Being a pianist and enjoying playing in front of people, you would be surprised to find out that I am an introvert. I have been in plays, given speeches and am the president of my own company, yet I hate attending events where I am in a crowd. When I attend a party or other event, I stand on the periphery of the venue, close to an exit. I enjoy one on one conversations with someone at the event, but not if I have to yell over the crowd. I love to learn about what others are doing, if it interests me, but I can’t stand mindless chit-chat. I have no need to impress others or compare my life to your life. I desire a meaningful conversation where I can learn more about you and form a bond based on mutual interests.
I have found that I enjoy observing others when in a crowd, seeing how they interact or simply enjoying watching people. If we are throwing a party, I would rather serve others and make sure everyone is having a good time. I want to stay busy. I’ll be glad to play the piano and provide live music, but don’t force me to mingle. If I want to have a meaningful conversation with someone, I will invite them over for lunch or dinner where I can focus on just them. Trying to do this in a crowd is simply frustrating in my opinion.
If you want to start an online store, you better be prepared to be different than everyone else, that is unless your product is your own creation that nobody else has. It’s just way too easy for everyone else to sell the exact same thing that you are selling through multiple platforms. Gone are the days when you can just throw something up on the web and expect it to sell. There are way too many players in the market. I’m not saying you wont sell some of your products, but you will work way too hard if you do not have some sort of niche or something that gives your site value that other online competitors do not have.
It used to be that taking your store online when the web was new was very profitable, but now everyone has an online presence of some sort. Also, social media is a very big part of most peoples lives and to keep your social media sites relevant is very important. Some people are even using social media sites to sell their products. Times have changed how people buy online. Review sites are also very important to most buyers as they probably have not heard about your company and need to feel comfortable that the products that you sell and the experience is going to be a smooth one.
I used to be in the original group of online companies that simply threw thousands of items on my online store and for many years we were very successful and had 20% growth rates per year, but all of this has changed. With Amazon and Ebay, people are using multiple platforms to sell, not just their online store. Think of Starbucks. Why do they have so many locations? They want the ability to be able to sell you a cup of joe very easy and convenient, not just one location every 20 miles. The same is true for online stores. You can’t just sell it at one location. You don’t know who is going to click on your page vs. another platform such as Ebay, Walmart or Amazon.
Being different isn’t just the only thing. You will need to have all of your social media accounts up to date with helpful information that people can actually use, not just “Hey buy this because it’s on sale.” Relevancy is huge if you are going to use the web. The search engines algorithms will rank your site based upon relevancy and how people are searching. If you don’t take this into account, your site will be buried on page 3.
I would like to say that owning an online store is easy, but it just isn’t anymore. You have to be up to date on how people are buying as well as what you can do to separate yourself from the pack. You do not want to be in the Red Ocean where everyone is fighting for that same dollar. You want to be in the Blue Ocean of low competition. So, make a decision today to BE DIFFERENT!
What can stress and anxiety cause? It can cause much more than you think. Our unconscious never sleeps. It runs tapes in the background when we are not even aware of it. Stress over work, money, family or a relationship can cause all kinds of physical damage to our bodies. I should know, stress over money and work caused muscles in my body to start to twitch. This started happening in the middle of the night after getting up to do what 60 year old men have to do in the middle of the night. After getting back in bed, my calves would start to twitch like crazy keeping me up. This was enough to cause me to visit my doctor who said I needed to see a neurologist to make sure I didn’t have ALS. Wonderful! Now that this sensitive doctor put the disease ALS in my head, I had something new to worry about. I couldn’t get into see a neurologist for 2 months. Now, the twitching started happening all over my body. This turned into insomnia. I was only sleeping 3-4 hours per night. By the time I was able to visit my neurologist, I was a nervous wreck. The neurologist did a basic screening and told me, you don’t have ALS, you have Benign Fasciculation Syndrome which means, your muscles twitch for some unknown neurologic reason, most commonly brought on by stress. He said to go see my primary care physician. By the way, I have a new PCP. The old one retired and his bedside manner stunk anyway.
All of this now turned into anxiety and panic attacks of which I have never had. My old doctor prescribed Ativan to help me sleep and for the panic attacks during the day, but being on this is not a long term solution, believe me. My new doctor has me on Cymbalta, a SNRI. It takes about 6 weeks for this medicine to kick in, but it is finally working, allowing me to feel like a normal person. No, the twitching has not stopped, it has slowed down though. I’m hoping that it all goes away eventually as it is really annoying and causes my muscles to cramp after exercising.
This is what can happen with stress. Some people get high blood pressure, heart issues or headaches. If we ignore stress, we may think that it’s no big deal, but those tapes in the background keep playing and these tapes cause synapses in our brain to change. Those changes can cause all kinds of physical issues. Don’t ignore or try to push the stress under the rug. You have to find a way to remove the cause of the stress in your life or find some way to deal with it in a healthy manner.
The Internet has made life easier in many ways. Buying online, especially if you live miles from merchants allows your Walden experience to exist; for the rest of us, we text instead of call, we like your Instagram pic or Facebook post instead of meeting for coffee or lunch to catch up on how we are doing, looking into your friends eyes to see how their soul is. We buy a part online to fix our car, then watch a YouTube video to figure out how to install it. These are great things and methods, but only to fill in the gap, not a replacement for asking a neighbor or small independent auto parts store for advice on how to fix your widget. As a nation, we have become more isolated. We now lean more to giving a thumbs up to our relatives new baby instead of calling to congratulate them. How about when we write a nasty review about our latest experience at the local restaurant, never to return instead of politely talking to the manager about our experience so that they can explain that their regular chef was out due to a death in the family, missing the opportunity to express our sadness for their loss.
I am just as guilty in many of these “sins of Internet indifference “, yet just as Scrooge intonated, “I will be a different man. I will keep Christmas in my heart every day of the year”. At my business, we used to use Google Hangouts. I turned it off. I want our small team to talk to one another, not text via Hangouts. We need to have real relationships. Stop what you are doing and TALK TO ME. If we don’t talk, then we don’t have a real relationship. We have some pseudo form of awareness of each other’s existence.
I know you can buy stuff online cheaper, believe me, I own an online business, but it was supposed to be an extension of my local face to face business, not a replacement for it. What we offer our walk in customers is expertise, how to install your widget or let us fix your widget and explain why it broke and what to do in the future. While you are here, talk to me about your kids, your struggles with whatever you feel comfortable talking about and I will listen. Maybe God will whisper a few words of wisdom in my ear that I can share with you. Maybe we will share a joke and experience the joy of laughter. I just know that both of us will be richer for having taken the time to talk face to face and rebuilding that community that is quickly evaporating in our world.
It’s been 13 years since opening my eCommerce store. Boy, have I learned a lot. I would love to say that I have perfected my store, that the search engines love me and I am making millions. My store is far better than what it was last year and scads better than 5 or 10 years ago, but it is by no means perfect. We sell over 400,000 products; yes that’s right, 400,000 products. Manipulating all of that data is not easy.
I have told others that being in eCommerce is similar to surfing. Once you learn to surf, you look for that secret spot. This is a place where you can ride the waves, not being cut off by some hot shot, but enjoy nice long rides in peace and quiet. I had that secret spot for about 3 years. Sales were increasing at 20% per year, which for my industry was pretty good. I wasn’t setting any records, but when you hit over $3 million in sales per year, it should allow you to start investing in key players and development that will take you to another secret spot. What I did not foresee was our market changing. I know that Google changes their algorithm as frequently as the wind changes, but I did not realize that people were slowly finding my secret spot and beginning to ride the same wave I was riding. Somehow, as I was so busy running my business, I didn’t see them a few feet from me paddling their board into the surf. They were invisible to me or I passed them off as a kid on a rubber raft. What I didn’t realize was that they were learning to surf as well. They were getting their legs conditioned to take the changes of each wave so that they would be able to graduate to a surfboard.
Ok, enough surfing analogies. I want to help you. I want to warn you about pitfalls that you will surely be tempted to fall for. I think that most of us open an online store, seeing it as an opportunity to increase our market share. Yes, this will happen, but there are costs involved that you simply do not have as a brick and mortar store. I have always retained a web developer to edit, change or create new features that I simply don’t have a clue how to do. Now, I have several developers working for me, some full time, others part time. I also have to have web content people who can add products to my site, using ad copy that is creative as well as SEO friendly. Let’s not forget data entry personnel who will add thousands of pages and products that your web content person doesn’t have time to do. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to WHY I decided to go on-line in the first place. Where I live, it can be wet and rainy, sometimes for months. I don’t mean raining every day, but pretty moist. My customers are home builders. They build new homes. When it is raining, they can’t pour concrete footings. Without concrete footings, houses don’t get built. Without them using their tools, they don’t need new ones nor do they even need to get them repaired. It rained off and on for months, thus my local sales slowed to a trickle of what they used to be. I had to think of something that would get the ball rolling again. I wish I could say that I had thought of it first, but a friend who was in the pool building business had sold his pool business after starting an online pool equipment business. He suggested that I give on-line sales a try with my product line. I decided to give it a go. I started with one part that someone had called me about from halfway across the country. I had a one page info site, but no products. I decided to offer that one part that they had called about and that’s how it all began. Back then, I had to create each product page one at a time. This was slow and when I had to hire someone to help, expensive as well. Now, we have over 400,000 products. Sounds like a success story doesn’t it. Well, it has been quite a ride, but now a cargo ship has found our surfing spot. That ship is called the MSS Amazon. This ship has disturbed the natural ebb and flow of the waves at our beach. If you intend on offering a product online that Amazon can also sell, then prepare to watch your margins slip. The ideal online store will have products that are not sold by these behemoths. They will be sold ONLY to a select few companies or better yet, custom made creations that have not been mass produced……..yet. Remember the surfing analogy. Enjoy your spot for as long as you can and plan on picking up your surfboard every couple of years to find a new spot to surf, because your area, if successful WILL be found out and reproduced, maybe not at the quality of your own product, but reproduced and sold online. You MUST Amazon proof your business. You must also make it Ebay proof, Wal-Mart proof and any big company proof or they will find your spot and come in and steal your margins. Don’t just offer stuff to sell. You must separate your business from everyone else’s business. Mass offerings of stuff just doesn’t cut it any more. There are too many people out there just throwing popular items up on the web, waiting for a sale; sort of like fishing. They know that they will snag someone, but is that the kind of business you want?
To enjoy your online business, I would not start with What will make me rich, because money is a short lived bit of enjoyment. You need to do what you love and then utilize the online community to publicize your services or products. Don’t make your online store an end in itself. You will be fighting every person that has access to your products and a computer. If you do sell online, then your product has to be a little different than everyone else’s or you need to offer something that the other guys don’t offer. Do NOT try and just be the lowest price, because it will be a quick losing battle to the bottom as you and your competitor try and beat the other guys price until your margin becomes stupid and you find you and your staff eating Ramen for every meal. The big boys have much deeper pockets and buying power than you ever will, so don’t go there.
My other bit of advice is to keep your inventory offering only as large as you need to. Managing 10’s of thousands of products from 30 or more different vendors is a HUGE undertaking data-wise. Find your niche and become an expert at that niche. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Let Wal-Mart take on that headache. The search engines love rich content. That means having more information, how to articles, video and publications about your products than anyone else. You can’t do that effectively for 50,000 products, but you can do it for 100 or more products.
Let your online business compliment what you do, don’t let it be an end in itself. If you sell widgets, then know more about widgets than anyone else. Become an expert on widgets. You and your company should own the widget world! That is what you do. Your online presence is simply an extension of your knowledge. It’s so easy to get focused on your online store that you forget what you do. Your online store is one avenue by which you connect with your customers. Some people ONLY have an online store and that is fine, but actually talking to your customers, even if it is only on the phone to help them with their purchase decision is valuable. We are not made up of 0’s and 1’s. We are analog beings. We use all of these 0’s and 1’s to serve us, not the other way around. An online store can be great, but make it a place where customers can learn about your products as well as you and your team. Let it be a way to connect to more people than just in your town as well as help others with your products, knowledge and service. Don’t just sell stuff.
We are spiritual beings, not just clumps of carbon. We are eternal beings, this being said, what you cannot see, the spirit, is more real than anything made of carbon. Have you ever stared at someone that had their back turned to you, only to find that they turn around to look at you because something in them told them that you were staring at them? I have had this happen countless times. Somehow the spirit of that person knew that someone was looking at them. I’m not saying that what we make and do on earth doesn’t matter, it does. I’m just saying that there is a spiritual side to us that we should not ignore, that we should spend more time spending time in meditation, prayer and letting our spirits be refreshed.
It’s easy to get in the shopping and preparation rush for Christmas. I know, I am guilty of this. This year, I am going to be mindful to celebrate the true meaning of the season. Work can wait, my home to do list can wait. These words penned below sum it up pretty much.
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
― Scrooge’s nephew Fred, from A Christmas Carol
I don’t know about you, but I am seeing a surge of what is now called artisan businesses. There is a surge of people in their late 20’s and 30’s taking a stab at what were at one time, businesses found in every town. Bakers, butchers, jewelers, carpenters, brewers, hands on business, literally “hands on.” The definition of an artisan is: a person or company that makes a high-quality or distinctive product in small quantities, usually by hand or using traditional methods: our favorite local food artisans. 3. pertaining to an artisan or the product of an artisan; artisanal: artisan beer.
With everything seeming to go digital, there is a resurgence of people wanting to put their hands to something other than a keyboard. They want to see the actual results of something that they made with their own two hands. It’s a sense of satisfaction that one gets from making something, be it an awesome wooden bowl or a perfectly pulled shot of espresso. Spending time with others who also share these interests creates community and the ability to collaborate as well.
Many of the skilled trades are suffering from a lack of people entering them. With the baby boomers hitting retirement age, there just aren’t enough people entering the trades to replace them. This will drive up prices for those that stay in their business, but it also opens up opportunities for the younger generation to enter the field and earn a very nice living.
I see this also affecting brick and mortar stores in the not too distant future. With many analysts predicting the death of the brick and mortar store, I see it as only temporary. When you purchase something online, it’s only for convenience. If you can’t find it locally and the buying decision is relatively easy, I can see people opting for an on-line purchase, but for other things like clothing, furniture, cars and local produce, why would you want to buy that on-line? I don’t know about you, but I want to feel the fabric, sit on the couch, test drive the car and see the produce that I am about to eat that evening. I also want the salesperson to tell me about what I am thinking about buying. Ideally, I want to form a relationship with that business owner so that when I need more clothing or food, I can talk to that person to help me in my buying decision. Sitting behind a computer can be very isolating and a chat box that pops up does not suffice as someone coming up to me in a store asking if they can truly help me. The difference I see in the brick and mortar store is a move away from the big corporate giants to more independent, local shops, where you know that your business is putting groceries on the table of someone that you have come to know; hence the relationship.
Many times, we get the feeling that a trend will continue and last forever, yet history shows us that there is a cycle to trends; they never last forever. I’m not saying that on-line purchasing and digital jobs will end. They are here to stay. I’m simply saying that people have experienced the isolation that these jobs can cause and desire meaningful relationships and seeing something at the end of the day that their own two hands made for others. There is room for both. We need both.
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