Disney’s three new pirate movies has resurrected “pirate” as
a fun concept for children as opposed to the not fun making
“pirate copies” of these same movies. The idea of “the wallpaper
pirate” goes back to the 1980’s where toll free 800 numbers were
advertised in the back of magazines.
Customers really loved the concept. They felt they had a
right to shop around for the best price. They had spent all the
time looking through many books in a number of different stores.
Although various sales personnel attempted to help them, it was
the customer who did the real work.
You would not believe how much retail store owners hated the
800 number wallpaper sellers. These retailers believed they were
stealing their customers. The retailers would spend untold hours
with the customers who would then not purchase from them but dial
an 800 number to place the order. It was the wallpaper retail
store owners who called this type of business a wallpaper pirate.
A retail store has expenses that a wallpaper pirate does not
have. Each wallpaper book costs between fifty and one hundred
dollars. Retail store space cost thousands per month in any
location that has any traffic at all. Floor sales staff costs
many hundreds per month.
The costs for an 800 number business includes the cost of
the operator giving out quotes and taking orders. The normal
rate is about nine quotes per order. Now if you lower your
price, you get more orders with less quotes. And if you raise
your price you get less orders with more quotes. So you can go
out of business by lowering your price and you can go out of
business by raising your price. Your variable costs vary with
volume.
But now we have the internet and there is no cost to giving
a quote. So now the formula is simple. You rise your price and
the volume goes down. You lower your price and your volume goes
up. Your variable costs are constant.
Right now, anybody who has access to wallpaper can get on
the internet and sell wallpaper on-line. You just give your new
internet business a different name than your present non internet
business and you are on your way. Call it “AAA Wallpaper
Discount”. Put all key words you can think of in your meta tags
and in your page content. Pretty soon you show up on the search
engines. Put together some quick ads and pay per click and you
get instant traffic.
But you cannot compete with the “big boys” because you do
not have access to all books at the best prices, unless, of
course, you sign up for the highest cost book plans for all the
vendors.
But then again, many of the vendors save their best prices
for stores who invest in inventory. Your investment will be in
the tens of thousands of dollars in inventory to get the prices
you need.
So now your fixed expenses have risen and more and more
businesses use this same model. So those selling at the same
price see their volume dropping because it is now shared with
everyone and their brother (a figure of speech indicating heavy
competition).
So what is left is developing a niche market where you get a
few products a really good discount and then sell at a fair
price. Your success is therefore based on picking the product
and marketing that product effectively.
To give a little of my personal experience, I wrote the
software program for Delta Paint in New Jersey in the 1980’s for
their National Wholesale inbound telemarketing business. They
sold wallpaper for one price in their stores and at a lower price
in the back room over the phone. The local customers had no idea
they could get a lower price by calling the 800 number.
I started selling wallpaper myself on the internet in 1997
by using a simple e-mail technique. Later I converted my software
to work on the internet and have been constantly upgrading since
then.
If you are considering selling wallpaper online yourself,
the best advice I can give is to be prepared to change quickly
and often.