Thursday, December 27, 2007

eCommerce

So, if you want to check it out, my store is at www.the-game-store.com and I think it came out quite well. Opening day was a rush to try and snag a few last christmas sales. While I did manage to get a few orders, I saw where there was some serious flaws. I was not going to find them until I went live. They are now a thing of the past, but I thought I would mention them.

I signed up with Google's AdWords. To this day, weeks later, it still isn't working. Stay away from this system, it really sucked. Nothing would get done unless I emailed customer service asking them what the fuck was going on. I've gone into detail about this before, so I won't rehash it.

I then signed with Yahoo's Adword system, and I was more than pleased with the system, and the results. Minutes after setting things up it was driving traffic to my store by the truckload. This, is obviously good. I can only assume that my problem was christmas time. Since I was peddling board games, I was competing with some serious bidders for top slots. I would guess my average per-click price was about .75 cents each. 30 visitors was costing over $30, and that did not take long to get that many hits. Other really good keywords was going to cost WAY too much for my blood. For example, both "Buy Backgammon" and "Buy Chess" were going for $7 - $11 EACH visitor. It was insane. The reason, was that they were shooting into a barrel trying to get someone to buy a $1000 Alabaster Chess Board and $750 Chessmen. But realistically, all I found was under $50 sales.

In the end of the weekend, I made 3 sales, $20 profit, and spent $250 in advertising. Now, obviously there is a better way of going about it. I think if I could get results from .10 cent hits, that would be affordable. Also, Amazon.com looked like a real deal at only $40/mo so i will look further into this at a later date.

Anyway, other issues I had with the store was that shipping was right on my site, but when it went over to paypal, it only charged about 50% of the shipping. Turned out to be some hidden "feature" I needed to disable. I also noticed that I was wholly undercharging for one companies products. Both these issues ended up costing me $4 to make my first sale.

I also had many Out of Stock issues pop up. One customer is going to wait for it to come back in stock next month, so I can make another $20 off that.

In general, I am putting the whole store thing on a shelf for now while I add more products to the database I am creating for the website. If you missed that part, none of these companies have valid databases of products they carry, so I am creating it all by hand from their website, one page/product at a time. It's a huge time waster. I would never do this if it wasn't for the fact that I do nothing at all at my day job. Seriously, for the past 14 months, I go in late, and run my side business from my desk. Everyone knows, and no one really cares. I do actual work for about 1 hour a day, if that much. I have no clue why they employ me. I have no idea why they pay me top dollar to do it, either. I used to worry about it, thinking if they caught on, they would fire me, but they never did care. Of course, now I'm just gloating.

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