Our Website Is Now Online and Open For Business!!

When I originally started designing my website over a year ago, like all perfectionists, I thought I would wait until it was completely finished before unveiling it to the world. But as time has worn on it became clearer and clearer that if I didn't get it online and actually start signing up customers and building traffic, it was just never going to happen.

So last week, I made a push to get all of the essential functions on the site working properly, and to edit enough listings that had been imported from E-bay, to at least make a start.

So I started with the item categories. Previously, I had designed a basic one-direction tree structure for  product categories that listed all of the stamp issues from 1851 in order. This is better organization than one usually sees on most stamp websites. But I realized that it could still be made even better. I wanted a navigation system that would allow the customer to casually browse as many different categories as possible, without having to rely on search. So I spent the next few days adding catalogue numbers to the titles, creating additional layers of categories and adding entirely different classes of product, such as collections, year sets and complete sets. My goal was to ensure that no matter what a collector is interested in, they can find it easily. I am particularly proud of what I came up with. A collector can now browse:

1. By issue.
2. By condition and grade.
3. By price range.
4. By catalogue number - both Unitrade and Stanley Gibbons.
5. By lot type - single stamps, FDC's Covers, Cancels, complete sets, year sets and revenues.

They will be able to look through enough items to interest them, but not so many as to overwhelm them.

After completing the item categories, I verified that the other pages were all correctly set up and functioning, and then I re-directed my domain name to point to the website. We were now online and open for business.

Then I began setting up the Google product feeds, and the Adwords account. Of course there have been some hiccups, as there always are with these kinds of changes. But I haven't worried about E-bay now for well over a week. I still had some sales there this past week, but I am done with getting angry at them or worrying about what they are going to do next. It has been wonderful not having to care about them or think about them.

At present, there are only a modest number of stamps listed, but over the next 8-10 weeks, I will be transferring some 6,000 stamps from my E-bay store to the website. So lots of new items will be appearing continuously. After this is done, I will continue listing items until all my inventory is listed, which I expect will be about 2 years. When it is finished, this will be one of the largest, if not the largest online retail source of Canadian stamps in the world. I have also considered the possibility of expanding beyond Canada as well eventually. But for the moment, my focus will have to be on Canada.

I would encourage you to take a look at the site to get a feel for it. These sites are a lot of work to set up, but it is nothing that most people with a computer and the ability to follow instructions can't handle. It just takes a lot of patience.

The Website URL is www.brixtonchrome.com, and can be accessed by clicking the following link:

www.brixtonchrome.com

Also, customers that sign up for a customer account through the login screen on the site, and do so before July 31, 2018 will become a VIP customer automatically. VIP customers benefit from enhanced order discounts, which never expire and are as follows:

Orders under$10 USD: 5%.

Orders between $10-$20 USD: 10%.

Orders between $20-$50 USD: 15%.

Orders between $50-$100 USD: 20%.

Orders over $100 USD: 25%.

I believe this is an excellent enticement to a prospective customer. I am hopeful, and am looking forward to building this site and making it a success. 

I Have Decided to Take Decisive Action Against E-bay For It's Anti-Competitive Business Practices

So, this week I have decided that the time has finally come to take action against E-bay, not just for myself, but for other sellers, and for buyers who will eventually see their privacy and consumer choices eroded by this company's complete disregard for the rights of indivduals.

I am currently researching the competition law in Canada, with the full intent of launching a complaint with the Monopolistic Practices Directorate. I have started another blog urging buyers and sellers alike to come forward with evidence of these practices. You can read my first post here:

https://escapingebay.blogspot.ca/2018/04/the-reason-for-writing-this-blog-to.html

I am also going to report E-bay Canada to the Canada Revenue Agency for their failure to correctly handle the HST they are charging sellers. They are charging Canadian sellers HST on the gross amount of their seller fees before any seller discounts. Then they give the seller a discount is 10% of the pre-tax fee amount. This is incorrect, as HST is supposed to be applied to the final amount of an invoice. Therefore E-bay is actually only giving top rated sellers between 9.5% and 8.5% discount on their fees, depending on which province they live in. At best, if they are actually sending all this money to CRA, they are merely not in compliance with the provisions of the Excise Tax Act. At worst, if they are pocketing the difference between the HST they collect and the HST they are supposed to remit, they are engaged in tax fraud. I have pointed this out to 5 different customer service agents over the last 6 months, in a very friendly manner, and they have consistently refused to address it.

Oh well, if they won't listen to me, maybe they will listen to CRA.

The Evacuation From E-Bay Commences and A Hard Won Sales Result for March

Well, E-bay must have caught on to my plans, because this March was undoubtedly the most difficult and anxiety ridden month I have had for a long time. Almost overnight, my sales on E-bay dropped to a trickle, even though I was continuing to list new material and nothing had changed in my customer base. I decided to test a few of my theories about E-bay hiding my listings again, just to make sure that I was not paranoid.

What I did was I went to incognito mode in Chrome and went to E-bay from there and searched for my items without logging in. While I did not see any evidence at that moment of my listings being hidden, I did notice that the appearance of my listings was different that what I was seeing when I am logged into E-bay. For one thing, when I was not logged in, I could not see my user name or feedback rating on any of my listings. It would show that I was a top rated seller, but other than that, if you were a buyer searching on E-bay, you wouldn't know one seller's listings from another until you click on it. That was a new thing that just came into effect, as I don't recall seeing it before. That might explain why a very large chunk of my E-bay sales for March came from new customers.

It was nerve wracking to see the magnitude of the slowdown. It was very noticeable, and felt almost as if the powers that be at E-bay had flipped a switch and just stopped showing my listings. Fortunately, I had enough offline sales from my established customers that we still did just over $4,500 in sales - not as good as last March, when we sold the Canada #2, but as good otherwise.

This was a remarkable month in other ways. Most importantly, it was the month when I began to execute my plan in earnest, to finally get out from under E-bay's death grip once and for all. It started with me designing and printing a brochure for all my customers, which clearly explained the benefits of shopping on my new website, as opposed to E-bay. I coupled that with a letter that I carefully crafted, which would go out to all my customers, explaining my decision to leave E-bay, and to explain the benefits of the new website. Here is a copy of it:

I am pretty proud of this. It took me several afternoons of writing, and rewriting to come up with copy that I was happy with. But in the end, I was extremely pleased with the result. Vistaprint had a 50% off sale that week, so when I was done, I was able to print 1,000 of these, and 1,000 new business cards for less than $400.

I realized though that as good as the brochure looked, I needed a way to gauge how many of my customers are actually going to come to my website, or at least express the intention of doing so. But how could I entice them to actually reach out and call, or send an e-mail? I thought about it long and hard, and finally it hit me: I need to offer them a real incentive. I thought about the standard 10% off your first order that a lot of places give. Then I thought, nah, this is not enough of an incentive to convince people to act - no I need something more compelling. Why not give them most of the savings that would come from not paying final value fees to E-bay? Beat E-bay at their own game. So I decided to offer any customer who registers with me before July 31, 2018, an extra 5% discount on any order they place FOREVER.

I received the completed brochures in the middle of March and began mailing them out in stages the following week. So far the response has not been high, but it has not been bad for a direct mail campaign. Response rates for all forms of marketing are usually low anyway, and it is still early yet. I have only mailed about 1/4 of all the brochures, and I still have four months to get the rest out, and additional letters to customers reminding them of the extra discount, and the time limit for claiming it. This way, if the response rate is really poor, or there are other indicators that leaving e-bay will not be feasible, I can always abort the decision. But, I do not think that is likely, as a lot of my customers are now repeat buyers, and even through a large number of them do not engage me, they keep coming back. Not only that, but a larger and larger number of my customers are becoming repeat buyers, as compared to before.

Toward the end of the month, I turned my attention to two other pursuits. The first was getting material organized to sell on consignment to raise cash flow for the tight months ahead. I fully expect my sales on E-bay to continue dropping over the next few months, so I need to have an alternate source of cash flow to tide us over until the B&B gets busy, which it will in the next few months. So, I began gathering together the non-Canadian material that I have on hand, that I know I will likely never get around to listing in my store, and I began to organize it for sale. I have engaged three different auctioneers to handle the material. This allows me to establish three separate cash flow streams, and it allows me to match the quality of the material to the auctioneer who will get the best results for us.

The second pursuit was to start seriously working on the website and getting it ready to go live. I already had some 7,000 listings in the inventory module from before, but now I went and imported all the listings that I had produced since the last import into the website, and began editing these listings, to get them complete, so that the website features would work properly. This turned out to be way more work than I thought. So, after a full 18 hour day of doing these edits, I finally came to the conclusion that I would need to hire some help.

This problem kept me awake for several nights as I realized that the work that needed to be done was going to take at least 6 weeks of someone's time, and that there was no way I was going to be able to afford to hire anybody local to help me. This conclusion did not sink in right away, mind you. I spent many hours looking at every government placement incentive and workforce expansion program initiative available to small businesses, and there was really nothing suitable for what I am trying to do, which is a large volume of very boring, tedious and relatively low level work done over the next few months.

So, finally, after much agonizing, I remembered the site Fiverr, where you can hire foreign based freelancers to do graphic design, programming, writing, web design and other work. Usually the rates are much more reasonable for the work involved. So, I went on there and posted a job description and had no fewer than 9 responses. I requested quotes, evaluated them and chose one of them to assist me with the website edits.

I also began sharing my blog content this month with the various stamp groups on Facebook, and have seen my blog traffic more than triple, compared to what I was getting before. Each new post that I put out there creates more awareness of my brand, and I am confident that it will eventually lead to the blog becoming a source of new customers. I have already had a few this month, and I also had my first customer engage me to provide an opinion about a stamp. It was a fellow living in the Netherlands, and he sent me a Lagos stamp, seeking my opinion on it, after reading an article in my Nigerian stamp blog.

So, I am scared to death, but at the same time I am hopeful and optimistic for the future. One of the most notable things I have experienced since starting to execute this decision is that I am more relaxed, despite the stress. The reason is that I am back in control, and I am following my own path, and not giving some faceless, unaccountable public company complete control over my future.

Onward and forward!