Without a doubt the most popular post I’ve written was last years post about chargebacks. Like most retailers, we feel pretty helpless when it comes to chargebacks, and I think that resonates with people. Since the system at it’s core is very broken, retailers don’t have a whole lot of options. Any system you put [...]
Archive for the ‘Decision Making’ Category
Inventory – the Death of e-Commerce Companies, Large and Small
A New Company Let’s take, for example, a brand new company that’s getting into the blue widget business. For fun, let’s call the owner Carlos. Widgets cost $50, and retail for $100. For simplicity, we’ll assume that Carlos has to pay in cash up front (which is somewhat common when you just start out), that [...]
How to Figure Out What to Automate
I think everyone who owns a web business wants to do as little work as possible to make as much money as possible. That’s pretty obvious right. Given that we’ve built our cart from scratch, we have the ability to automate just about anything that can be automated. So why don’t we? I get that [...]
No Longer Shipping Internationally
Effective yesterday we are no longer shipping packages internationally. This also includes US Territory addresses and APO addresses. Much like closing down Tastefully Driven, there were a lot of reasons behind our decision, but it can all pretty much be summed up by saying that it was too much work for how small of a [...]
Decision Making and the Competition
One more thought on us shutting down Tastefully Driven. I find it interesting to ponder how little we factor our competition into making decisions like this. Clearly shutting down our Amazon store will help our detailing competitors. They will sell more products and probably will sell more at a higher margin since there’s one less [...]
Goodbye Tastefully Driven, So Long Amazon
In an effort to become more efficient, more profitable, and more flexible, we’ve decided to close Tastefully Driven and stop selling our products on Amazon. Effective March 1 the e-commerce store will be closed down and we will sell any remaining inventory (non-detailing of course) on Amazon. We’re running a 30% off sale to try [...]
The Difference Between School, Work, and Entrepreneurship
Effort. You need effort to succeed a traditional corporate environment. You need it to succeed in academia. You need it to succeed when you start a business. But when it comes to running a company, effort doesn’t guarantee that you succeed like it does in the other two. When you’re in school, your grades are [...]
The Manager – Programmer Disconnect
Nethy left an interesting comment the other day in regards to a potential new feature I mentioned: I’m always impressed with how your processes [flow]. Having a system like this that works properly needs: a) the programming doing the work and b) someone to plan the process. That’s something that’s very hard to do on [...]
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 3 of 3
Now that I’ve outlined the majority of the improvements on Part 1 and Part 2, I want to take a step back and quickly talk about why I think this was a successful project. The Process & The Time Frame We didn’t really plan it this way, but from the time we launched the previous [...]
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 2 of 3
In Part 1 I took a look at some of the more obvious improvements on the major pages of the site. I think some of the subtleties are even more interesting. Things that might go unrecognized at first, but make a small positive impact on your business. Banner System One time during one of our [...]
