Tag Archives: serendipity deals

I need a clone

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Well, summer is pretty much here.  (Come on we all count Memorial Day weekend as the real start of Summer).  For most people that means relaxing at the beach, grilling and pretty much just getting a tan after a day at the office.

Not me….

See, I do get to relax.  Every weekend I go to Kymer’s Camping Resort in Branchville, NJ.  I’ve been up there for 20 seasons, every weekend from April 1st till November 1st.  It’s nice to have a place up in the woods.  It’s very relaxing.

However when you own an online store you really don’t get time to “relax”.  I may be away from the computer and the internet when I’m up there but I still get all my sales sent to my cell phone so I can make sure I’m keeping up with my customers and making sure that they get what they need in a timely manner.

Now, on top of that we have Castle No Fear.  A gaming community that wants more games.  I have “plenty” of new games to add, problem is, I don’t have the time to add them since I’m still working on getting as many products added to the store as possible before the Holiday shopping season starts in September.

September?

Oh yea….that’s the start of the Holiday shopping season when you own an online store.   Crazy huh?

Anyways, between going away on weekends, adding products, processing orders, adding games, managing an internet radio station, attempting to blog on this site, and being a husband and father…..I need a clone.

Even without one though, I couldn’t be happier. :)

~NFM

Somebody wants a cookie

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Help me out here.

I know this will more than likely be one of my shorter posts but…for the life of me I can’t figure this out.  I’ve even tried to do it myself and it didn’t work.

As a business owner I need to know how people are finding my sites.  Of course out of those I pay the closest attention to Serendipity Deals.  So….imagine my surprise when I look and see that in the passed 30 days a total of 124 people have found the store by searching Google for the word “cookie”.

What?

We don’t sell cookies, and right now I don’t have any cooking supplies that have to do with cookies.

The only remote way I was able to get the store up in the first page was to type in cookie + Serendipity Deals.  By doing that it brought up a link to the Privacy Policy for Serendipity Deals which mentions that we use cookies to save your shopping cart so that you don’t have to re-add your products every time you go back to the store if you don’t purchase them the first time you add them.

So…color me at a loss for words here….but apparently there are a lot of hungry people out there.  That…or Cookie Monster will be my next customer….

~NFM

My mouth gave me a migraine

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Yea, I was pretty much useless yesterday.

I spoke with a supplier on Sunday and I did something I never do.  I told him that I would make sure to have at least 40 products up from his company by Tuesday morning.

Doesn’t sound like a big deal does it?

I get minimal info on the products, and the biggest worry for me is always shipping.  See, I like to make sure shipping is included with the price you see at the site.  It saves people from having to worry about a “suprise” in the shopping cart.  So, I have to make an educated guess on how much the shipping is going to cost.  If I guess under…well then I usually get stuck having to pay the difference and losing money on the sale.  That’s not good when your company is only in its second year.

So…I had to go through, add all of these products, look up an estimated shipping cost, add the product to the site as well as the OpenOffice Calc sheet that I use to keep track of how much I should be charging to keep my margin low but make a small profit.

It quite literally took me all day staring at the computer screen with minimal breaks.  At the end of the night I had to go out somewhere and I ended up at 37 products.  Just to keep a promise…the next morning I added a few more.  I didn’t make the full 40 since I was hurting so bad yesterday I was only able to add a couple products and then had to lay down since I was sick to my stomach.  I took some medicine and made it through dinner….after that I was out of it for the rest of the night.

Today I get to add more…..

Here’s to a new headache!

~NFM

Doba Responds…

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Yes….that title is correct.

Through my email at Serendipity Deals I received a response from Doba about my recent blog post about them.

It wasn’t some customer service rep, it wasn’t some PR guy that wanted to talk to me about it….no.  It was Doba CEO Blaine Nielsen.

I quite literally just got off the phone with him.

Why did he call?  It wasn’t to try and get me back, it wasn’t to argue with me.  It was to discuss what Doba could do better to improve.  I am honored to say that he wanted my input.  To that extent I give Doba credit and Mr. Nielsen my respect for wanting to be sure they can provide the service and vision that he had in mind when he opened his company.

I gave him my recommendations, mostly about notifications to the retailers about stock.  See, Doba has a “Watch List” that you can add products to when you add them to your store.  That watch list will keep track of inventory levels for you.  However…it still doesn’t make keeping track of inventory much easier.  Why?  Simply because you would still have to sort through the products you have on the watch list to see what is out of stock.  I told him that those watch lists should email their creators with out of stock notifications or back in stock notifications of the products listed.  THAT would make the retailers lives 10 times easier.

The same should go for when they remove suppliers from their list of products.  Don’t just drop them and hope that the retailer notices…we’re busy people.  If you’re going to drop them let us know, we can remove the products before they become unavailable through Doba.

That was most of my conversation with him.  No arguing, no threats, a very polite conversation with Mr. Nielsen.

So…where does this leave me with Doba?  Well…until they fix the issues I still won’t add products from them to Serendipity Deals.  My account with them expires on June 7th….and I have no intention of renewing without a good reason to.

However I do thank him and the company for his email and proceeding phone conversation.

~NFM

Double or Something

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February 1st 2008 was the opening of Serendipity Deals my long dream of running my own store so I can make the rules and treat customers the way they deserve to be treated.

Holidays 2008 I had about 1,000 products listed at the store and quite a few sales and customers coming to the store.  My daily visits doubled during the Holiday season and it’s actually stayed pretty steady.  So now I have a new goal….

I’m at a little over 1,400 products listed at the site now.  I want to more than double that by this Holiday season.  I want to have a MINIMUM of 3,000 products listed at the site.  I know I have the products to do it….it’s just finding the time and the right ones to put up.

Sheesh…between this and the Gamerscore Rush I’m gonna be a pretty busy guy….lol

~NFM