As this is my personal blog I don’t regularly do health checks on it. A health check includes clicking every link and interactive step on the process. If you run a business with an online presence this is an essential regular step. Don’t wait for the log entries to alert you, and most users wont…

We are selling 80-100 items per week on ebay Australia. 60 of those are our bestselling item, the balance is products we are listing in an effort to find another bestseller. I got a call this week from Wendy at ebay who tells me we are in the top 3% of ebay sellers in June!…

I went through the list of stock sent to MGS Auctions today. They wanted my price expectations. This isn’t a reserve as such, rather the target prices that would see me giving them more product to sell. The target prices are well below cost, but at least it frees space in our warehouse and turns…

The guys from Mason Gray Strange Auctioneers came around on Monday and picked up two truckloads of stuff for auction in their rooms. That’s about 14 pallets and should go in their auction next week (I think Monday 10th May). In Bexley we sold about 5100 units in 12 weeks. We shipped about 4100 to…

It’s the end of April and I haven’t posted aside from getting the blog functional. Nothing on Psychology of the Deal this month, I’m too tired to be philosophical or insightful. It’s been a busy month. On March 12 we opened a clearance warehouse in Bexley on a short term lease to clear excess inventory.…

On Friday we decided to abandon our trial of the Compiere ERP/CRM solution. We concluded that a company of our size with our resources was not ready to impliment Compiere at its current development level. The stock control system was excellent. Our struggles were basically with GST and accounting. Compiere does not support GST inclusive…

We registered the new company last week. The domain isn’t in place yet so I can’t name it yet. Anyway today was our first trading day at the new location. Result: we covered the rent for the week. Yippee! I’ve also decided to get a business mentor. That sounds like a fun challenge and the…

I’ve been planning the next steps for my company. We’ve run ads for new distributors, I’ll be interviewing some applicants tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll hand that over to one of the staff as well. Actually that’s interesting because distributors mainly deal with my staff member who does stock allocations. Her role in a retail company may…

I’ve moved the company desktop to Mandrake Linux 9.2. There are some teething problems. The most surprising is the timing of double clicks is sufficiently different to our Windows NT boxes that we’ve all noticed it. I don’t run a corporate democracy. I wanted Microsoft products out of my business, so I picked a Linux…

We’ve been back at work for the last week but have been cleaning the warehouse and testing our Compiere ERP+CRM implementation. Going from MYOB to an ERP system is intimidating and overwhelming. I’ve had staff swearing at their machines for a week It hasn’t helped that I also forced Linux on them as a new…