We're an online retail company – here's what we've learned
Posted in Decisions, Uncategorized on Oct 15th, 2008
Obtaining funding today is hard. If you’re burning cash, even if you have solid long-term profitability expectations, your business model may have to change.
This week it was Mercado being unable to get financing and then selling for $6.5M to omniture, which was probably a small fraction of the money sunk into the biz.
The lowest risk [...]
Posted in Decisions, customer service on Oct 22nd, 2007
On Variable Markup Michael Julson links to this excellent interview with Jeff Bezos on Harvard Business Review. Read it. Here’s what I learned.
“Every new employee, no matter how senior or junior, has to go spend time in our fulfillment centers within the first year of employment. Every two years they do two days of [...]
The most frustrating thing about having employees is that everyone wants to be recognized for their unique contribution and everyone wants to get everything everyone else has.
Using the tactic of explaining to people that while someone else got X perk that you didn’t, you got Y perk that they didn’t seems only to piss them [...]
Posted in Decisions, Uncategorized on Sep 15th, 2007
You know you want to!
A 2% increase in average selling cost probably means your profits will jump by 20%. 20%! And with that big a jump up in profit margin, think of all the new advertising that you would be able to implement while still getting your ROI.
It will be huge!
But the balding, slightly doughy [...]
Posted in Decisions, customer service on Mar 21st, 2007
You’re going to ask at the end of this, why emails didn’t decrease by way more than phone calls were. A large percentage of our emails are spam and those weren’t influenced at all (are they over?).
We changed the reply-to on our order-confirmation/receipt email to an auto-responder, which refers people to the customer support page [...]
Posted in Decisions, customer service on Feb 18th, 2007
Our customer service department was very short staffed on Friday so I took the opportunity and took one out-sick individual’s job for the day.
I gained understanding twice.
1. I did her job when we were starting up (I also packed boxes – the CEO job is easier). I needed some reminders of our procedures, etc. on [...]
Posted in Decisions, customer service on Feb 3rd, 2007
Forget gaming the rankings, we can discuss that another time.
How do we improve customer satisfaction?
Our area of lowest rated performance according to bizrate is customer service and by an impressive percentage.
Ensuring customers get the correct product, on-time, the first time is the best way to raise that rating. People are happy with customer service [...]
Posted in Decisions, Uncategorized on Dec 22nd, 2006
One of the competitors of our martial arts site has a live webcam of their warehouse on their website.
It allows us, us being the company their trying to take market share from, to know what products are selling for them, whether they are moving individual pieces or bulk sales and how their overall sales volume [...]
Posted in Decisions, Uncategorized, Warehouse Operations on Dec 21st, 2006
For the final few days before the end of the holiday rush I contributed by picking up the slack in a few areas where we weren’t keeping up with holiday rush.
I discovered some inefficiencies that are easy to address, and that’s my plan for next week.
I also learned that some employees developed their own procedures [...]