SALES TO ASTONISH #30 - FEBRUARY 2025
It’s beginning to feel that The Unreality Store is at a bit of a crossroads or perhaps a plateau would be more appropriate.
I may have mentioned this in past columns and I am sure long time readers (if there are many of you?) will be able to confirm, but I am incredibly proud of what I have achieved with The Unreality Store. Moving away from full time salaried employment with all the other benefits such as paid holidays, sick leave and pension wasn’t a hard decision at the end of my tenure in property sales in relation to my working environment/stress etc, but it was in terms of my financial security.
I had squirrelled away some savings and felt that I’d had enough to get the business established and for it to start paying the bills etc. If you are reading this and are thinking about setting up a small business I’d have lots of advice or opinions on what to do or not to do, but you can never ever have enough money set aside to offer you that financial safety net you have with full time employment. There are many many benefits to being self employed and additionally for me on a personal note being able to have a business that I am passionate about and a medium I love. That said taking the step into self employment means that you forego holidays, work longer hours, stress about things you’ve never had to worry about in regular employment as another department or team did that and you never want to be sick because you are essentially paying you.
Over the (almost) 6 years of trading as The Unreality Store I’ve got the business into a position where it just about pays the bills each month which is a phenomenal achievement given the majority of my sales come from the website. And if it weren’t for the support of both regular, old and new customers I wouldn’t be sitting in the Ford garage waiting for the brakes to be done writing this column.
To circle back to the statement that opened this month’s missive, whilst I’m paying the bills there’s not much of a ‘rainy day fund’ for those life emergencies like fixing the brakes etc so the website has to generate sufficient enough income each month to cover regular outgoings and this incidental events. Plus any buying in of new stock. And looking on some of the Facebook groups that I am a member of it seems that I am regularly missing out on opportunities to improve and broaden my stock offering. February was quite simply the worst month I have had for a long long time and one where whatever I seemed to do had next to no bearing on changing the downward direction.
Life is full of routines - I work towards a Thursday product launch and a smaller one on Saturday every week and then that re-sets and repeats. We all work to the end of the week or month to get paid, pay the bills and then that re-sets and repeats for the following month. I can often tell by the middle of the month whether or not I need to up the ante in terms of listing more items to get more sales to pay the bills. February started strongly but the fade to mid-month was alarming.
In part I would say that my product launch decisions were possibly responsible for this. Extenuating circumstances surrounding stock re-homing and the plans to secure a new HQ for The Unreality Store in 2025 meant that I made the decision to go with a couple of single title launches rather than a mixed theme. This is ok if there are a few people looking to fill gaps in their collections but as evidenced by the Avengers launch mid-Feb if people aren’t desperately looking to complete their Avengers runs then this type of stock often sits around for a few weeks or months without flying off the website the morning of the launch. I should know better but a box of Avengers and the following week a box of Uncanny X-Men were all I really had to easy access to. That said I was surprised that I didn’t sell the copy of Avengers #196 at £50 (or less with discount) and it remains unsold at time of writing. Taskmaster’s clearly no longer the hot commodity he once was.
As I’ve written about in the past I kept telling myself that I wouldn’t get too hung up on data and analytics but when things start to slow down I have this overwhelming urge to find out why exactly it’s happened and what I can possibly do to avert the slide. Getting too bogged down in data can be a bad thing though and it can lead you down the proverbial rabbit hole. I never paid too much attention to the geographical location of my audience. About 5% of the website visits come from the USA but I do precious few sales there due to exorbitant postage costs. The remainder largely comes from UK based web traffic. Within that all the major cities are represented with London coming out on top. However over the last 3-4 months every day I have noticed multiple visits (sometimes into double figures) from Dunstable. Now this wouldn’t necessarily be worthy of writing about were it not for the fact I have never ever sold anything to anyone in Dunstable. So my conclusions are that there’s someone living in Dunstable who visits the site multiple times a day, possibly to eventually buy something, but being an online retailer I have no way of engaging with that person to understand what they are looking for and/or why they haven’t bought to date. Yes I could try social media to make a connection but that would make me come across a some kind of loon shouting into the abyss. So for now Dunstable-person visits (at the time and date of writing this there’s been 3 visits so far today) and I miss a chance to engage and a sales opportunity. Now imagine if there were multiple Dunstables visiting the site every week….. You begin to see my challenge….
I think the other key metric worth mentioning is the high level of shopping cart abandonment I experienced in February. Of the 120 people who reached checkout during the month 40 (or 33%) failed to purchase something. Now I have no further data to explain the reasoning behind these numbers other than people don’t want to pay £5 postage for one comic (which is understandable) or as I mentioned earlier the high international shipping rates prohibits sales abroad. But they don’t wholly account for 40 lost sales in the month and I’m sure that being able to shop remotely allows this to happen more frequently rather than the physicality of taking something to the counter in a shop and then leaving it there and exiting without paying. This is another area of the business I continue to muse about and how I can possibly mitigate some of these lost sales by some level of diversification.
I tried to breathe some life into the flagging sales rate by running a 25% off Flash Sale on 17th February. As I was away and this was a spur of the moment decision I was only able to promote it via some social media posts rather than an emailer. The result was 1 sale. Now whether that was a result that people aren’t ‘getting out of bed’ for 25% off or whether my social media reach isn’t hitting the right people or people just missed the posts remains to be seen, but look, in an effort to reframe my thinking to be more positive, one sale was better than none 😎
As the mid-month slump continued I attempted to put some new stock on the website at different times of the week -
Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Sunday night and followed this up with some social media posts. Whilst this generated a lot more website traffic it didn’t result in a huge surge in sales.
I even attended Northampton Comic Con on 23rd February which was a result of my deposit being transferred over from a cancelled event prior to Christmas. Given my track record at these shows during 2024 I had zero expectations and had decided to take a number of £1 comic boxes to let people pick up some cheap reading and possible future treasure. It would seem that even £1 comics are of precious little interest to the convention attendees and I just about covered my costs. I doubt that taking along full priced stock would have made any great difference to the result. I said my farewells to some of the fellow dealers I had become friends with and hope to see them sometime in the future.
By the time February was drawing to a close I found myself continually checking the website to see if there had been any sales, wondering why there hadn’t been any kind of payday uptick in sales, cancelling non-essential appointments like a hair cut and counting every penny (literally I coppered up as my partner calls it 😆) and vowed this cannot happen again.
So to return back to where I began, I find myself at somewhat of a crossroads. Do I continue on with The Unreality Store and accept that there will be these big bumps in the road or do I try and secure some other type of employment that will help mitigate these occurrences or do I plan an exit strategy??
That’s more of a T Junction than a crossroads but I think you get my gist 😝
