Reality Strikes

Blimey, received an e-mail today saying 'my goods are now arriving' please give us delivery details - which has caused me some confusion as my understanding was that they were going to ship the goods to their warehouse and I could then arrange to pick them up from there, so have had to e-mail back for clarification. I hope that the items will have been shipped in a form which means I can load and unload a van by hand - given I don't have access to a forklift truck and I'm pretty sure one wouldn't fit in our garage!

I am also now waiting nervously to see how much I will have to pay for shipping, customs etc. When I first set out on this venture I did receive a quote for the fully landed price but I am intrigued to see if what I actually end up being charged bears any resmblance to this quote (I have added a supplementary order to the shipment so I am expecting it to have changed a bit but not by a massive amount.

Now it is time to really focus on tidying up the JKToys website at http://www.jktoys.co.uk/ , deciding on the pricing strategy and defining the marketing strategy.

In respect to the final of these topics I have now signed up to both Google's Adwords and eBay's Adcommerce schemes - my plan is to use these schemes to drive customers to either the goods I am selling on eBay (my initial sales channel) or the JKToys website. I am intrigued to see how effective these schemes will be - they certainly seem to offer plenty of tracking statistics to show you number of click throughs etc.

I need to work on the definition of the campaigns in both of these tools ready for launch date - I am having to hold myself back from having a go with the tools now - as obviously the site isn't ready and I have nothing to sell (I'm just really keen to see how well these tools work).