[Marketing] Re: [theforum] cafepress etc
David Kaufman
david at gigawatt.com
Tue Feb 17 08:43:24 CST 2004
Martin Paul Burns <martin.burns at uk.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> Couple of questions;
> 1) do we have any baby toddler sizes - noting that the number of evolt
> bairns is growing all the time ;-)
There are baby products available - i just set up a toddler-tshirt, a
creeper (one-piece) and a bib -- dunno why i skipped these previously. i
suppose because my toddler is now a teenager :-)
> 2) The main barrier to selling more to me is that you're paying
> shipping from the US, and then our local post office charges sales
> tax and charges you for collecting it on behalf of the government
> (and sales tax on the charges), which gets really expensive really
> quickly - a single shirt ends up as $50 or so. Any chance of having
> something similar EU based?
i hope stef can swing something on that side of the pond!
another possibility to consider, we can order our *own* stuff from
cafepress in bulk (quantities of 15 or more, with mixed sizes ok) and not
only do we not have to pay our own $5 markup, we get and additional
(similar) discount. although there would still be some shipping cost and
some VAT taxes i'm sure, we could make a bulk buy, and a bulk shipment to
some stragegic point euro-side.
See: Cafepress Bulk rates
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/bulk.aspx
for instance we can buy 15-plus t-shirts which currently cost us $13.99
and we markup to 19.00, for $9.00 each. we'd have to:
1. determine bulk buy + bulk shipping cost
2. research import taxes that will be levied
3. do the math to determine a euro price
that covers this cost + re-shipping "locally"
4. oh yeah, and setup a website + merchant account
hmmm, maybe that's the hard way :-)
but one thing *is* apparent. whether we get product from cafepress or a
local manufacturer, we'll still need #4) an "euvolt gear" ecommerce site,
a payment processing solution and a merchant account.
perhaps we can rally the troops (on the list) to pitch in and build such a
thing (shamelessly ripping off -- oh, say... cafepress frinstance as a
spec :-) -- it'd be a nice addition to the list of projects evolt
publishes as open source on sourceforge, as well as a starting point to
inspire stef's friend to ramp up for some real orders.
who knows, we might be able to help the guy fill the entire UK niche for a
cafepress-like service, get a cost-effective evoltgear store euro-side and
grow ourselves a generous commercial contributor in the process :-)
-dave
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