Neville's Financial Blog

Over at House Of Rave it's been busy because of the Christmas holiday shopping season. Owning a store that sells light-up and relatively unique items, I'm always tickled by the surprise hit products that seem to sell like crazy during the holidays.

Every year I see odd products that previously didn't really sell, then all of a sudden see huge spikes in demand. Often it's products that are unexpected hits, the manufacturer runs out of stock, so it goes out of stock at most stores, so people flock to whatever store they can get it at.

By far, the most demanded item I saw on HoR this year was this Lava Plasma Lamp:

It's basically a Lava Lamp that has one of those electricity-looking plasma balls inside. It's a new product and actually looks like a slick little room decoration...which makes it prime gift-giving material.

Unfortunately the Lava company didn't anticipate such a high demand for it (likely because this tight economy doesn't permit companies to easily extend huge lines of credit for large manufacturing runs). Or maybe there was a fire at the warehouse and they all got burned up. Who the hell knows. The end result was EVERY store was sold out.

I opened my orders one day and found 20+ orders for JUST this item, all from new customers...it was a little odd. For a while I could send them out, but of course my supply dried up also. I of course immediately cancelled and refunded all the orders since I couldn't fulfill them....but kept the item up for a while in order to grab new customer info (so I can send them my email newsletter later). Kind of sneaky actually....

I eventually put the "out of stock" status on the item because so many people kept ordering it and the customer service required for canceling and refunding got a little tedious....plus it pisses people off when they order something so close to Christmas then get an email their order has been cancelled.

Another funny runaway product line this year was BACON stuff. Yes, bacon. These are some of the items that recently came out and started selling REALLY well this holiday season:

Bacon Bandages:
There's a whole lineup of these novelty bandages, and by far the bacon strips sell the best.

Bacon Gumballs:
Why bacon flavored gumballs sell so well is beyond my understanding.

Bacon Toothpicks:
I'm not even kidding...

Who would've thought the American public has such a fascination with BACON products?? Like the popular Lava Plasma Lamp a lot of these bacon-related products sold out quickly too.

Another weird item that really took off and I had to keep canceling orders for was this Gravy Fountain Gag Gift Box:

It's a fake gift box you put a real gift inside to fool your unsuspecting subject. I presume this gag box is great for White Elephant gift exchanges, hence the popularity. What's weird is there are other gift boxes like this, but by an exceedingly large margin the gravy fountain box was the most popular. Baffling and kind of hilarious.

Most of these small items don't have a huge margin, so even if you get lots of orders per day for them it's not a huge amount of profit. However you gain new customers, some of them buy a lot of other stuff, and it's always fun to see the weird products that hit a nerve with the buying public!

Labels: business, house of rave

That's right, I'm famous. Uber famous!

A few months ago someone from a German publishing company contacted my business House Of Rave to possibly buy some of the wallpapers featured on the site. They wanted to use one of the pictures on the cover of an upcoming book about the techno club scene in the 1990's till present (or something like that)...

They offered to pay me a nominal fee for the rights, but I declined (in order to keep the full rights) and requested a copy of the book plus photo credit if it was published using pictures I own. I figured since I own a rave company, I should probably help support the rave community in whatever way I can...and it seemed like it would be decent publicity too.

So I provided them the original high-res files to a few of the pictures they requested, and didn't really expect anything to happen.

Just recently I got a package from Germany with two copies of the book, and they happened to use a picture taken by me, of me demonstrating a product! While you can't clearly see my face, you can see the silhouette of my face (so excuse the opening line...my SILHOUETTE is Uber famous)!

Front Cover:

Back cover:

Side-by-side:

That white line divide near the bottom quarter of the picture is actually a giant dry-erase board in my upstairs living room.

Photo credit on inside jacket:

Here's the German Amazon link to the book.

So a picture of my hands are on the front cover of a book. This reminds me of when The New York Times did a full photo shoot with me, then just used a picture of my nose...but they used a full picture of Jim!

Ok, I finally get what everyone's trying to tell me:
I'm too good looking to be printed.

Labels: house of rave, Personal

Hey...can you please take 5 seconds to click the image below and click "Vote for Me" on the page?

It literally takes 5 seconds or less, doesn't require entering a lick of information, and would make me very happy!

I entered HouseOfRave in a competition and want to see if NevBlog visitors can sway the vote higher!

Very much appreciated,
-Neville

P.S. If you'd like to find out more about how House of Rave works you can see the whole series here.

Labels: house of rave

I though it'd be interesting to take a look at all the Google Analytics since I installed them on House of Rave somewhere around the beginning of 2006. I'll only use Google Analytics because they are probably far more accurate than my server's reports (which I believe counts viewing an image as a full unique visit which may distort the number of TRUE visitors to the site):


2006:
I had to put this report on a weekly view rather than daily so the rest of the years analytics even show. There was an "event" that caused hits to go from a few hundred per day to about 50,000 one day then 25,000 the next day. That was great, but it really screws up viewing the yearly analytics.

HoR has always been a very "sticky" website, and 5.41 pages per visitor is a pretty good stat I'd say.

2007:
Some funny activity in the beginning of the year was most likely attributed to this very blog. Whenever I talk about the business in a way that interests people, I can see little spikes in traffic. I don't particularly care because those visitors from my blog rarely buy anything from HoR...so it doesn't make me any money. In fact simply talking openly about this business has caused a slew of people to copy. Why on EARTH anyone would want to copy a business model I did back in high school is beyond me... If I could do it over again I would've preferably picked a much larger niche.

Judging from this chart, HoR was pretty stagnant or even declining during 2007.

2008:
I ended up doing all sorts of improvements to HoR in 2008 in my own sporadic way. I suppose it helped as traffic went up. Traffic may also have something to do with this blog. Once again, traffic doesn't necessarily = income. Although I'm sure it doesn't hurt.

2009 (Up till Sept. 1, 2009):
Here is a snapshot of 2009 thus far. These stats don't account for 4 busy months of the year, so I'm not sure how trusting I am of them yet. Looking at the stats I notice the Avg. time on site is lower than it was 3 years ago. I suspect 3 years ago people had slower computers and less web savvy. Or maybe the site just sucks and people aren't staying as long. Who knows.

Site traffic seems to be consistently growing a small bit. Based off my estimates (with information not presented here) it should overall grow to a new high.

From the information presented I need 102,689 more visits this year to equal the traffic of the heavily inflated 2006 sample. Based on the 2008 sample, a yearly avg. for monthly traffic would be 27,303 uniques per month. Multiply that by the extra 4 months in the year and that comes to 109,214 which would put 2009 as the highest traffic year. That 27K average is also probably a low average, since generally the 4th quarter is a higher traffic time for almost every business in the United States.

In addition HoR has an ancillary rave blog that gets 200+ visits per day...those are not included here.


Effects of recession:
I always get asked if this recession has had any effect. Well...yea.
Anytime you get people making less money, lots of money fear etc. etc. people will buy less...especially stuff in the party/retail sector. Also, with lots of big corporations in extreme money-saving mode, most of the really large orders I would get from them have disappeared along with those fat-ass budgets.

This business also sells stuff people don't really need. We actually have managed to grow believe it or not, but not by the 4X factor we were hoping for late last year. What hurts the most is the indirect effect the recession has taken. HoR sells "hard to find light up stuff"...and "hard to find" roughly equates to "not manufactured that often." It takes LOTS of money, time and resources to manufacture/store/ship/distribute a single product, and lots of the cool products we once used to carry have gone bye-bye (much to my chagrin). If anything, this has been the single most destructive part of the recession to the business.

Well, recession or not, cheers to a decent 2009! *clink*

Labels: business, eCommerce, house of rave

I read Adam's post about a large chargeback a while ago and could completely relate to the pure helplessness felt when dealing with these.

A chargeback is when someone files a claim to get their money back from you. This is a great consumer protection device, but it can be abused.

It's almost obscenely rare that the merchant will ever win one of these disputes. I've tried many times to no avail. I fully understand that this is simply a cost of doing business, but I'd still like to send a message:

As you know I own a business called House Of Rave and over the years we've had to deal with chargebacks. Since customer service is good and everyone gets handled properly, legitimate chargebacks are quite rare. However the occasional piece of fraud slips through the system, and it really sucks losing even $1.00 to these people.

I'm not in position to change how this entire system works, but I'd like to do something to help. Whenever I see a suspicious order, I'll basically just Google the name, address, email etc. to see if I can find results. Based on this I can often make a judgement to send the order or not.

Inspired by Adam's post, in the archives of the House of Rave Blog I've created the Chargeback and Fraud Warning Page:

We don't get many chargebacks, but I listed two of them we've recieved in the last five months. I'll list more if they come along.

This way if any other merchant Google's some of this information, it will give them a hint that this person/address has done this before. They can make their own judgement call from there.

If you own a store or have the resources to make one of these pages, I'd suggest you do. I'm not sure if it's worth it, but if this manages to stop even one jackass from ripping off someone else's store, I'd be happy.

Labels: business, house of rave

Flashback to January 2007 I decided to try not having any yearly goals. Well that didn't go well as planned (or...unplanned)?

I like how Earl Nightingale put it:

Think of a ship with the complete voyage mapped out and planned. The captain and crew know exactly where the ship is going and how long it will take - it has a definite goal. And 9,999 times out of 10,000, it will get there.

Now let's take another ship - just like the first - only let's not put a crew on it, or a captain at the helm. Let's give it no aiming point, no goal, and no destination. We just start the engines and let it go. I think you'll agree that if it gets out of the harbor at all, it will either sink or wind up on some deserted beach - a derelict. It can't go anyplace because it has no destination and no guidance.

While 2007 was a good year, it was also a relatively stagnant year. At the end of 2007 I wasn't much further along as I should or could have been with clear cut goals. It's a pretty gross feeling.

Bad idea.

Somewhere in the February to April part of 2008 I once again started focusing and making very clear cut goals on yearly/monthly revenue and other things. It worked great. Making month to month comparisons was especially helpful because you can literally SEE yourself slipping or getting lazy in numbers:

Before I made my 2009 list of goals, I made sure to really think about each goal first. I used this criteria:

• Is this goal something I REALLY want?
• Am I willing to put in the time and effort to accomplish this, or is it just something I'd "like" to accomplish?
• Will this actually benefit me?
• Be specific.
  

Here are some of my top level biz goals for 2009:

1. Have first $83,333 revenue month at House Of Rave ($1,000,000/year equiv) by 4th quarter 2009.


2. Spend around one full month with the House Of Rave drop shipper to re-vamp and improve processes.
   
3. Make and upload two HoR product picture/video reviews per week.
   
4. Keep a more aggressive track on month to month income, taking a few minutes on the 1st, 10th, 15th and 25th of the month to make sure monthly goals are being met...and if not, ways to meet them by months end.


5. Start preparing for holiday seasons & mini-seasons 3 months in advance. One month for product additions, two months for tweaking.


6. Any changes made should be measured. Don't simply make changes and see they improve things, actually measure what was improved. How did each specific change effect traffic, conversion rate, or revenue (and other metrics)?
   
7. ...tying in from #6: Keep a close watch on month-to-month trends and numbers. Print out charts and keep in a folder like I keep my daily to-do lists.


8. Maintain and increase current year-to-year growth rate of House Of Rave: If I compare House Of Rave revenue from X-month 2007 to X-month 2008 there was a minimum of 177% increase and a maximum of 504% increase. I'll post the numbers at some point. Profit was increased by 307% from 2007 to 2008.

SOME PERSONAL GOALS:

1. Start buying proper furnishings.
   For some reason I hate owning a lot of big stuff, especially furniture. It has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with portability and freedom. Previously I've lived in furnished apartments which provide all the furniture (and it's nice furniture too). When I started living in a house I absolutely detested the idea of having to BUY a bed. It took the combined force of my mom and my roommate (who owns the house) to make me buy a bed. My mom literally stuffed hundreds of dollars in cash into my palm saying I had to buy a real bed with it...and my roommate said he wouldn't let me live there if I slept on anything but a proper bed.
   
   I can sleep on the floor with a thin sheet for all I care, so a bed seemed like a ridiculous notion to me (I know I know....I sound like a homeless person).
   
   Anyhow, a few months ago I think I officially became an adult when I.......bought new pillows. Under my own will power I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond and bought a king sized pillow and a body pillow. It was a big step. It was the first (non-forced) purchase I've ever made that benefited my own physical comfort. This is the first cautious step into slowly becoming somewhat of a grown up.
   


2. Spend a few short minutes every morning for some thinking time.
   I used to take yoga classes and after an hour of intense positions you'd just lay there. Those few moments made all that work worth it. Like clockwork this sudden feeling of mental clarity would hit me. My mind would slow down to a halt and this euphoric sensation would take over. It's hard to describe, but very cool.
   
   I would try to duplicate this some mornings without the hour of yoga preceeding it, and I found that simply sitting in a comfortable meditation-like position (but not comfortable enough to fall asleep), would yield a similar clarity, but without the brain-shutting-down part. This means I can think about my plans, goals and objectives for the day in a clear state. I also tend to get some great ideas during this time (although about 50% of my ideas still come to me whilst showering).
   
   Doing this morning exercise every day would feel great and be very beneficial.

So far these are the only goals I have that I know I can stick to. They can always be modified or added to during the year.

Anyhow, have a great 2009!

Labels: Goals, house of rave, Personal

Today for improving HoR I added a new section and some products to populate the section. I added this Costume Accessories section:

If you look closely, the image on the far left of the banner is me in a picture I took from this post two years ago!

The products in this section don't necessarily fit in with the "Light-Up" or "Rave" theme of the site, but it seems like they could sell well during the holiday times (especially Halloween).

We shall see.

Labels: house of rave

In an effort continually improve House Of Rave today my contribution was mainly adding several products, going through and selecting sub-products and I even added some pictures and video (which I made yesterday) to the Lightcubes and Rainbow Orb Ball.

One of the more significant things is I recently sent out the first real House Of Rave Newsletter which went over pretty well. Open rates were in the 20% range and click-through rates were on average 10-14% which is quite good. So far this initial email has been sent to about 2,000 people.

I wrote about attending a Vertical Response event and ended up going this past Thursday. It was more of a low-level introduction to email marketing, but I must admit Vertical Response did a bang up job of presenting their product. Some people were already existing customers, but I almost garauntee at least 90% of the people at the free event will soon start using their service. That event really helped associate a "face" with the company, and they even had the CEO and top engineers at the event so you could ask difficult questions about their service. I also got free breakfast, lunch and 500 email credits.


Posted 4th of July Thing:
HouseOfRave started getting into seasonal retailing to capitalize on the increased spending during those times. I added this seasonal Uncle Sam "thing" that looks like it's peeking out of the website to attract attention to the 4th Of July section:

It looks a little cheesy, but it seems to do the job!

Updated Shipping Prices:
This was another big step. My supplier has some shipping formulas which my Shopsite shopping cart system doesn't allow me to perform. I've been struggling trying to keep my shipping prices consistent with the supplier but so far to no avail. I finally took a good look at my shopping cart system and found a way to be within just cents of their shipping prices.

So far it's working well. This is good news for me because I don't have to absorb the cost of higher shipping anymore. Unfortunately this does raise customer shipping prices (which have gone up a lot with gas prices).

Labels: house of rave

Today for improving House of Rave I went through adding some products and correcting some templates. However the more notable thing was I sent out the first proper email blast for HoR.

The newsletter basically looked like the original one I made:

I added a few things and removed a few things, but it was essentially pretty similar to what's above.

I was originally going to send out the newsletter to the first 4,000 people on the email list, but I realized I could definitely improve the email blast, so I decided to slice the email list up and send out several different versions. Yesterday (Monday 5-19-2008) I sent out the first email blast to 500 people. Today (Tuesday) I sent it out to the next 500 people on the list. I plan to do these 500 person email blasts for the rest of this week.

The reasoning behind this is I can make small changes to each email blast to see what works and what doesn't. So far I only have 24-hour old statistics of the email blast sent out on Monday:

*QUICK NOTE*
The 500 email addresses sent in this initial first-500 test were collected several years ago, so I suspect this will be the lowest performing group.

Anyhow, within 24 hours 20% of the recipients had opened the email, and 13% of the entire 500 actually clicked on links which direct them to HouseOfRave. This equates to roughly 65 extra visits to the site from potential customers.

Far as email campaigns go, I believe these click-through rates are on the high side, especially for several-year-old email addresses. As for how many sales this generates, that's a difficult metric to measure.

One of the cool things about email campaigns is you can see which links were clicked to access your site. The links which got the highest number of clicks on the first campaign were images, in particular the animated images....especially this one:

So for the next week I'll be doing more email blasts and improving upon each one. With decent results so far, the HouseOfRave Newsletter may become a regular monthly thing.

Labels: house of rave

Today I added a Party Packs section to HouseOfRave along with several products to go under it. I used to have a Party Packs section a while back and it did very well, however after the switch to a new supplier HoR no longer carried most of those products and the section was removed.

Anyhow, in an effort to bring it back I've re-done the Party Packs section:


Currently it just has DJ lighting kits on it, but I eventually want to put customized kits on there. This means grouping together popular products and offering a discount for buying so much stuff. It seemed to prove pretty popular before.

Labels: house of rave

I'm starting to get all this newsletter stuff in place, but realized I didn't have any form on HouseOfRave that allows passer-by'ers to signup for the newsletter.

I've gone ahead and inserted a Vertical Response email form which automatically adds the contacts to my existing list:

Also I've upgraded to a new server this weekend. My old server had been continuously running for 4 1/2 years....about due time for a hard drive failure. It's also outdated compared to newer servers, so my hosting company bumped me up to a new server gratis.

They simply imaged the current drive and put it in a new server, and 99% of everything on there worked just fine after the transfer. However HouseOfRave had some problems since the paths on the new server were different.

I tried fixing it myself this entire weekend but to no avail. I don't have a yearly service contract with Shopsite, so I ended up paying $245 to get a technician to look at the problem. The problem was fixed within 10 minutes of my service request.

It really reminded me of a story I once heard:

A nuclear power facility was having trouble diagnosing why the reactors were getting dangerously hot. The engineers exhaustively examined every piece of equipment and couldn't find any faults or possible causes for this. This was a very dangerous situation so they resorted to hiring a consultant who charged $10,000 per day.

The next day the consultant came to the plant, grabbed a cup of coffee and casually walked around for a few hours lightly inspecting the machines and looking at gauges. After about 3 hours, the consultant took a can of red spray paint and drew a big red circle around one of the machines. He then told the engineers, "Replace this machine and the reactor will return to normal," and he proceeded to leave.

As he was leaving, the engineers couldn't believe he was charging $10,000 for only 3 hours of work, and demanded he give them a detailed invoice. He took out a pad and pen, then wrote:

Red spray paint: $1.00
Knowing where to spray: $9,999.00

So anyways...HoR is back up and taking orders. The site itself didn't go down, but none of the add-to-cart or checkout buttons parsed properly to the cgi scripts (a.k.a. you couldn't buy anything this weekend).

On the plus side, the new server is much faster than the old one. I'm getting a roughly 4X faster response rate across the board:

Even simple things like logging into the FTP and server backend are much, much faster which is always appreciated.

Speaking of appreciated, Happy Mother's Day!

Labels: eCommerce, house of rave

HouseOfRave has thousands of registered users on the mailing list and yet I've never sent out a newsletter or mass mailing with new products, news yadda yadda. It seems I'm missing out on a decently large opportunity here (well, I sent a ghetto one before which was a total disaster).

I'll be using Vertical Response to send out this upcoming newsletter as I've had some experience with it before. Today I designed, wrote and formatted the pictures for the upcoming newsletter.

I'm actually waiting to send this email blast for a little while, because coming up on May 22, 2008 Vertical Response is having a free workshop @ the Driskill in Austin which will teach a bunch of tips, tricks and recommendations for email marketing. I'll be going if anyone here in Austin wants to join me for the free food workshop.

Anyhow, currently this is what I've come up with for the Newsletter:

It looks a little plain, but hey, it's only the first day I've worked on it. I also have a feeling the final product that goes out will look much different than this initial composite.

I'm sure the upcoming workshop will have a bunch of recommendations on what works and what doesn't. I've heard little tips like giving away a 15% of coupon in the email is good, but it never works good as offering free shipping....little things like that can make or break a campaign (so I hear).

I'll be sending this initial test email to 4,000 registered customers, and it's crazy to think of that percentage wise.

• If only 2% order something, that's 80 extra orders.
• If only 1% order something, that's 40 extra orders.
• If only .5% order something, that's 20 extra orders.

I'm wondering if that's just wishful thinking, or if this email marketing stuff really works that well. Anyone here had any success with it?

Labels: house of rave

A few days ago I setup HouseOfRave to send an XML feed to Google, now to further expand HoR's reach I've submitted a product feed of 350 HouseOfRave products to Yahoo.

I had to format the product list myself since my software doesn't automatically do it, but Yahoo makes it simple, so anyone relatively familiar with Excel could figure it out.

For BodyMonkey.com I use Yahoo Stores, so all my products are automatically listed on the Yahoo Shopping network. That business is rarely updated yet still makes some orders solely from Yahoo Shopping Network listings.

What I like about the Yahoo Shopping Network is that when people click your product, they are usually ready to buy. However since HouseOfRave is not hosted on Yahoo Stores, I'm curious to see the actual buying habits.

Unlike Google's Froogle, inclusion in the Yahoo Shopping network costs money. I added $50 to my pay-per-click account and am anxious to see the results in the coming month. If an investment of $50 brings in <$50 in profit I wouldn't have had before, then the campaign will be a success and I'll increase my Yahoo spending. If not, lesson learned.

Labels: eCommerce, house of rave

I recently wrote about improving the shopping cart layout and flow for HouseOfRave, and it's definitely much better than it used to be.

I added upon that and started making new checkout buttons that stay congruent with the main site. Previously all the buttons looked like this:

There was nothing really wrong with the buttons, but they didn't fit the color scheme of the site very well. I went ahead and re-designed some of the buttons to appear like this:

The changed buttons were basically transposed from the "Add to cart" and "View Cart" buttons customers see on all the products.

MAIN CHECKOUT BUTTONS:
Now I realize the "Continue Shopping" and "Checkout" button have not been changed. I actually DID change them, but reverted them back. I'm trying to make the buttons congruent with the site, but that was the problem, the new buttons blended in too well with the site. I think the checkout button should stand out a little more, and I'm still trying to find/make a good one. Even Noah commented on this saying checkout buttons should stand out.

I do like how it looks at the moment. The "Remove" "Empty Cart" and "Recalculate" buttons are routine user operations, and the associated buttons look completely different from the main site functions (Continue Shopping and Checkout").



An extra backend function that was added to the site courtesy of the recent Shopsite upgrade is I can track user store searches. So whenever people search for something, I see the results in the backend. This feature was just implemented this feature very recently so there's not much data yet, but it's another metric I can use to improve the overall ease of use for House Of Rave.

Labels: eCommerce, house of rave

Today for improving HoR I added a bunch of cross-sell items to the products in the Disco Ball section of HouseOfRave.

Another improvement to the disco ball section today is the addition of a "how-to" page. Every once in a while I get calls or emails asking what is needed to create a full disco ball setup. I'm sure if a few people are emailing and asking about this, a lot more are wondering.

Come to think about it...it isn't very intuitive. People who want a whole disco ball setup in their house, apartment, game room, business...whatever, need three things: A disco ball, a motor and a light. There are different types of disco balls, different motors for different sized disco balls and different types of lights. To cure this confusion I decided to make a simple graphic that explains this:

....that's not quite enough to explain it, so when clicked, it brings visitors to the "How To Setup A Disco Ball" page which I made today. I'll admit this isn't the neatest tutorial around, but it can help clear up some confusion to the novice disco ball buyer.

In the tutorial are several steps on how to setup a disco ball and it also shows HouseOfRave's offerings. It isn't overly complicated, but it gives people a better idea of what's needed.

I wrote the tutorial, snapped some quick pictures, cropped them and posted them in a new page. Hopefully this little addition will help improve the quality of the Disco Ball section.

Labels: house of rave

On Noah's recent trip to Austin I introduced him to a friend who's a huge player in the viral marketing field. Now he runs a big media company yadda yadda, and showed us some of his tactics.

One of the things he's absolutely fanatical about is optimizing his checkout forms. Whether for buying a product, filling out an email form....basically anything with a customer text entry box...he does massive amounts of multi-variate testing to see which layout, which font, which words, which images, which checkout flow, which spacing etc. results in the highest amount of successful transactions.

Now his market and sales are much different than mine on HouseOfRave, but something can be learned from this.

SO I decided to take a page from his book and for the first time EVER....optimize the checkout form on HoR.

I was actually quite horrified at how bad it was. The colors made me wanna throw up, there were no links to see the products you were buying, there were some confusing forms, some unnecessary fields and more simple fixes that had remained untouched for years.

Thanks to the recent upgrade of Shopsite I have the ability to change my forms a lot more. I realized that a lot of these names are strange to people and they have no idea what they're getting when they press "Checkout." Fortunately I can now add links and images on the shopping cart, which lets people know what they're getting. Now when someone adds something to the shopping cart it looks something like this:

When people checkout they now see something like this:

There's a lot of very minor changes in this new form such as the addition of writing "Optional" on the 'Address 2' field. Despite most people knowing this is where you'd enter an apartment number or office number, some people not familiar with online commerce scratch their heads wondering why they need to enter a 2nd address. Clearly writing "Optional" instead of simply denoting it with an *asterisks* should help.

I also want people to give suggestions in the comment box, so I wrote that. I want to change it soon to include something like "Why are you buying these products?" so I can more clearly understand what market I'm catering to (Hint: hardly anyone actually buys from the site for raves...it's kind of counter-intuitive).

There were also little things like lining up the text entry boxes correctly so it looks neat.

If you can spot any confusing parts of the form or have suggestions, please let me know. I also plan on doing this sometime soon:
Allowing all the readers of this blog to place test orders on the site and send me feedback on what they thought was confusing or could be improved. I'll try to get that test out sometime this month.

There's still a lot of work to do, but simply paying some attention to the things I've overlooked for so long has already made a world of difference.

Labels: house of rave

Today for updating HoR I added a few more products to the site to various sections, nothing particularly crazy but a necessary step in the improvement process.

I also took advantage of a feature in the recent upgrade of Shopsite: Google Sitemaps. The new software automatically populates a sitemap specially designed for Google and submits it via the Google Webmaster Tools.


On another note, a very small change that has been particularly helpful lately has been the percentages metric I added to my accounting sheet. Little did I realize how many of my products had a much older version of the shipping metric on them.


It becomes especially apparent on large orders where my percentage should be 30+ percent. Before I would get a large order, and after the numbers were entered, a nice profit sum would be spit out. This profit seems nice until you realize it should be nearly a third higher. What a big difference such a small metric can make!

Labels: house of rave

I did the $325 upgrade for my shopping cart software, and I am proud to announce something:

It was the first installation of new server software in the history of mankind where nothing went wrong.

On another not I got the 4th of July section relatively done, populated and have put up a small denotation for it in the left navigation bar:

I've also got the Froogle feed setup...another thanks to Adam's post about this. It went pretty smoothly thanks to an automatic Google Base submit feature in the newest version of Shopsite I just upgraded to.

Labels: house of rave

When I get an order for HouseOfRave there are two numbers I plugin to get my profit count for the day: the amount of money brought in by the order and the cost I pay the supplier to send it.

It's a very rudimentary calculation of Income - Cost. With this system some orders would have a high profit, some would be low. Sometimes an order would make me $25 another order of similar value would make me $5. This shouldn't be the case.

When an order goes way below my margin rate, that means something is funky on my end. So to more obviously identify what is going on, I added a simple income/profit percentage rate calculation. Now with this simple percentage I can more easily pinpoint problematic orders and fix them immediately.

Check it out:

That first problem order was for $49.25, yet I only made $2.33 in profit....less than a 5% margin, yikes! However, orders of roughly similar value bring in at least $12 or more.

So now I can see something is wrong and fix it. With that particular order, the person ordered with 3-day shipping, and my formula for 3-day shipping on the products they ordered was wrong. Easily fixable.

That order isn't the only problem, in fact almost every order has some small issue. Every order should have a margin percentage rate at or above roughly 30%.

So this set of shown orders brought in $1,168.02 and profited $274.38 for a profit margin rate of roughly 23%. If there were no problems with my shipping table and all prices matched the supplier, then this set of orders would have brought in about $350 instead.

One of the real culprits here is the shipping prices. My software can't do the same type of calculations as my supplier, so they are always a little off. Hopefully the upgrade can help solve this issue soon.

One of Bob's Rules really is true:
Anything that is measured and watched, improves.

Labels: house of rave

Today for HoR I further populated the 4th of July Section which I want ready by month's end, however the most important thing today is I bought a $325 upgrade for Shopsite, the server-side software I use for HouseOfRave.

A few of the goals I previously set out that will be now be possible with this upgrade are:

• Upselling commonly bought items at checkout.
• Integration with Google Analytics.
• Automatic Google Base XML feed submission (thanks to Adam's post for jump starting this idea).
• Free shipping coupons.
• Analyzation of in-store keyword searches.

There's a couple more features the upgrade has, but the main ones I bought it for is the checkout screen upsell feature and auto Google Base XML submission.

In the coming days I install it, I'm sure there will be a little learning time for the new features, plus maybe a problem or two. Murphy's Law ya know!

Labels: house of rave

A while back I did a business in a box inventory experiment. It's been almost a year now, and even on a small scale I realize that I really don't like maintaining an inventory, and especially don't like physically sending out orders.

This is why HouseOfRave has always continued to be a dropship model.

Since I've done this little experiment in selling the tattoos I've had to re-order inventory twice, buy more packing supplies (aka envelopes and stamps) and this time I ordered a little more stuff, which was perhaps a mistake, but a learning experience nonetheless.

So to keep in conrguence with the "small, lightweight, can-be-sent-in-an-envelope" theme I also ordered some of these tattoo sleeves from the supplier:

(Yes, that is my arm with the tattoo sleeve)

I did a quick photo shoot of them and made them a new product on the website. Additionally, the supplier was out of the standard 8" tattoos I ordered before, so they sent 5 1/2" tattoos instead which I had to make a new product for. So now on the tattoo page you can see the two new products.

For the smaller tattoos I decided not to sort them into individual products as that gets tedious to maintain inventory, but to sell them as an "assortment" which means you get random styles. I still had to photograph some of the different styles using the same method I did for the first tattoo experiment:

You can see all the final images on the 5 1/2" tattoo page.

Every time I get an order for a temporary tattoo I:

• Get the "business in a box" from my room (aka the Aldo shoebox)
• Address an envelope
• Insert the tattoos (or sleeves)
• Send the "package" when I check my mail.

Relatively simple yes, but it still involves work which is best suited for a properly prepared supplier with a warehouse. For example, if someone wants the tattoos with Express shipping, I have no way of doing this without a trip to the post office. Fortunately this doesn't happen often, but nevertheless I might remove these products at some point if I have to ship them myself, despite their (minor) profitability.

Labels: house of rave

Improving HoR today dealt mainly with making the Glowstick section more congruent.



I changed a lot of the prices (as they have been raised), properly calculated shipping prices and calibrated all the product layouts to the new top cart. I also added some new 10" high intensity and 10 " Ultra high intensity glowsticks to the section.

When I tell people about HouseOfRave they usually say, "Oh, so you sell a lot of glowsticks?" It's an understandable misconception...but in reality I don't make much money on glowsticks. However I do make money every once in a while on the big, bulk glow orders.

Another thing I started doing today was preparing for a HouseOfRave email blast. I'll be sending this particular blast out sometime towards the end of the month using Vertical Response. It'll be to 4,000 emails (a group of customers who haven't ordered in at least 6 months from the mailing list). I could send it to more, but this seems like a nice test size to run some numbers.

This will be my second email blast ever for HouseOfRave, the first one was a total disaster:

• It looked horrible
• It had a long load times for the images
• If the address wasn't capable of HTML it just showed code
• I simply sent it using Outlook
• I put the addresses in the "To" field instead of "BCC" field, therefore IIFFFF the email was even opened correctly, it showed 5 long pages of email addresses before the content began.

Quite embarrassing! I also (understandably) got a lot of angry people emailing me back saying, "I can't believe you openly shared my email..." I've got much more experience with email marketing since then, and will hopefully send out a successful, nicely designed, customer friendly email. I'm curious to see the order impact it will have (if any).

Labels: house of rave

As a high school then college student running HouseOfRave I never understood anything about retail.

Later in life I learned that seasons can make or break retail outlets. It's well known that many retailers often clear half their yearly sales from November to December alone.

Luckily I'm with a supplier who's much wiser and long understood that, and plans retail holidays months in advance. About a month ago, for the first time ever on HouseOfRave, there was a seasonal based product section. That was the St. Patrick's Day section:

It's kind of annoying adding so many products just for a short holiday, especially since many of them don't tie into the "Light Up Stuff" theme of HouseOfRave....but I've found some other long-term value benefits to these sections:

• It makes the site look up to date.
• Makes the site look "bigger"
• Holiday supplies are often good upsellers.

I realized most people ordering the St. Patty's day stuff ordered different items first, saw the St. Patrick's Day section then said, "Oh, that would be nice to have this weekend" and added the product.

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With that said, Spring is here, the weather is warmer (Austin weather is unbelievably beautiful right now) and people will be doing more outdoorsy stuff.

Products I carry that are congruent with this are the Bubble Section and Fans. Apparently these items do really well this season.

So for improving HoR today I added some fans to the Play Stuff section...although it doesn't really fit there (just needed some place to stick em for the moment). I also added a couple of bubble products to the Bubble Section:

Labels: house of rave

I didn't really do much to improve HoR today because I was primarily concerned with an all day doing-taxes-at-the-last-minute session. Actually it only took about 2 1/2 hours thanks to TurboTax....it made my day a WHOLE lot easier.

Ha! In the amount of time it took me to make that creepy TurboTax-love picture I probably could've upgraded something on HouseOfRave.

Labels: house of rave

One of the very unfortunate drawbacks to dropshipping like House Of Rave is the lack of your own marketing and branding materials that are physically sent to each customer in their order.

With my old supplier, each order had SOME marketing materials as they would simply print out my customized invoices and send orders based on that. It was easy to tweak information on the invoices. Now my orders are all electronically sent and things got a little more complicated.

Now when an order is received by a customer, they get an invoice...but it doesn't say "HouseOfRave" anywhere. That doesn't help people remember the name...and sometimes actually confuses customers.

To combat this I designed some front/back 4" x 6" flyers and had several hundred printed out:

So whenever an order is sent from the supplier on behalf of HoR they will toss in one of these flyers. This makes sure the customer remembers HoR, makes HoR look a little bigger, thanks the customer for their order and also contains return instructions in case something doesn't work.

I only printed out several hundred the first time since the text can use some modification over the next few months. I also might want to initiate a call to action on the flyer by offering a 10% discount or free shipping on the next flyers...see how it works.

In the future I hope me and the supplier can somehow customize my order invoices electronically as that would be the easiest and cheapest method to branding. Theoretically I can simply email customized packing lists to the supplier for each order, but this involves more work on my end and his end.

So come Monday I'll send these flyers to the supplier!

Labels: house of rave

Day 3 of improving HoR consisted of changing some more product image layouts like on Day 1, then some new things like adding cross-sell products to some of the popular items.

I still have a lot to do, but when someone looks at certain products, they see "Related Products" which they also might be interested in. So if someone's searching for high intensity glowsticks and lands on the House Of Rave search result, they will see other types of glowsticks they might be interested in like this:

Another thing I picked up again today was the Search Engine Optimization of HoR. I've done many contracts for larger companies on this in the past, but never applied it to my own stuff before. So I charted out some keywords to go after and have actively started tracking them using the SEO tracking software I used for other companies.

This will be a several-months-long project as SEO is relatively slow moving, however the software did make me aware I didn't have proper description tags on many of my section pages, so I went through and changed (or added) most of them.

Labels: house of rave

This is more of an obligatory post to say I've continued pretty much doing the same thing from Day 1.

Labels: house of rave

Day 1 of my effort to improve my online business HouseOfRave.com started with me re-doing a bunch of products with a new Add-To-Cart template.

Previous all the products on HoR had the shopping cart buttons at the bottom of the page, like this:

As you can see it's often not centered, different product image sizes throw it off, and it's just more confusing in general.

To cure this I had a top-right-centered template made for Shopsite, so I've been going through and changing product pages to this more standard Add-to-Cart layout:

In theory I can simply select all the products in the catalog and mass-edit them to the new template in one action...however many of the products on the old template required me to insert a lot of breaks so the formatting around the images was correct. This causes problems now since the layout is different, and if I blindly apply this template, it leaves many of the products with a lot of wasted space like so:

So there's the unfortunate job of going through all the products and removing that code. The upside is once this job is done, I can make new templates without worry about ghetto-ized code messing everything up.

So today I've gone through several product sections and cleaned up code, re-sized a lot of product images, added bulk pricing information to certain products as well as updated shipping cost information.

Labels: house of rave