Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

The carousels are finally working at 100%. I hope they stay that way now. If we just had more hours in the day to get everything on them now, we'd be set. That being said, we've got some inventory management issues that needed addressed as well. For some unknown reason, our system was set to throw out the largest order, then make sure we had 50% more than the second largest order in stock. For items that we were averaging a few per year without the occasional large order we now have large quantities of. What a mess. Now that we're stocking more of the first few brands, though, we're getting more orders out the door in a faster manner. There are more and more orders in stock at the time they're placed. Now, if we could just get them all pulled, boxed, and out the door same day we'd be really cool. We started looking at some of our competitors this week. Competitors? That's funny. In any case, they're selling things at a competitive price. We're paying...

Man, is it ever hard to let anything go. But, alas, I have to give up some of my duties. We're going to try outsourcing SEO for ToolBarn.com to FathomSEO . The plan is to give them the tougher of our websites, have them try for some more competitive terms in a few of the categories we can make a few bucks in, and then consider allowing them to expand their efforts to everything. Seems to make sense, but it is still difficult to let anything out of my hands. After all, site development has been done primarily by me for so, so long. At least I still have Tool Parts Direct that I get to do SEO on. Speaking of Tool Parts Direct, I've put up an initial Froogle feed for the site. This has, of course, led to more visitors. To really make the most of this extra traffic, we also opened up Priority Mail, and since I integrated it with our inventory management system we could actually lower the rates we charge to our customers. We also were able to pass along the savings we're getti...