Time to get up and running again

So only 5 weeks between posts this time!! I have a different excuse though - we have moved house and with it has come a larger storage space, unfortunately without any shelving etc included.

I have just received my shelving from BigDug, you may well have seen their advertising in the national press - the shelving was reasonably priced and delivered very quickly - unfortunately with snow on the ground I haven't been able to clear boxes out of the way in the garage to allow me to get the new shelving set up.

During our move and for the period between Christmas and New Year I had to suspend sales both on the JKToys website and on eBay as I could not guarantee that I would be able to deliver orders due to the stock in transit situation.

Things are now getting back to normal and so the online shop is up and running again and I am starting to place some items on eBay to get a bit of New Year turnover to cheer the bank manager up! I am hoping that all those people who bought items before Christmas who will have received discount vouchers will look to use them before they expire at the end of March. This will conicide with JKToys first donation cheque to Great Ormond Street Hospital, we have committed to donate 10% of our Net Profit to this cause for this year - later on in the year we will be asking for nominations frmo our customers for a new charity to support.

A busy couple of months

What can I say, looking back I can't believe it is 6 weeks since my last post.

Sales have taken off really well and I have been kept very busy each evening packing orders and dealing with enquiries. I can't believe I have actually sold out of my highest value item, the 100 piece wooden train set - unfortunately this means some lost sales in the run up to Christmas.

I have also been slightly stymied by Amazon's rules which mean that as a new seller without much of a track record they will not let me sell over the Christmas period - this was frustrating as I had just started to see a few orders coming through from this channel. Still come the new year I will look to continue to develop this channel so that I am in a position next year to sell through the peak Christmas period

I am now working out what to order for my second batch of goods from China - obviously some more of the 100 piece sets and then more on the accessories side of things. My reasoning is that people will get bought sets for Christmas and then hopefully in the new year they will want to expand these sets with additional track and accessories.

In terms of marketing I have mothballed my Google Adwords campaign - although it was driving people to the site these weren't being converted into sales and therefore until I can take action to rectify this (i.e. get more stock) there seems little point in continuing to incur spend - fortunately Google were kind enough to send me a voucher for £30 credit against Adword spend.

Sales via the JKToys.co.uk website are beginning to climb and I put this down to the discount cards which I send out with all of the orders I process via eBay. This still seems to be the most effective channel to market so although the fees are high it appears to be money well spent given the business it is driving.

I have actually stopped listing on eBay until the New Year now, we are moving premises and I don't want to run any risk of not being able to fulfill orders at this critical time - I would not forgive myself if I let somebody down on an important order for a Christmas present.

In the New Year JKToys will be back with avengence selling a wider range of stock and actively pushing to open up new markets.

Merry Christmas everyone and here's to a prosperous New Year!!

Another Sales Channel

Having seen a relatively slow ramp-up of orders via the www.JKToys.co.uk website and a reasonable amount of turnover via eBay I have decided to explore yet other routes to market. This weekend I have made some tentative moves onto the Amazon.co.uk market place which allows anyone to sell via Amazon.

Having read the fees involved I was initially put off -c. 17.5% of final sale value seemed very steep but on further thought and investigation Amazon is effectively providing the service of both eBay and Paypal in one - they provide the route to market and the payment processing - so when you compare the fee to the combined fees of eBay and Paypal it is actually reasonable and certainly allows me to keep my margins at the level I am happy with and still offer market beating prices.

My hope for the medium to long term is still to drive the majority of sales through my website but in the short term I am happy to use other ways to create turnover and at the same time increase awareness of my venture - with everything I sell via either eBay or Amazon I will be sending a money off coupon for the website sohopefully returning customers will go straight to the website to find the best prices available.

Tomorrow I need to produce the 2nd monthly newsletter for JKToys and send it out to the members who have signed up for our mailing list - I am also going to e-mail all those people who have purchased items via eBay to seek their permission to add them to the mailing list - I would really like to build up a good list of potential customers so that I can directly advertise to them at absolutely minimal cost compared to Adwords, eBay, Amazon.

Almost one month in...

So almost one month in and as you can see from the reduced frequency of posts on this site I have been kept busy fulfilling orders and working on the business. I now have the order processing better tuned - although obviously the recent and future threatened postal strikes are not ideal for a new business totally reliant on mail order sales.

I was encouraged by an article in the Telegraph last week in which John Lewis have predicted that wooden train sets will be one of their top ten sellers for this Christmas - part of me thinks that Christmas may be too soon for me to be really at my peak for fulfilling orders, and indeed my stock variety is still lower than I would like. What is encouraging that hopefully all of those train sets given at Christmas will want to be upgraded and that is where JKToys.co.uk comes in.

Happy customers

So into week one and there has been a steady trickle of orders which is encouraging and useful to test the process for fulfilling orders. So far, fingers crossed and touching wood, everything has gone smoothly although I have say the daily trip to the post office is getting to be a bit of a drag - I am going to have to find a better way of fulfilling orders (at the moment I am keen to get a proof of postage for each package so that I can sort out any problems if they occur).

The best part so far from this week is the first bit of unsolicited feedback from a customer - I received an e-mail from one of my first customers as below:

" Hi, I just wanted to say how happy I was with the items I ordered from you (junction pack and wooden straights), and also the delivery was really fast. I didn't expect to receive them until next week! I'll definitely pass the recommendation onto my friends, and return when I need new bits for my boys wooden track collection."

The best part of this e-mail is the promise of word of mouth advertising - as far as I am concerned this is by far the best type of press any business, especially a new one, can get. Here's hoping that this will lead to plenty of further orders especially in the run up to Christmas.

Customer Service, what Customer Service?? (Royal Mail - the people's rip off!)

So having made our first sale today was the day to deliver on that order. So having packaged the order up -and included a couple of bits of additional track as a bonus for being our first customer it was off to the post office to send it on its way.

To cut a long story short the postage was £9.58 - much more than I had expected and certainly more than the £4.50 postage charge - what has really annoyed me is that on getting home I checked my receipt and checked the post office website to check their tariffs and what I found wsa that my package had been weighed to 4.004kg and that packages up to 4kg cost £7.06 so that extra 4 grammes cost me £2.52 in postage (and all because I included some extra free track).

What really annoys me is that the lady at the Post Oiffuce counter didn't think it worth while mentioning that if I could take 4g off the package I would save £2.52, and I could easily have removed 4g just by cutting a small piece of cardboard off the outer box. Oh but she did have time to try and persuade me to take out a Post Office credit card - to me this typifies bad customer service - not really thinking about what the customer wants but being completely focussed on what you want to get out of the customer!

Grand Opening!!

Well Grand might be overstating it a bit, but the online shop is now officially open for business -and indeed the first order has been received, not without problems mind. The finely crafted website managed to break the link with Paypal and hence customers weren't able to pay for their orders.

So the first order processed through the JKToys website was actually done over the phone with an invoice to be sent with the package for payment by cheque - not quite the slick online e-commerce transaction I was planning on, but hey a sale is a sale!!