Finally, a Shopster Blog Update

I'm taking a little time out of my work day to give this blog an update, as well as to step back and view Shopster from a high level. Shopster is ramping up fast. For the first quarter of this year, our retailers have seen sales quintuple (5x) from the same period last year.

Last Christmas was busy here, as we chased down every delayed order with the suppliers. We need lots more people, and lots more efficiency to survive the forth quarter of 2008. There are a lot of new faces around here already, and we are forced to become an efficiency driven organization. Given that many of those systems are under my responsibility, I've been busy. One side effect of having more people around it the company culture changes. Before, there were no set rules for when you had to be in office. As long as the work got done, hours were flexible. There were 4 of us. Now, when you have to coordinate meetings with 12 people, you have to start coming in at a regular time so meetings can be scheduled. That kind of sucks. What also sucks is that when the organization was smaller, your work, or lack of work, was immediately obvious. Therefore, you never had to worry about not appearing busy, cause everyone knows what you contribute. Some days, I'd just go walk around for awhile in the sunshine, and get the coding done later. Now, in an office environment, there is more pressure to 'appear' busy, even if you just want to slack for awhile (like say, writing a blog post... heh heh)

One interesting thing about last Christmas was Wii sales. Because Wii's were hard to get anywhere, Shopster actually went above and beyond with a particular supplier, to ensure our retailers had first dibs on any Wii stock that supplier got in. Some retailers were making $40 profit per Wii sale (even after the supplier raised the price on us).

Currently, the top 10 list of RShops by sales is crowded by a lot of electronics stores. Wii's and mobile phones are generating the highest sales and profit margins. I have a couple of theories of why that is. First of all, we have good prices on many electronic products. Secondly, I think a lot of those customers already know everything about the product they want to buy, and are just looking at price. The store doesn't have to 'convince' as much as other products.

The stores themselves are attractive, but fairly basic. One store is still using our logo generator's logo as their store header. That made me chuckle, because the logo generator is a good way to get your shop looking presentable, but I always assumed our retailers would eventually replace it with a less generic looking logo.

I would prefer it if our sales would be a bit more spread out among product categories. We have some successful shops in inexpensive jewelry, perfumes, and health products, but given the huge amount of products in our warehouse, the top selling stores should have more diversity. In that vein, we are having some internal discussions here at Shopster about starting a retailer acceleration program. When we see shops that have had a few sales, and are on the verge of success, perhaps we should reach out to those retailers to really get the sales going.

RShops I would like to see Shopster help grow:
1. Non-electronics stores.
2. Stores concentrated around new suppliers in the system.
3. Stores making sales, but with margins set too low.

For all retailers, I would like to see the product information presented better. I have internal reports which show me which products have dropped in price, as well as the new products in the system. Our browse warehouse functionality is designed around finding a single product, as opposed to 'shopping' the products to find interesting, sellable items. Hopefully we can get that improved soon.