As we close out the month of October, I just wanted to remind everyone that we will be closed for vacation from Saturday, November 27th until Sunday, November 4th. All of our marketplace stores will be shuttered during this time frame although you will still be able to place orders through our main web site. Naturally, we will not be around to answer any questions but will do so upon our return.

Our Amazon store has been up-and-running for several months now and we’ve witnessed phenomenal results as well as some curious issues.  We’re still learning the ins-and-outs of selling on Amazon and the importance of winning the “buy box” as a means of generating sales and moving inventory. Currently, we only sell to the United States and Canada. We were hoping to make the Amazon store available to customers in Europe and elsewhere, but have since learned that you must have a physical location within each “territory” to cater to the clientele. It doesn’t make sense for us to use their Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) operation as a means of selling product overseas due to the storage costs involved as well as logistics and other criteria that invariably affects our bottom line. So, for now, if you’d like to make a purchase from us and you live outside North America, eBay and our main web site remain your only course of action.

We’ve also discovered several other problems with selling on Amazon that we are attempting to address as expeditiously as possible. First, which ever retailer creates a listing for an item, generally gets to provide much of the information for it, even if its superficial in nature and less than optimal. For instance, we’ve noted, time and again that an item’s title may be inaccurate, containing little descriptive information and sometimes accompanied by line art images instead of actual photos of the product. Moreover, many products are not even listed on Amazon since they do not come with a UPC bar code or other means of digital identification to be entered into their product catalog. After we return from vacation, we plan to address this issue by purchasing independently-created UPC codes and affixing them to each item, thereby enabling them to be sold through Amazon and elsewhere. We’ve told several distributors and manufacturers that they need to correct these deficiencies in their product packaging if they hope to sell their products on Amazon or elsewhere, as more and more marketplaces require UPCs, EANs or ASINs for inclusion in their product catalog. Frankly, its a headache that a retailer shouldn’t have to address in this day-and-age. Be that as it may, we will rely upon this short-term fix as a means of getting more product online across the entire spectrum of marketplaces.