Gift Rep Sandy

Posts Tagged ‘Idaho Gifts Wholesale’

If you hadn’t noticed, the days are starting to get shorter, the nights are cooler, the kids are heading back to school … change is in the air!  Late summer is the time of year that my sale rep business starts transitioning from tourist season to holiday season.  Even though we have some of the hottest days of the year in August, I need to start thinking about Christmas, holiday products to offer my customers, and new products from my list of vendors (lines I represent)

With all these changes, comes new pages and updates to my website:  www.idahogiftswholesale.com.  I will be spend large chunks of time over the next weeks to gathering information, taking pictures, and offering new products to my retail buyers for October/November buying.

On the home front:  I need to take my laptop back to my friends at Cactus Computers in Moscow.  The crazy machine is running slow and crashing programs even after I doubled the RAM capacity a few weeks ago.  We bought a Toshiba laptop in March of last year — a change from our usual Dell purchases – because we were told that Toshiba made the best laptops.  Well, you could not prove that by my experiences with this one!!  Hopefully, my friends can fix the problem and I can go about my business.

We are still spending everyday at the downtown office to access the internet.  It looks like we will not be able to replace our high-speed internet at home.  Malcolm has set up a dial-up service, but I have not yet tried it.  I suppose I will want to go to sleep waiting for it to load up, but at least we will have service at home again.

So enjoy these last days of summer.  I get back with an update on the fall changes as they unfold.

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Yesterday, Malcolm and I attended the Stores Online web marketing workshop in Spokane, Washington.

Stores Online “provides a wide range of solutions for entrepreneurs seeking a trusted resource to help them launch and/or manage their online business.”  According to their website, “StoresOnline is the most comprehensive eCommerce and marketing service provider because of its best-of-breed software, customer support and training.”

We have been working with Stores Online since 2004, and have used their templates to develop our first websites.  I love their e-commerce system if you are selling a lot of products. We use it for our websites:  Idaho Gifts Wholesale and Tastes of Idaho — both sites list hundreds of products!

The workshop was great!  Even though we have been using their templates for years, attending this refresher course gave me some new information and ideas for my upcoming website:  GiftandGourmetWholesale.com (still under construction at the time of this post)!  Also, I got a chance to realize how much I have learned and implemented over the last 5 years since starting our websites!

One of the tools they gave us was Compete.  After you register with Compete, you can compare your competitor’s websites to see which search terms visitors use to access their site.  Very valuable tool to see what keywords and mega tags and descriptions you want to add to your own site.

We have had a love/hate relationship for Stores Online for most of the time we have been working with their system.  Their templates and Merchant Service section is very complete and helpful — probably one of the most complete web marketing system I have ever seen!  But, we have gone back and forth with them several times in the past over URL and template information changes.  Seems that we bought the original system (6 customizable website templates) BEFORE they made their major updates and they are unable to update our websites without starting all over again!  A job I am not willing to do nor willing to pay their tech staff $50/hour to do for me!!

Despite our disagreements, I still use Stores Online and like the options they give me.  And I enjoy the workshop and learned lots of new things to implement on my sites.

So … watch over the next weeks and months for my new website on their NEW system:  Gift and Gourmet Wholesale!

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Had some warm beautiful days in north central Idaho this past week!  Spent some quality time outside enjoying the sun, the view and my two cats, Jazz (shorted from Jasmine when we found out it was a HIM and not a HER!) and Rodger.  Some of the joys of being self-employed is picking your own times to work, and often, in my case, it comes in 2-3 hour blocks with time off to be lazy.

This morning I caught up on my housework before settling in my computer chair for my first block of work time.

Idaho Gifts Wholesale, my main wholesale site, is getting ready for a new product line launch.  I’ve been spending hours inputting a line of dry mixes to my site and am very excited to get it listed for all my customer.  When I am done with the product input, adding pictures and publishing, my newsletter will go out to the 400 or so buyers on my email list announcing the line.  An exciting time!!

Also working with my husband, Malcolm on some new blogs sites.  Malcolm and I have a great working relationship (well … most of the time!).  He has his expertise and I have mine.  We often help each other with our strengths and weaknesses.  Malcolm is a great idea guy, sees the big picture and can plan projects ahead.  I am the exact opposite as I like to  sit down and ‘get it done’.  When we work together, we make a great team as we balance each other.

Tomorrow I will be heading downtown (10 miles down the hill) to Orofino to met a gift store owner from Pierce.  She ordered some custom labeled Idaho Redneck products for her new store.  I am looking forward to meeting her as alot of my on-line customers I never see.

I’ll check in with you later ….

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