Shopping Carts

I met with my friend last night with whom I'm starting up Business #2 and showed her the product samples. We also spent some time figuring out the next steps - one of which includes getting a website and shopping cart up and running.

So I spent some time this morning researching various shopping cart options and it looks like PayPal is the best bet for small businesses. With a PayPal business account it looks like you can accept Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, Discover, and PayPal but don't have to pay monthly fees, gateway fees, setup fees, etc and simply pay a transaction fee just as you do with any credit card sales. PayPal even helps you set up the shopping cart which is hosted on their site so you never have to worry about misplacing any sensative financial information.

I need to look at it further as I may end up changing Business #1's shopping cart and payment to PayPal as well since I think it'll save me a good deal of money.

If you're interested in learning more about it check out their info here: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-overview-outside

Just wanted to add that I am in no way paid by PayPal for this and I'll be more than happy to share later whether or not we used them and, if so, what we think about the functionality.

And as soon as we get things set up (hopefully in January) I'll post a link to Business #2. I think it will be fun and best of all 10% of proceeds goes to charity!

Sick Day

Blah - that's how I'm feeling. I can't put my finger on something exactly being wrong other than just general blahness.

In truth I think that this is my body decompressing after a very very busy season. This is the first day that I haven't had a ton of work to do. Since I'm leaving on Friday for a trip I dropped off my inventory and operations manual with my parents (yep - a small company so I have to rely on my folks to take care of stuff while I'm gone!) and now I'm back home trying to tie together a few business loose ends before taking off.

And I think that because I don't necessarily have a ton of stuff on my plate for the first time in literally months my body has decided to take a little time to catch up.

So yeah, I feel blah. But I do need to get a few more things done so hopefully I can get myself off the couch after this episode of the Hills is over (c'mon - what do you watch when you're home sick?).

He Does Hate Me!

(not my picture but the only picture of damaged mail I could quickly find on google images)

The Postman does hate me. How do I know? In the past few weeks I've shipped three packages to Florida (from where I am in the soggy Northwest) and all three times they've come back return to sender because the post office apparently can't find the address. This leads me to believe it's one of three things:

1. 1. People in Florida don't know their own mailing address (which seems unlikely as when I resend the package it gets there without a problem).
2. The Florida postoffice is exceptionally inept (a decent possibility)
3. My postman hates me (I think this is the most likely)

What's worse is that I swear it looks like the packages have been literally kicked the entire way to florida and back. This means that I have to not only call up the retailers to confirm their address (and yes, in all three cases the one on the box was the right address), but I have to repackage the entire order which takes a ton of time not to mention the fact that there are always a few packages I simply can't reuse. Then repackage in a mailing box (since the previous mailing box is a disaster - more money out of pocket) and lastly reship the entire thing at my cost.

Why my cost? Well I figure I can't hold the retailer accountable for the fact that my postman hates me so in the vein of providing good customer service I cover the cost of reshipping the packages. So there's a good $20 that cuts into my profits (we ship Priority Mail on everything).

So yes, I'm pretty sure my postman does actually hate me. Do you think leaving him a holiday tip will help ease his feelings of illwill?

Advice from the Experts

Advice from folks who have gone down the Entrepreneural road before and done a rather good job at it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/business/smallbusiness/27toolkit.html?ref=smallbusiness

We're ready for our closeup

We're going to be on TV! Well, in reality, one of our products is going to be on TV. And by TV I mean a local afternoon show so it's not like we'll be getting nationwide exposure. But still, it's our first TV appearance!

This all came about because I have a good relationship with a local magazine publisher. Every time they've asked for something I've made sure to come through (and to be fair - they've haven't asked for the moon) so when they had this opportunity on TV they thought of my company. Obviously I jumped at the opportunity - very excited!

Sadly I'm actually going to be out of town when the program airs and need to ask a friend to Tivo the program for me. I wonder if I can buy the TV clip and add it to the new and improved website?

Market Research

Big companies dump a ton of money into market research to see if their new product ideas will actually catch on in the consumer market. So what's a small company - with a very limited budget - to do? Up until now I've been mainly going by my gut but I'm beginning to wonder if that's necessarily the best course of action. As I look at the new products I'm thinking about introducing in 2008 I realize they fall into one of two catagories:
1. Products that are in line with current market trends or I've had a substational number of retailers ask for a similar type product
2. It sounds good to me

To try and offset some of the risk involved with those products that fall into catagory #2 I'm thinking about doing a little market research of my own. Of course, I'm trying to make it as cheap as possible. First of all I realized I'm going to tap into my business school's network of over-eager graduate students and have them do some of the market research for me. Business schools are actually a pretty under-utilized asset for small businesses and many business school classes require some sort of work with a real company. My bschool has a marketing research course that almost everyone takes and it requires student teams to work on a real-world problem for a real-world company. Best of all, they do the work for free. Granted, sometimes you get what you pay for but I figure it's worth a shot. Which reminds me I need to get in touch with the department head before the end of their fall quarter.

The second thing I'm thinking of doing to test the product is try to get a booth at one of the local farmer's markets and simply see how/if the product sells/what do consumers say about it, etc. I'm still not totally set on this idea and have a meeting scheduled with a friend who launched her company via one of the local farmer's markets to discuss the idea further. The benefits to this idea is that the farmer's markets in my area are very popular and get a ton of foot traffic so it could prove to be a really useful tool. The markets are also relatively cheap and there's always the chance that any revenue brought in could help offset my production space costs in the slower summer months. On the other hand, it means I have to be there week-in and week-out and if the idea totally flops then that could make for a very long summer!

Building the Operation Manual

Yesterday was my second to last day in my production space in 2007. I'm heading off for a belated honeymoon pretty soon so gave up my rental space for December since I won't really be around. Thankfully, my landlords have said they'd try to hold open my normal hours as I've been a very reliable renter. Hopefully it will hold true.

So I'm spending most of this week trying to build up the very last bit of inventory which will hopefully carry through the new year and next week when I'm home more often I'll refocus on trying to get all papers and "office" organization actually organized.

In fact, one of things I've been working on has been an Operations Manual. I started it because I realized that if I want to grow this business beyond simply little ol me, I need to have the company's procedures written down in a way that anyone could pick up the manual and continue the business without my guidance (or even without me!). As I've been putting it together I've been a little surprised by how much knowledge is saved in this head of mine. Nothing overwhelming, but - for example - the passwords to access various online programs that we use daily. Then of course there's the instructions for how to create our product, accept and process wholesale orders, invoice clients, pay commissions, etc. So there's a lot of information I'm trying to put down on paper.

My hope is to have a lot of the actual "accepting and processing orders" portion of it complete before I leave for my honeymoon as I'm leaving my mom in charge of the company (go mom!) while I'm away and want to make things as easy as possible for her. Then, if my grand plan works out, I'll finish up with a lot of the "production instructions" end of things in the first quarter prior to hopefully hiring on part-time help second quarter next year.