Can your customers reach you?

Today I had a call from someone who wanted to get in touch with a Truly Texan mall member. The company in question doesn't have a phone number on their website. That happens fairly often. And since I don't give out client information that isn't on their website, the best I could do was suggest this person use the email link on that website to contact the owner.

Not having a phone number on your website may protect your privacy, but it doesn't do much for:
1. your sales, or
2. your credibility.

I have a couple of rules I follow when making an online purchase. I never buy from a website that doesn't have a phone number. Nor would I buy from a website that doesn't have some sort of physical address - at least a city and state.

And these days you can buy prepaid cell phones that are cheap and use them to be your answering machine for your business. I'd bet that increased sales would more than pay for the phone over time.

Setting up Complex Inventory in PDShop Pro

If you use PageDownTech's shopping cart (the ASP.net version in this case), you might find this useful when setting up your product database. While I think they have a great little cart for the price, their instructions are sometimes less than useful.

This explains how to set up products in your database that have inventory-affecting options. This would include any clothing that comes in sizes, colors, designs, or perhaps items like art prints that are available in different color frames that you need to track in inventory.

Overview:
Only "items" can be tracked by the inventory part of the software. So to sell a product like a t-shirt that comes in different sizes and colors, you have to treat the t-shirt's options (colors, sizes, whatever) as "items."

Important: When you create these "items" that are going to be used as options for a product, they can only be used for that particular product. So don't think you can create a product called Medium and then use it for all your t-shirts. Keeping this in mind, you can see why we suggest using a naming convention as shown in our example.

EXAMPLE
Our example will be a t-shirt that comes in different sizes and colors.

1. Set up the parent item with an ID of Tshirt1. Don't worry now about the options (sizes & colors), but enter the descriptions, pictures, category, etc. In "inventory" enter the total of all sizes and colors you have.

2. Set up another item. This is going to be your first size and color option and let's say it's pink and size small. So give it a product ID of: Tshirt1-sp.
Enter Pink-Small for the Product name
Enter the appropriate number in the Inventory box.
That's all you do. No price, no description. . . just what I said above.

3. Repeat step 2 for each size and color, using product id's like Tshirt1-sb (for a small, black t-shirt), etc.

4. Go back to the parent item. Add an Option Group: Color and Size

5. Add an Item to the Option Group. In the popup window, enter the option you created earlier, such as Tshirt1-sp (or some part of the name if you don't remember what you called the options).
One or more items will be listed. Choose the appropriate one.
If necessary, enter a price adjustment, such as $2 increase for XXL sizes.
Save.

6. Repeat step 5 for all options (colors/sizes). Be sure to set one of the options as the default. You can also assign numbers to each option if you want them to show up in a certain order..

You're done!

And while I'm talking about this company, I sure wish they would add a customer forum. I would recommend the software to more clients (depending on their needs) if ongoing help were more available. And a customer forum is the best way to do that. But it seems they prefer customers pay extra for support after the initial 30 days or whatever it is (which is too short - whatever it is).

Prioritizing

Prioritizing is hard. Well, actually, it's not hard; I just forget to do it. And then I sit here doing stuff that could wait when I should be doing other stuff. But now that I think about it, I don't think I "forget" to prioritize. There are just some jobs I'm not excited to do, so I do piddly things, telling myself I've been needing to do them for a long time so I'll get them out of the way real quick. (and yes, I know it should be "really quickly" but this is my blog, not a term paper)

Piddly things like updating my blog.

Which I've now done.

So I'll get back to real work.

bummer

Westfall Horsemanship | Bridle-less riding

Westfall Horsemanship | Media Gallery

This is the most amazing horsemanship I've ever seen and the dedication and music make it truly memorable and very touching.