Search This Blog

Monday, May 9, 2016

May Is Off To A Good Start And A Month Of Fine Tuning

May has gotten off to a good start sales wise, with almost $800 in sales after the first week. On Sunday, I posted 12 orders that had come in since Friday afternoon, which is easily double the volume that we usually see over the weekend. I have started tracking repeat customers and repeat sales and from what I can see, roughly half of the sales are coming from repeat customers now and the other half is coming from new customers. I am seeing greater engagement by customers to our welcome e-mails that we send with each first sale, with about 20% of people responding now, which is double what we were seeing just a few months ago.

Steph's modern Canada continues to sell very well with the first 150 or so lots that have been listed, experiencing almost immediate sales. So much for the perception that nobody collects modern. I have actually had conversations with some of these buyers who have told me that they collect stamps from the year they were born!

This month is shaping up to be a month of organization:


  • E-Bay is slated to release its migration tool on the 11th, with a webinar to discuss its use next week. So we will have to make a final decision about whether we want to migrate listings over to E-bay.com (unlikely now) or switch to CDN$. 
  • Our free trial on Auctiva Commerce runs out in a week, so I've just upgraded to the starter plan, which is $14.95 per month to keep the store "warm" until we can start listing products there and experimenting with Google Adwords. 
  • I have after many enquiries with Bonanza started the process of manually assigning our store items to categories so that customers can find them in the store. Steph and I have concluded that inability to navigate the store might be one reason why there have been no sales yet. We have held off including business cards with sales orders, as they have our webstore address on them and until that store is user friendly, and easy to navigate, I have been reluctant to send customers there. That will hopefully be finished soon, though I see that if we choose to convert our e-bay listings rather than migrate them, that all this work will have to be done all over again. 
  • Because Steph is in lotting mode for the modern, and we only have the one laptop, I am using my time now to finish organizing all the pre-1952 material and getting it ready for scanning. I have as of now completely finished to 1930, and then from 1935-1942. So all I have left is 1930-1934 and 1942-1951 to go. Once that is done, I can scan and list it quickly. We are thinking that at this point, it will be time to purchase a second laptop, and possibly a second scanner. 
  • Fabio is almost finished organizing the worldwide material that one of our shareholders contributed for his shares. Once he is finished, we can get a final value tally and complete the issuance of the shares. The other legal work is finished now. 
In addition to all this, the blog readership continues to grow. We started our third stamp blog about general stamp collecting and have had an excellent response to the first two posts. 

So with that we remain optimistic and are looking forward to getting things resolved with respect to our e-bay lots. 

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations!Glad to see that you are following your life-long passion! Best of Luck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Phoenix!

    Nice to hear from you and thanks so much. How are things? Where did you wind up?

    Chris

    ReplyDelete