When Good Vendors Go Bad

Everyone who owns a business that sells product (as opposed to a service) is beholden to their vendors, especially when their product sells. So imagine our dismay when one of our highest volume vendors announces that one of my somewhat decent selling products goes from a cost of $50 to a cost of $125. So, we'd have to up the retail price appropriately, with no change in the product.

At first, you could say - sounds reasonable. Manufacturing costs went up, so the price went up. Well, that's not what happened. Here is what happened. Originally the product was only meant to be given away (understand me here, the product was only intended to free) if you ordered $500 worth of the related items - that don't sell nearly as well. Well, the bigger item became so popular, that other customers of theirs (as well as ourselves) started ordering it and it alone. So, a salesman (not sure who and not very relevant) pulled a price out of thin air and starting selling the item for $50. The price stayed the same for well over a year, too, but now the price is $125 instead.

But, the good side of this is, is that if you have a good salesperson - like we do, then you can work out something. While we are being charged the $125 for each piece, she is going to send us a third one for free, which makes the hit a little less noticeable or at least lets us increment it on the website.

But, bad bad vendor, for not controlling your salespeople well enough to establish prices on every product, even if you they are not intended to be sold individually. They have to know someone is going to ask for that piece alone.

AdWords. AdCenter. Yahoo Search. Amazon. Oh My.

With the number of portal sites opening - and have been around - there has to be a better way to make better use of our time. Small sites are already stretched thin enough as it is, but in order to get reliable - even if sometimes expensive - traffic, we have to make feeds for:

• Shopzilla
• Shopping
• Amazon
• Froogle
• Need more? There are thousands

Just to name a few.

On top of this; we also have to create keyword bid lists for:

• Yahoo Search Marketing
• Adwords
• MSN Adcenter
• Many different 2nd/3rd tier search engines

There has to be a way to consolidate all of these into a single - either web based or windows based - software system that lets you upload new ads, keywords, items to the appropriate place, organize them to each of their liking. Manage your bids, track your ROI and keep a budget all without costing a fortune. Something that'd let you stop keywords at one or all of them at the same time, add new products to a given with a click of a button and upload it instantly. Why are we continued to be forced to use these impossibly difficult GUI interfaces.

Given the right software, it seems like a business owner (or a trusted employee) could easily manage all of this themselves in a few minutes time. If you think anyone you hire through these analytic companies spends more than that on your account, you are kidding yourself. "Dedicated" account rep is really just a selling point and thus a bunch of bunk. I've tried out several of these services. Each one is very non-responsive or slow in getting you the data you need.

Optimizing ad text. Please. What more do you need than a url for the person to click and (probably) the price they will see when they get there. Assuming the clicker is reading anything more than that is fantasy. All web owners know this. No one reads your website. Or they wouldn't call and ask questions that are plainly obvious on every page of the site.

Selecting keywords? Come on. Who knows my market (and my keywords) than me, the person who runs the business every day. Do I suspect Bob over in CA (3000 miles away from me) knows what terms will create buyers better than I do? Unlikely, he neither has the time (he has 50 other clients to be "dedicated" to today) nor the knowledge of my field (chances of this guy being a widget expert are 1 in a billion). We all have the same tools to track keywords. Wordtracker. Only YOU know what keywords convert browsers into buyers.

 Someone, please, just give us a piece of software that lets us manage our keywords/feeds/bids/ROI in a single setup without having to type our same username password 80 times to do it. Is it really that difficult? I find it amazing that these big companies don't work together (We all know they are all part of an  oligopoly anyways - they raise their prices at the same time or in close proximity, have similar marketing tactics, etc) and make it easier for people to use all these things at once. Easier = more clients = more money. It isn't rocket science. Really.

We have price comparison software for UPS/FedEx/USPS that is widely available. Surely getting a package (at the best shipping rate!) from my warehouse to Podunk, LA is more difficult than putting a keyword on the internet. Why isn't it?

Discount-Mats.Com: A Lesson in Business

By now, you have heard of the story about Discount-Mats.com (I won't link to the site for reasons that will become apparent later). A soldier in the military wanted to order mats from this website and asked if they shipped to APO addresses. Someone at the company emailed back saying that they do not ship to military addresses, and if they did they wouldn't ship to Iraq and that the Army should pull out.

I own a small business and let me start by saying that I ship to APO (military addresses) but only reluctantly. It's a pain in the butt to do so. You have to fill out customs forms, for some reason. You have no idea when the package will arrive - only recently has the USPS enabled tracking for such shipments. And, an international company handles the mail for much of the way (a customer/soldier informed me of this months ago) and they are not reliable. So, your shipment can arrive in a week or it can arrive in a month. Who knows. Most customers with APO addresses understand this, some do not. I like having a certain delivery date and I hate filling out customs forms. But, still, I ship to military addresses.

The guy at Discount-Mats.com said they would not ship to Iraq. How does he even know the package is going to Iraq? APO's go to New York (I believe) then are forwarded to their final destination. Putting your personal feelings behind your business is a very quick way to put yourself out of business. I've learned this a long time ago. More recently, when customers have personally threatened my life (maybe I'll tell the story another time) for no reason at all, you have to stick to your nonemotional responses or you will eventually lose control of what you have set up.

Discount-Mats.com may well be out of business in a few months. Or it may not. This is a very short term story and no one will remember it in 2 months. The internet's memory is long, but peoples' memory is short. What Discount-Mats.com HAS earned because of this is a ton of incoming links to their site. And, as we all know, incoming links help you rank in search engines. So, this blog will not honor their insult by linking to the site. I know I'd love to get inbound links from WSJ, NYTimes - oh wait, I have those, and other major papers. But that doesn't happen by properly running a business, unfortunately. Controversy will probably propel Discount-Mats.com to the top of the SE's in no time at all. Congratulations pontificators!

So, once again, (eventually) there is no such thing as bad publicity. Every major paper online links to this site now and will, for at least, a while.

A story yesterday suggests that Discount-Mats.Com did not fire the employee as they had said.

All of the research I have done shows this to be a one or maybe two man operation.  A search of the workers compensation database shows no company by that name listed.  That means either they don’t pay out over $500 a year to employees, or… they have no employees.  I very much doubt the assertion that someone has been fired.  The rest of the media has just accepted this story and moved on.  I have placed calls today to both Faisal Khetani and Sajid Nasir (the person listed in the article as the vice-president of the company) and have yet to get a phone call back.

I did not do the same research, but I'll assume its accurate. It is VERY easy to run an internet based business with one or two people. You can easily mask how many people you have by having generic email address (cs@domain.com, contact@domain.com) and no one knows you are working alone. I did this the first few years I was online. I bet the guy who wrote the email was the owner, possibly the co-owner of the company. There is, simply, no one to fire.

But, the customer claims to never have received an apology from the company. The company says they did apologize. I'd tend not to believe Discount-Mats.com.

Either way, this is a good lesson in business. About being emotional in your business dealings. Benefiting from controversy. And making headlines for yourself.

All-in-all, if the company can survive through this short period of turmoil, I'd say it has a bright future ahead of itself. Especially since the offending employee no longer works there *wink wink*