Pre-Christmas Drive

Apologies once again for not updating regularly - even at once a week it's hard to find the time to update. Assignments at university have started to pour in and I've been handing out CVs left, right and centre trying to find a job. On the plus side, however, the Internet has sped up in the house so it's now at a reasonable enough speed with which to be able to work. Enough about me however, now onto the business.

Unfortunately October has been a pretty slow month for the business. It has had 5 sales so far and none of them have been from the website itself. Due to the increased Internet speed I was finally able to load Google Analytics the other day for the first time in a few weeks and it did not paint a pretty picture; however the number of visitors has kept fairly consistent so I have that to be thankful for. I also noticed that there were a handful of subscribers to the newsletter which was a pleasant surprise.

At the moment there is a lull in university work so I plan to capitalise on this opportunity. Christmas is coming up so I will be updating the website with new goods as well as adding a number of special offers to try to draw customers in and boost sales. I've been talking to a few people regarding mutual advertising on websites relevant to my target audience to help boost traffic and sales as well. My supplier recently came to me with the offer of appearing in industry trade magazine MCV by answering a few general questions about the business and market in general so I will submit that Monday and fingers crossed it may even get published.

I will keep this blog updated with how all these things pan out as and when they happen. Until then, goodbye!

Updates

Apologies for stating that I would update at least once a week and then promptly nearly going 3 weeks without an update but the past few weeks have all been very busy for me. Primarily because I moved house as university as started and amongst other important things such as trying to find a job and signing up for lectures/general university work it took a while to get Internet up in the house. It's still not great however as it's very temperamental and nowhere near as fast as it should be. 

Unfortunately in the past fortnight or so the business has slowed down somewhat...whereas I used to be sure of a sale every other day or so via eBay at least, there hasn't been a sale for a week now across any of my outlets. I have been experimenting with prices on a few of my more popular items and it appears I may have set them slightly too high for people's liking. Unfortunately I had a bit of a nasty surprise a few weeks ago due to some suppliers being less than clear with price structures and failing to make clear some extra costs which meant up until that point I had sold some of my items at a loss, which is the last thing a business wants when it is only just starting. Fortunately it is not too great a loss; it's recoverable so can simply be chalked up to experience and being more careful next time.

However it's going to be difficult to recover when the business has not seen any sales for a week. Unfortunately due to my other commitments, primarily university, I haven't been able to spend anywhere near enough time promoting the business and its website which means it's floundering about with no real aim or direction at the moment and I need to find the time to set it right but at the moment with the temperamental Internet connection it's just not possible as it only works half the time and is far too slow...