Tony Sarno24 February 2007, 9:03 AM
We expected it would be tough. But not this tough. Our online store's first week of trading has shown us that success will come only after a lot of hard work.
In this series, APC has opened a fully-functioning online store selling real gear, to give readers an insight into how e-commerce works. It’s cost us around $35,000 so we need to make the business work to get our money back. We launched the store on Feb 12.
When APC and its partner, e-commerce providers NetMerchant, launched Geek Gear a few days ago, we expected all the usual teething problems of a new business. We got those, and more.
Issue 1: We didn’t have all the stock in store
When Geek Gear opened, several products displayed in the online catalogue hadn’t yet been delivered to us by our suppliers. So as customers began buying (the first sale was an MP3 player on the morning of the launch) we had hardly any products to send out.
With all those months of planning, how did we get ourselves into this mess?
With hindsight, selecting the tech gadgets and T-shirts and having them delivered to our warehouse (an employee’s garage) was easy and it happened well before the store launched. But we underestimated how long it would subsequently take to have them customised with APC and Geek Gear logos and slogans.
In the planning, we should have tried to better understand how long this part of the process would take. Customization inevitably means having to do some revisions of designs and of the way the logos and slogans appear on the products. Throw in an approval process and delays start to mount. In the end, it was just as well we were launching an online store. Had it been a bricks and mortar shop, it would have had several empty shelves.
As orders started coming in we were painfully aware buyers would expect the gear on their doorstep within a day or two. Most were choosing the Express Post delivery option instead of the cheaper and slower standard mail, which surprised us.
At this point, we could have could have taken people’s money and told them to wait until the products were available. But that’s a strategy for business suicide. We had to be upfront with the customers and make it up to them in some way.
Luke Amery (the MD of NetMerchant, our partners and builders and operators of the store) has a theory: “In business you’re actually judged by your customers on how you face adversity. If everything goes perfectly, customers aren’t judging you as they do when things go wrong. That's when you have to rise to the occasion and put customers first and not have silly excuses.”
We agreed we would not charge freight fees for all orders that could not be shipped immediately, and we would send late products out with Express Post.
“We didn’t want to muck around,” says Luke. “We screwed up not having product on the day we launched, and we had to make up for it.”
The stock problem is now solved.
Issue 2: We didn’t quite pick the best-seller. But then, which new business ever does?
Quick quiz: which product on the Geek Gear shelves is selling the most?
When you’re a business deciding how much gear to stock in each product line, you’re putting thousands of dollars on this bet. We just weren’t quite prepared for the binary clock to be our best-seller.
We assumed the binary clock would be a curiosity at best, selling maybe one or two a week. Instead, it sold five in the first couple of days. Only problem was, we didn’t have five binary clocks in stock. We had assumed that a couple of samples we’d received from the suppliers would cover us for the first few days. So, another product in short supply.
 Geekgear's binary clock: an unexpected success |
This inability to predict the best-selling product is fairly common for new businesses, says Luke, who has seen it happen over and over with other online stores he’s built.
In Geek Gear’s first week, the gadgets have proved to be the winners, with the USB Cup Warmer and USB 1GB MP3 Player joining the Binary Clock as the stand outs.
 No I won't be your tech support: or buy this t-shirt, either. |
The surprise dud has been the “
No, I WON'T be your Tech Support T-shirt” which has not sold one copy. Not one. But we think we know why
1) In our hurry to get the photos online, we forgot one very obvious thing: if the T-shirts are selling slogans, then the slogans need to be visible on the T-shirt in the photo. In choosing the most model-like shots, we ignored the less artistic ones which actually showed the slogan.
Even the caption under the photo does't spell out the slogan. It just says: "No, I won't." No, I won't what? You have to click through to the page featuring the T-shirt to find the full slogan. This is on the list of the next round of fixes.
2) It turns out many users hate Helpdesk Ed, the character on the T-shirt. One customer asked politely whether he could have the T-shirt with the slogan but without the image.
Similarly, we’ve had complaints from other readers who’ve objected to Helpdesk Ed’s image in the magazine. One emailed a few days ago to complain that the gun brandished by Helpdesk Ed was not appropriate imagery for young kids. The reader was no prude. She worked in tech support and would have understood the gun was our idea of the perfect metaphor for the frustration sometimes felt by tech support staff, but she felt it was inappropriate nonetheless. I emailed back and said we’ll consider finding a less offensive object for Ed.
Although he looks like a real person, Helpdesk Ed doesn’t exist. He was created in Photoshop by Chris Zammit, our APC art director. Ed is a fine collage of the features from other people’s faces. I know Chris will be disappointed to hear his Frankenstein is scaring away customers.
So how does a new business minimise the risks of picking the wrong product mix?
Luke suggests that anyone contemplating launching an online store should first test some of the intended products on an online marketplace like eBay. “That would give you a feel for what will actually sell, and what kinds of things people look for. Once you have this information, then you can hell for leather with your own store."
Issue 3: T-shirt sizes not for everyone
Not surprisingly, stock selection was behind most of the feedback we got from users in the first week.
A reader known as “The Warbear” wrote to us to say: “Considering the sedentary nature of most geeks, and nerds too, it amazes me that your largest shirt is only XXL. As a large man, a geek AND a nerd, I am very disappointed that you did not provision for larger sized people. Will you in the future be expanding your range to or above 5XL? If not then I see a potential market lost by not providing for. I personally like the 'Geek Inside', and 'There's no place' shirts.”
He makes a good point. In selecting the T-shirt sizes, we should have realised we had a significant proportion of supersized readers, given how much time some would spent sitting in front of a computer. I will be discussing this with Luke to see what we can do.
 XXL is not enough: geeks need up to 5XL |
Issue 4: No clothes for women
A female reader pointed out our T-shirts were all “sacks”. We have nothing that would hug a female figure. Eh, true. We didn’t really research the needs of our female geek demographic, which a bit short-sighted given it would be a sizable market.
It’s also unforgivable given that APC is part of Australian Consolidated Press, an organisation that runs several of Australia’s top womens and fashion magazines.
Anyone from Cosmo or Harpers Bazaar could have given us a few tips on what geek women would want to wear. In our defence, we assumed our T-shirts were unisex.
Issue 5: Store Design and standards compliance questioned
Kate from Brisbane was disappointed with the look of the site and the product display. She also took issue with our declaration that we were standards-compliant.
”You have mentioned that the website is W3C standards compliant and accessible, and it is not,” she said, suggesting we redesign the entire online store.
We immediately checked the site for compliance and noticed a few errors. We’ll remedy this.
Issue 6: Site usability
People couldn't figure out our Wish List or the freight charges. You need to be logged in to use the Wish List so we’ve made that more obvious (how would the Wish List be retrieved if it isn’t assigned to your account?).
A few people struggled to find freight charges - they show up in the checkout after you choose where you want it sent.
We've also added a feature: check out what happens when you click on a large image icon inside the site. Some of our customers rang us to ask for this functionality and we accommodate them.
Site usability is critical, so if customers are complaining fixes need to be put in place immediately. Anyone launching an online store should keep money in the project budget for post launch enhancements. You won't think of everything before you go live!!
Issue 7: Where is the word "Nerd" in the branding?
In pitching the site at “geeks” who we believe are people who know too much about technical things and aren’t afraid to bore people with their knowledge, we didn’t mention the word “nerd” anywhere. That's because, unlike Geek, nerd has negative connotations. Luke reckons it describes people with “appearance challenges.”
But it seems that for many readers, there is a close association between geeks and nerds. One New Zealand reader wrote: “ Yes, yes. I know that the site is called Geek Gear but I know for simplicity’s sake I settled on one label (nerd) and I get the feeling that there are others out there, so, if possible, could the word Nerd be added onto new merchandise? You will be surprised just how much that would keep my pseudo-social life from complication.”
Again, we’ll add this to our list of considerations for any revision or expansion of our product range.
The killer, issue 8 – Not enough products
At the end of the first couple of weeks of any new online store, you start getting a sense of the major issue that’s going to make or break the business. And for Geek Gear, that issue is the limited range of products on our shelves.
This is where our wish of making the Geek Gear business a solid generator of cash clashes with our fundamental goal for the project, which is to show how e-commerce works.
We have spent just enough on the store and the product range to make it real; to enable us illustrate how a store works and not much more. Had we been very serious about creating successful business from the day it first opened its doors, we would have invested in a far bigger product range, to give customers a greater choice and get them coming back regularly to find hot new gear.
Geek Gear’s limited product range was overwhelmingly the number one complaint we received from users. One site visitor summed it up in this less than elegant email, but then customers aren’t generally known for their diplomacy: “the selection of products suck. i know some people hate to choose, But i Love a large range to select from... i'll shop at thinkgeek till u get some true geek toys and not some old hat thing that went down shit creek before USB 2.0 came out.”
At this point, massive expansion of the product range is not an option, as it would not be for any number of small businesses launching an online store. That would require additional investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Our goal is to keep taking you inside the store and discussing the fine detail of operating an online business. But it’s clear that if you want to get into the tech gadgets and geek trinkets business, you need a seriously large product range at the start to satisfy most of the customers coming to your store.