this floor doesn't seem to have impacted on our order volume.
2) We get about 300-400 emails a day now. Impossible to answer. We rely on prewritten responses for most inquiries. Computer viruses have been a nightmare, almost shutting us down completely a few times. In March 2002, some especially virulent viruses came out. Our Windows 95 and some of our older machines could not deal with them. When the antivirus software rejected the virus, it also locked up the machines. So, we've made some major investments in new computer equipment and software.
3) We have not been able to get the beads for the Martha Stewart Cranberry Wreathe project for more than a year now. It's been a great loss of income.
4) Glass beads are still in, though the styles and fashions keep changing. More people are interested in gemstone beads, which is not our specialty.
5) We discountinued a click-through advertising program on About.com, but began one with Google, that seems more effective.
6) We started an on-line contest called The Ugly Necklace Contest, to get more on-line and off-line publicity. It seems to have worked.
7) The rate of returns is about 3-4%. The rate of declined credit cards, stolen credit cards or credit cards with bad account numbers seems to have risen considerably. It may be 20% of submitted orders. This is frustrating to deal with. We used to email customers with invalid or declined credit card numbers. Now we call them directly. This has increased the number of these orders that get rung up.
We're not sure, if we were just beginning this adventure, that we would have tackled it. The amount of technical maintenance and technology upgrading, -- in both time and dollars -- is enormous and overwhelming. It's not particularly fun.We'll see how well our new system does -- it answers most, but not all, of the issues we've confronted over the years.
While technically frustrated, we're ecstatic about our new catalog coming on-line. We've improved everything about it, particularly many of the navigation problems and the problems associated with price increases and product updates.
Thanks for being there for us and with us,
Warren and James