Geek Gear opened on Feb 12 and made its first sale - an MP3 USB player - much to the excitement of APC and NetMerchant staff. We report on the first day's trading, including the revenue we made.
 Henrik Milton, Luke Amery and Philip Street at Geek Gear check out the new online store's first sale yesterday |
Well, it wasn't all for nothing. The first order arrived at 8:41am on Geek Gear's first day of business (Monday, Feb 12). That didn't take too long! We had a steady stream of orders all day, seven in total. The gadgets were popular at first, then the shirts started catching up.
No-one seemed interested in the caps, which was interesting since we happened to stock up on a lot of caps.
We will be providing a full profit and loss report after we have been operational for a longer period, however, revenues from day one were a promising $451.75. If that rate can be sustained we can break even on the project in just under 100 days.
This is a relief. As this blog mentioned yesterday, just before launch there were plenty of nervous nellies around. Would we even get one sale? Had the whole thing been a mistake? Having said that, we were also quietly confident in our assessment of the potential market, and the results yesterday proved us correct.
At 9.59am, Luke sent Tony an email. It said: “Well at least we have something to talk about, we got our first order!”
To which Tony replied: "Historic moment!”
It was a USB MP3 player (pictured, right).
One of the most encouraging things about our first day’s trading was the amount of feedback we received. There was one clear signal: the Aussie version of the Think Geek site has arrived. But while Think Geek obviously provided one of the seed inspirations for the idea, we are nowhere near their product range yet. We would love to grow the business into that if it’s feasible.
Other feedback included:
• Requests for product information - a sure indication that our detailed descriptions were not up to scratch (we have progressed a little on that since going live).
• We were too male oriented - we obviously need to address this, there are female Geeks too ya'know!
• Plenty of praise, which was nice. We appreciated the positive comments on our first day.
• Requests for PayPal as a payment method - we would like to discuss this in a future entry.
There was one very interesting comment that we want to talk about in a bit more depth. Callum Grant brought to our attention that freight costs to New Zealand were going to be $24 for one T-Shirt. We had assumed that we would not get international customers. That was a mistake. But luckily it was one we could easily rectify by quickly creating some New Zealand specific freight rates that were a lot more competitive.
I guess the lesson for anyone contemplating doing an e-commerce store is that you need to have an e-commerce system flexible enough to be able react to customer demands like that in real time. No matter how much you plan, you just can’t predict what every customer is going to want. If our system had not allowed us to to cater for our New Zealand customer we could have lost the sale
A bit of a hiccup occurred when we tried to process the first payment through SecurePay as our Payment Gateway (the link between our web server and the VISA network). It happened because of a simple typo in the payment gateway script we had created - we resolved this quickly and we processed our first transaction!
Our launch report yesterday attracted several comments, reflecting those sent directly to the Geek Gear shop by its customers. “Tin” and “Wes” expected a bigger product range – but a bigger product range would have necessitated a massive investment in stock upfront, which was not part of our business plan. Our strategy with Geek Gear is to start modestly and increase the product range as demand warrants.
When the APC office learnt that the first T-shirt had been sold a cheer went up. We put a lot of effort into the T-shirt slogans, though we were miffed when we learnt that the first one sold had one of the slogans we didn’t come up with: “No place like 127.0.0.1” which was adapted from the web. But later we sold some of ours, so we’re happy.
APC's Art Director, Chris Zammit, came up with some of the T-shirt slogans and designs. In the photo above he displays the one featuring APC's HelpDesk Ed, our geek techie who's frustrated with stupid end user requests. HelpDesk Ed doesn't actually exist. Chris created him in Photoshop.
added Feb 23: We have since received some complaints from readers who find the gun held by HelpDesk Ed offensive. One she said she would not let her children wear a T-shirt featuring firearms. We take comments from readers or customers seriously, so we'll have a look at whether we should replace the gun with something less confronting.