Joanne Musgrave

I spent Wednesday this week at the Online Retailer Roadshow learning about all the new things happening in online retail. Apart from all the great tips I learnt to improve my shop (not sharing here guys, sorry), I found two great new websites to shop from and learnt the meaning of a new word, bespoke!

Shoes of Prey were one of the guests at the conference. It’s an Australian site for bespoke shoes. Bespoke is the ‘fancy’ word for ‘custom made’. Surprisingly, they start from $195 and go up to $350 for ankle boots. I think that’s pretty damn good for a pair of shoes you get to design yourself. Go check it out, you’ll have oodles of fun playing with the shoe maker, and if you’re at all worried, there’s a 365 day money back guarantee if they don’t fit or if you don’t like them.

The second shop was Appliances Online. Now, normally, 27 year old with a huge success story like this business would make me want to hate him, but John Winning was a guest speaker and he was just so down to earth and worked hard to get his success – starting off by doing customer service himself 24/7.  After taking a good look through his site, I can tell you, I’m not walking in to a Harvey Norman again to buy a toaster or a kettle or a fridge or any appliance. Great company, great worth ethic, great success story, great products, great prices. Why would you go anywhere else.

David Lawrence have just lauched an online store. Normally I take a trek in to Newcastle to their standalone store and walk out with $400+ in new goodies. Now it’s at my fingertips 24/7. God help my credit card!!!

I’ve been getting the emails from Scoopon every day, and up until now, haven’t really seen anything I was interested in. $149 worth of foot at The Orient at the rocks in Sydney for $49, which is dinner for 2, entree, main, dessert & a drink for less than 25 bucks each.

Bargain!

Apparently in T-80 minutes, the rapture is going to happen. Judgement day is 21st May, 2011. Being an Athiest, thankfully, I’ll be staying behind with my loving husband and 3 border collies to live the rest of my life without people knocking on my door telling me I’m a sinner. 

Some enterprising Athiests in America have set up a service where they’ll come to your house, post-rapture, and collect your pets and take care of them here on earth after you’ve moved on to the next life. Eternal Earthbound Pets charge a very reasonable $135 for your first pet and $20 for each additional pet. So far, 259 people have signed up, so that’s a nice $35k for making a website that I’m guessing won’t have to deliver on it’s service. I must admit I’m impressed by the idea and dumbfounded that people actually signed up.

If you can’t take your pets to the next life, it does make me wonder ……. do you get to take your clothes? Can you pack a bag for travelling and fill a thermos with some chicken noodle soup in case you get a little peckish?

Read more about it at news.com.au.

For a work-a-holic, this long weekend has been a chance to actually catch up on a few things. 8 months ago we moved in to our new house, and quite literally just threw our food in the food cupboard and have been hunting high & low for things ever since. This meant that I had the following in the cupboard:-

• No tinned tomatoes, tomato puree or yeast that was in its’ used by date
• 31 tins of tuna
• 14 tins of soup & asparagus that will never get eaten

So, off I went to the supermarket to stock up on things we were out of, bought new flour, tomatoes, stock and lots of other essentials and tidied up by shelves and labelled them with a dymo gun. Then I raided our Lock & Lock containers at the shop and put all the new sugar, flour, almond meal and all the other junk I bought and lined all my Lock and Lock soldiers up in a row! If you’re clever and pick containers all with the same sized lids, they fit in perfectly and there’s no waste.

I ran out of time to try and perfect my Anzac cookies recipe, but I’ll take another swing at it shortly.

With Anzac day coming up, and me with a sweet tooth and having sugar only as a ‘sometimes’ food, I trawled through a sweets recipe book tonight trying to find something I cook “Janella” – (Good Chef Bad Chef – take a yummy recipe and substitute naughty ingredients for healthy ones.)

It’s a reallysimple recipe, but they’re still in then oven, so I have no idea what they taste like.

1/2 cup self raising flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
A good splash of olive oil (I used light)
Agave nectar, enough to wet the mixture (didn’t measure it, sorry)

Roll in to little balls. Bake for 15 minutes. Watch this space!!

Are you fucking kidding me Gerry? Your response to you losing sales in your Bricks & Mortar stores to ‘overseas online shops’ is to rip of Catch Of The Day and flog off remnant shit no-one wants to buy off someone who sells lounges and TV’s? For those of you who haven’t seen it, check out Harvey Norman Big Buys. Today he’s selling $40 mascara for $10. Why the fuck is Harvey Norman selling mascara, soccer balls & raised garden beds?

Yes, there’s a market for cheap remnant shit on the internet. Catch Of The Day (who I have shopped with on more than one occasion) have become Australia’s #1 online retailer from it, and have proven there’s a market for it.

What you fail to realise is this, they are #1. They have an extraordinarily large following and a fucking gigantic mailing list database of people who get their cheap crap in their inbox EVERY BLOODY DAY, myself included. It’s a fan-fucking-tastic website. I’m thoroughly impressed with their business model and I can see why they’re #1.

What I can’t see is this:-
1 – you having a snowballs chance in hell of competing with them
2 – this doing any good for your bricks & mortar proprietors. It’s there purely to line your own pockets. Do you not have enough money?

Admittedly, I’m mildly impressed that you’re not shitting all over your proprietors and competing with them online, but you’re so far off the mark here it’s not funny. Instead of trying to tweak your business model, you’ve left your current one exactly the way it is and dipped your toes in a totally different pond.

I’m just waiting for the interview with Ruslan Kogan where he tries to predict the fail date for your online venture. I’ll give you 18 months ’cause you’ve got some buying power and some room to fail.

Here’s a free tip for you Gerry, you’re not losing your sales to overseas online retailers, you’re losing them to people like the Good Guys and Kogan, because unlike the bulk of staff at most Harvey Norman stores,  they give a crap about customer service, unlike the 60+ year old lard arse who was so dis-interested in selling me a washing machine (and more interested in getting back to his coffee and donut on his desk) that I went and spent my $1,700 at David Jones instead.

Adios Harvey Norman. You belong in a museum. Big businesses are failing, watch out.

We have a wide variety of clients that we do websites for, but one of our latest clients really causes my husband to smirk every time he has to go and call on them. You see, we did a website for a rather classy Central Coast brothel, so James would have to be one of the few husbands in the world that gets to say “I’m heading out to the brothel” without getting in trouble!

My that’s a lovely spatula. Nothing says “I Love You” like a spatula. Get yours soon at Spatula City.

I just came across a pretty cool iPhone Ad that allows you to turn your iPhone in to a mobile credit card processor. It’s from iCCPay and syncs up with SecurePay, eWay or PaymentExpress.

It’s PCI DSS compliant and a nifty way for tradies or stall holders at markets to take card payments without lugging around a POS machine.