forklift

First shipping damage. Shipping issues abound, will this consistently be a difficulty? ugh. The customer said it looked like a forklift went through the box. Demands a complete refund. Grr, freight carrier costing me money

top blocks

First we had to build the blocks. Then we started building the castle. Now the final blocks are just about put in place. This is rockin', quite exciting. we like the feel of goldstargames.com right now.

We have all this product everybody! If it's the awesome equipment you need, buy at GSG!


product types manufacturers distributors trademarks prices days suppliers locations inside curbside delivery trademarks trucking extensions customers first names last names contacts sets tables tops timeframes lists articles pictures dimensions contractors web hosting area codes marketing grids phone numbers orders furniture phones trials milestones - what a wild ride to get us to t-minus 16 hours 21 minutes to launch

power out

Had a power outage the other day. Must admit my first thought was "omg did I not pay the bill?"
Then we found out it affected the area, and despite our computers having battery-backup power, we saddled up in front of the white board and had a brainstorming jam.

As an employee a power outage gives a great reason to get out of work early for the day. In my mindset now, every moment of no internet or no electricity is bad for business.

shined up nice

Something that is encouraging and plays a bit to the ego is when a big company tells you this : “We normally don’t approve website stores - in fact we haven’t approved any in the past year - but we’re going to give you a shot.”

Here’s my timeline of e-business from the perspective of traditional manufacturers :
1992 - the internet? who would put their credit card into a computer?
1995 - are there really that many dollars being spent? I’m interested, but I don’t really get it.
1999 - wow there’s big money to be made online. sign up everybody with a website!
2002 -the bottom fell out! I knew this was going to happen. Nothing like the good ole days. I told you so.
2005 - Ok the web is here to stay. we must treat it as its own branch of business. Work only with full-scale legitimate web companies.
2008 - Gold Star Games, finally the answer we’ve been waiting for! ;)

foostastic

Get back on the train - nothing like multiple sales before 10am to keep your spirits up.

taxman

If I sell a product to a customer outside my state, I do not have to charge him sales tax. Officially he is responsible for paying sales tax to his own state, which of course he never will. surprised the IRS hasn’t jumped on this more aggressively. or maybe they have and I just don’t know it, which is why I am writing this post soliciting advice.

More specifically, as a drop shipper not in Georgia, if I sell a product that ships from the manufacturer in Georgia to a customer in Georgia, do I have any involvement in the collection of sales tax? quite a concern on a product that costs 3 grand.

pics & product

Adding product like gangbusters. we’re trying to have 1001 loaded by May 1st (although at our current pace we’ll only be at 600). still should be plenty to launch the “mother” site. also making pics - try to give ourselves the ‘appeal’ advantage. we’ll find out if that means anything - are customers looking only at price, or does the “feel” of a site with better graphics create search-ending loyalty?

Now I’ll overcome to the 3:00 lull with that liquid legalized crack :

b a logger

It's a sunshiny day - we have all the windows open for a nice cross-breeze.
Cut back our PPC budget so it's all quiet here on the eastern front.
Loading up the ecommerce platform with more product, getting ever closer to our launch goal of 1001 games. When we turn goldstargames.com live I'll lose the blog at that url, since for some reason I can't put it in a directory or even a subdomain. I need more programming friends! (or a whole lot of money)
So regardless of the order in which this appears, it's actually my first blogger post. Should I
use it, or post on a domain we own? For the moment, it seems I've settled on this as the solution.
Google was on our site today. not just 'bots - it appeared to be someone from their corporate IP looking for a foosball table. Yes you may buy a thousand.

wkd

There’s so much to do that you find yourself working every day. Saturdays are for cleaning up the paperwork that has amassed throughout the week, or fixing the squeaky wheel on your chair. Sundays we get in for just an hour or two, then try to relax so we have full energy for the new week.
Now it’s back at it gung ho. We’re adding product lines for the coming launch of the master site with 1001 products. Kudos to the companies that make drop shipping a breeze - they’ve embraced the internet age and will be more profitable for it. Business with an old school perspective require a much more hands-on approach, i.e. more work for me, but there’s more opportunity in it for us. If you don’t make it easy for customers to buy your product, we will.

big toys

Our mini-streak was broken yesterday with no sales coming through. Let’s start a new run today!

The bigger site is coming along - chess pieces are the latest addition. Chessmen in the fashion of the American Civil War, Napoleon’s army, Camelot, the Russian Tsars, etc. These will be just about our smallest types of game equipment, and we’re aiming for crossover shoppers; the same guy that buys a $2000 arcade game for his basement will be back for a $300 set of ornate chessmen when he needs to decorate his den. now it’s just down to great customer service and making people feel comfortable that Gold Star is where they go for high quality games.

Speaking of high-end game equipment, how about the most expensive toys of all? An Indycar team is what, a $10 million toy? Helicopters and F1 cars and those planes that fly around pylons in Europe may require a bit more, but there’s no real difference between 10 and 100 million to me. They’re all just out of reach - but they’re still fun to watch. I saw the first two races of the Indycar season, the first reunified races since the split a dozen years ago into two competing series that would do equally horribly. Now we can watch all the open wheel superfast toys together.

ring that sales bell

we don’t really have a bell
so right now we all just clap and make a lot of noise

get your order processing in order

foosball foosball air hockey. calls are rockin, orders are in, we have trucks going from florida to california, nevada to ohio, pennsylvania to new york, quotes and requests criss-crossing all over in every which way.

a few graphics are up : like this one on a list of air hockey tables
the DMI HT280 sold thirty hours after we added it as a product.

there’s so much dish about the industry. there are circuits of stories that distributors and manufacturers and wholesalers and operators all share. Did you hear blahblah told his customer blah, or that blahblah got cut off by blah, or that blahblah is sniffing around for a new job. it’s industry gossip and I doubt I have any amusement game readers yet but we don’t report industry gossip. we want to make sure that all the talk about us is always good - unless it’s that we’re taking some of their customers or making them work harder to keep up - so our plan is to be open and honest and be friends with every person that’s willing in the game industry. sell more fun stuff.

phone-in customers often want replacement parts. we don’t carry them. If it’s a $4 item that comes in 43 shapes and 91 colors, we’re out.

phones

What do you do for phones? local phone company, giant phone company, cells only, PBX, VOIP, and other options out there. of course we all want high quality, flexibility, and the cheapest price.

ClearTel has been a disaster. I never thought I would long for the regular ole phone company so badly - but I’m crawling back as fast as I can. The day we switched over from the Bell/AT&T megagiant to the T1 supposedly-faster internet connection and phone service that would offer greater flexibility is a day my internal organs would prefer not to relive. The phone numbers, toll-free numbers, voice mail boxes - none of it worked right. The T1 was slower and regularly cut out completely. Every person I spoke with in the ensuing days - literally 20+ representatives of ClearTel, were all really nice, but they one by one promised me the next person would fix it. I would get transfered, called back later, forgotten about til I called in again, and shuffled around the world until it was clear no one really knew what to do. My numbers would stop working, the toll-frees go dead, and voicemail give out so that their best advice was to start over again. The experience revealed layers of incompetence with that company.

So now I’ve vented to you - and faxed a contract back to Bell. Just work - just be reliable - just be up all the time. from an older perspective it’s amazing any of this stuff works at all. from a millennial’s frame of mind, it’s a disappointment when there is a half-second delay in delivery.

The company depicted in the cartoon below had nothing to do with my awful experience - but it’s a funny image of dealing with phone companies as we all must.