Survey For Leathercrafters

[electrathon]

Bruce,

I almost always agree with you. Not this time. I can go into any store that sells stuff and buy it, check out and am not charged a handeling fee, even though the store overhead is many, many times more than it would be if it was a mail order. I have never understood the total double standard. If I went to your shop and bought something from you, took up a half hour of your time selecting it and then handed you money would you then tell me that you wanted an extra $20 for the time it took you to handle the sale? Store overhead covers shipping/handeling/heat/cashiers/theft(this one is HUGE)and on and on. Mail order overhead is a fraction of that, then you want to charge more. I have no comprehension of it at all.

Aaron

[TXAG]

...exactly what Electrathon said...Couldn't have said it better myself.

[bruce johnson]

Aaron, We pretty much agree on most of it. Like I wrote, I m playing the devil's advocate a bit. I see what you are saying, but I am coming at it from the point of view of the mail order/internet small business that it appears he is setting up. The time and materials involved are a fixed cost of business of a business that ships. I time this out for myself. The most basic order takes me abut 15 minutes once I have got the order firmed up. That is the time to run the card or email a PayPal invoice, pull and pack, do a receipt, print a shipping label, and get it on. I am not adding more than rounding my flat rates up to the next dollar. I am packing a splitter, 3-in-1 or something big, I may have 45 minutes and a lot of packing material involved. I still just round my shipping up, and hope to hell my packing hasn't added more weight than I allowed. When I ship leather orders those two or three shipments a week time isn't a big time factor. When I ship 6 or 8 boxes of tools a day, it can be. My deal is that I have this factored in to a small degree. Is there enough margin for him to offer discount shipping, be price competitive, pay himself and maybe employees and still be profitable on the same things that the established sellers already have in place? I think that some can be beat with service, but it may be pretty hard to consistently beat them on price and keep the boat floating. When he planned to have choices to compare - I think Osborne punch vs. a Tandy punch side by side, is there enough there to warrant and afford stocking full lines of both? European tools? Is there enough demand and knowledge of them here to make it profitable to stock and sell in the US? My limited experience is that about 80% of the Dixon and Blanchard older tools I sell go to Europe or to Australia. Another 10% go to European trained leather craftsmen in the US/Canada and the rest go to US workers wanting to try them.