Busy, busy, busy

Well, Christmas season has finally come. We are doing many more orders now compared to normal, and quite a few big one's. I spent half of today doing orders over the phone with customers, which is fine.

Except the system in Magento needs a little fixing 'cause it doesn't allow you to do PayPal in the backend and the Canada Post backend section doesn't work either. Which is annoying but livable I guess - I should stop using the backend and just do everything from the front-end. It'd work better I would think...

Ah well. Small changes, but at least we're seeing good sales now.

Office locations

So, we're likely going to get an actual office space. Since I've started working on this biz more often and have no real job, it makes sense to move logistics in-house now instead of doing it externally and paying someone a lot of money.

This does raise questions about deliveries/etc. but I think for the most part, it won't be that big an issue. Especially if it's close to where I live, the entire costs/benefit ratio really starts weighing towards us.

I'm off to see another three locations today, we shall see if I get a call for anything else. This should be, as someone once said, interesting.

Some days, I can't decide if I love Magento or hate it. I finally figured out how to do product promotional packages correctly, after spending nearly a few business days doing it. On and off that is, because I'd think I'd have it fixed, check it oua dn realise it's not.

So to do it properly, you need to create multiple selections for each specific item on the product promo, making sure to include each specific on it and making sure it's required and not editable by customers.

So a good example is that for Settlers of Catan, you'd have to include the base game, the 5 and 6 player expansion and anything else you want, in seperate 'options'. Furthermore, yo ucan only choose radio buttons because checkboxes do not give you the ability to say 'no edits'.

Ugh. I'm stll wondering if it'd be better to just put the entire settlers of catan products on one page and then direct customers to just that. while giving orders that order both an automatic discount, thus reducing pages down in number.

Interesting question... I'll have to test it out one day. Ah well.

No sales

Oh gods. No sales yet. There's at least 200 people who have gone through the site, and not one of them ahs bought.

I just turned Adwords back on later today, let's see what happens. I hope it works out well... but there's no guarantee. I'm so frigging worried it's going to cause a problem. Ah hell, we won' t know till it happens. I can just cross my fingers now.

Starlit Citadel has a new site design and CMS!

And it lives. The new CMS and board game site design is complete. And I must say, the site looks really good.

I'm still debating whether or not we want to go into the system and change some of the design - specifically, taking away the white links and making it dark blue. Also, there are a few things on the site that used to look good but because we removed the CSS code for it, such as links and bullet points and bounding boxes, they just don't look that good anymore.

Ah well, one step at a time.

And there's a slew of things we need to add and edit on the site too that we just did not have time to finish. We shall have to see if it works out, I really think it should but who knows eh?

Still, there seems to be a ton of things that I can do now, if i can spend the time to learn that won't require working with my IT people. Which is all for the good - board game landing pages, specific board game category pages and the like.

So the site changes have been going well. Add the nice little boost we got from sales for our latest games and things are going well.

Well, beyond the rather annoying fact that we had more copies of some games coming in than we wanted. Bah! Now, we have 7 copies of Jack Expansion.

Hmmm...

I wonder if it's because I'm so slow in posting and just never do so that this blog doesn't really have any PR as yet. That and the fact that the vast majority of my post thus far have been rather short.

Then again, how long can I write these posts. Bah. Rather annoying really, but I guess we'll continue to have to play with this to see if it actually ever works.

Realistically speaking though, I should have continued updating this. And transferred and fixed my LJ account a long time ago. Ah well.

That is life.