Ordinarily we offer our annual look ahead towards year’s end, after the dust has settled down, we’ve had a chance to catch our breath and generally get a better sense of where we have ended up come the post-holiday season. This year, however, we decided to change things up a bit by sharing our plans for the coming year several months earlier.
For starters, we’ve decided to launch a lengthy, multi-issue print ad campaign beginning with the December issue of World War II magazine. This is where things started for us almost two decades ago so we decided to both return to our roots and expand our customer base by reaching out to those magazine subscribers that may not be aware of our store or the lines we stock. As such, the first print ad will cover the re-launch of Corgi’s Military Legends series and will be picked up again in the January issue of Military History magazine. As the series expands, we will likely run follow-on ads covering some of Corgi’s latest offerings.
Next up, we will be moving our storefront to Shopify, a Canadian-based e-commerce solution that offers greater flexibility than our current web hosting solution provides. Our plans are to move over all of our current product, customer and order records to the new service so we can provide a seamless migration that will not impact sales and/or the customer experience which has proven to be so vital to our existence. We will likely run both sites concurrently for at least a month to ensure all of our records have been successfully migrated to the new platform. Look for the transition to occur in the first quarter of 2020.
By moving over to Shopify, we will also be able to offer true multi-channel support across all of the marketplace sites we now operate on as well as those planned to come online in 2020. This will include satellite sites on both Target+ and the resurgent Toys “R” Us, and could include others still on the drawing board that have yet to be finalized. Presently, we must operate each channel independently, which creates a bit of a problem maintaining correct inventory levels across all platforms. Its a bit like trying to keep several plates on sticks spinning freely instead of of watching them crash to the ground for lack of attention. By moving to Shopify, everything will be “under one hood” thereby preventing instances where we could, theoretically, outsell an item or make available inventory on one channel and not on another. Shopify provides real-time inventory updates that are designed to prevent these types of occurrences from ever happening.
Going deeper in inventory to support multiple retail channels also means we cannot go quite as broad. As a result, several lines are being cut and/or phased out so that we can make room for additional stock. In most cases, the lines we are shedding were either experimental categories that never quite took off or ranges that are under-performing largely for lack of support at either the manufacturer or distributor level. For instance, the Eaglemoss Warships of the World line has run its course, no longer in vogue due principally to the unavailability of certain models.
Additionally, Shopify has fully integrated additional payment gateways that we currently are unable to offer such as ApplePay and Venmo, along with Apple’s newly launched credit card. As more and more payment gateways come online, this will prove essential for a growing business to thrive in a digital world.
So, that’s pretty much it for now but we’ll keep you posted should anything else change. As always, we look forward to serving your needs in the diecast military space. Have a wonderful year.