Chess Sets and Chess Sales

Have you noticed these one page chess stores such as the UK Chess Store ChessBaron? Well, not actually one-page. But through RSS feeds all the store’s products are displayed on one page, so where the feed occurs it’s just one page. You then visit the chess store through one of the many hyperlinks available in the feed. Many feed web sites now display stores like this across many industries (i.e. not just chess). Don’t know what I’m talking about? Wanna see some examples besides the one above?

Try the US chess store ChessBaron - their one-pager is displayed in many feeds, and one example is here at the Improve Chess site. The UK ChessBaron is a little bigger because of the larger inventory the UK has. This UK chess store is probably the largest in the UK, probably Europe too - the range is very large. The pages for these chess store feeds take a while to load because thumbnails of their entire product catelog have to load, but the results are microcosm of the stores themselves in places other than the actual web address of the store. Cool huh?

 I’ve noticed that this concept has started to be exploited by companies selling other items too (well, let’s face it, chess aint gonna be first!), and where items can be added to the shopping cart too - something that would be a significant improvement to a simple RSS feed. Currently these one-page displays are just a glimpse of the site/store itself. You can’t buy from the store at the place the feed is shown, nor can you see contact details, where the store is, and what the returns policy (for example) is. You have to go to the original site for that. But the one-page chess store displays (such as the examples above) all the products retrieved from the store’s database, as a microcosm to get an idea of the quality of the goods. I wonder if the phenomenon will last? It’ll last as long as RSS lasts!

Theme chess sets, chess clocks, chess computers, all of these are periferal to our main business. So our sales of them don’t carry as much profit, but hey, we don’t have to stock them or handle the problems with purchasing, returns, etc. But if only the man blowing bubbles at the top of the diagram were really true. Is it? Well, after optimising our chess store website and attaining good position, importing most of our stock for selling as a conventional store, it’s the easiest part of our business to then include other chess products that we don’t actually stock - we’d kinda be crazy not to huh?

Chess Computers appear to have a very thin profit margin, so we don’t want to get involved in stocking them, let’s just drop ship them. It may suprise most readers to know that in the UK, most chess computers are funnelled through one company, who drop ship for most of the countries online chess stores. Good old Eric. Theme chess set suppliers already have mature defined programs for drop shipping, so we may as well take advantage of them, the margin can be quite generous - it would be madness to stock them. Chess clocks sales are low if steady, so the hurdle to stock them seems rather high, especially with Ebay being the automatic first stop for something like a chess clock.

To run a whole business on a drop ship basis is a much easier way to live, but exceptionally hard to really make the kind of margin needed for a successful business in chess retailing such as chess sets and chess boards. They therefore usually go for volume and a ‘Mall’ type of store, unless as in our case, it’s just perifery to the main stock. Once accomplished with enough lines and enough volume, it would be a relatively easy life. The destination retailer’s stock levels is always an issue (managable, coping with what they have in stock and out of stock) but the larger issue is that with increased web maturity and the subsequent difficulty in optimising a site for competitive phrases, the up ramp is steep indeed. Getting on the High street without paying through adwords is expensive, difficult and prone to great dissapointment with rogue SEO companies being difficult to detect among the many who have set up in this industry.

However, one important factor in favour of drop shipping is the superiority of the model over mere affiliate sites. Clicks go astray, other sites don’t want to link to affiliate sites, search engines take a dim view to affiliate sites, etc. At least with the drop shipping method, the funds are taken and neither the customer, the search engines, nor other websites and webmasters know that no stock is actually held. Not a bad life if kept in balance, the customer is well served, and the suppliers manage to make their profit too, something I often wonder about.

Well, kinda. Only they make us do it instead of themselves. It’s not as if we don’t give a reasonable business over the months. We have many parcels, some small some large, but courier profit margins are so thin that they appear to try anything on to make that little extra. Our packages from chess sales are generally between 3 and 15KG’s. So how come we have entries of 44 KG’s in our bill? Human error they say, we’ll get another bill out to you. Well, hang on, what about these re-delivery charges? Half our entries for the month have corresponding re-delivery charges, which in some cases would significantly affect any profitability for the sale (once Gordon Brown has his VAT cut, the Credit Card’s have their cut, the payment gateway theirs and the transaction processing company get their cut)… And whilst you’re sorting all that out those redelivery charges, what about those prices for chess deliveries Northern Ireland, Scottish Highlands and the Isle of Man?

Yes, we’re working with new couriers for our chess store, actually a broker who will sort out the right courier for the area of country, including Europe. With billing errors, if paid, it would be a wonder that we would make any profit from our chess store at all sometimes. What with the chess suppliers trying to get every penny possible, more and more customers trying for discounts on their chess sets, customer returns and now couriers doubling their bill, its a daily struggle. Mmmm, but I’d rather be in chess than in logistics. The key is to keep an eye on everything and not to trust bills from suppliers and couriers. We have a small company do our order fulfillment, and the guy who heads it also has the task of going through the couriers bill with a toothcombe - we’re fortunate to have someone so methodical and meticulous.

We managed to get our bill almost halved for the month of May, that kind of reduction really helps the bottom line. I think we can continue working with this broker. It’s a struggle to get couriers at the right price. Any suggestions anyone?