About

Our company is fundamentally changing due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. It is simple, our state shut down our storefront. The fact that we are a small retailer means we are not safe enough to have people walk into our business and yet the giant big box store next to us that holds thousands of more people is safe. I am most definitely in a lawsuit with the state for pandering to a company that simply brings in more tax dollars than my business does. But that is the main reasoning why we are changing our company to be an eCommerce-based company. We have had to learn a whole lot of things in order to survive in anti business economy. One of the biggest lessons we have had to learn was to shop in the correct places for our shipping supplies.

This all started with teh simple fact that we are going to have to sell our items online instead of in a store. That means we are changign from simply bagging our items or letting people who want to be environmentally friendly simply carry their items out. Instead now we have to use cardboard boxes or bags. So in order to stay competative we had to make sure we were getting these items at the best cost. It is really hard to compete with giant companies who are ordering these in massive quanitites and sending them to customers at a fraction of the cost of what the average person can buy them for.

Our process began by looking local. I am anoyed by big box stores now but I am still always for looking local and seeing what the cost of these companies will be. So I shopped around and found that the price was rather high for teh supplies we were going to need and the virarety of the items was not very vast. A major issue we ran into was quanitty. We were not going to be able to pick up thousands of an item but more like a few hundred at a time. That means multiple trips for higher costs, but it also meant that we had a place to go to get more. Buying local means that if we run out we can fix our problem within an hour which is a wonderful thing to be able to do in a bind.

The next process we went through was the one everyone goes to. We started shopping on Amazon and pricing out what we could do with prime shipping. We like to be able to get backups for products fast. We saw prices went down about 10 to 20% but for thsoe items we also ended up wiht more than prime shipping. Most of it was actually 2 week shipping for large quanitites. This means we have to buy much more than we need to insure we don't run out. Becuase restocking is simply more complicated and not nearly as consistant.

Our last look was at packaging supplies stores. This was where we found cardboard boxes at their best prices and also bags too. We learned that we could buy in bulk and cut down the cost by anohter 20% on top of Amazon. Shipping took longer, but we wer able to buy more for a much discounted price and that was going to help us stay truly competative.