Let's talk about on-line sales

for the small time hustler.  One of the ironies that I'm facing, of course, is that I'm not at all different than all the other small time hustlers around Mountain Home.  The only difference, if there is any difference, lies in the resources I have available.  For one, I'm better educated, and I have a broad enough educational and employment background to make, as it were, "improvements." Lord that sounds arrogant in ways that I don't intend, and perhaps irrelevant to the world we're in, but pragmatically speaking, if one thing doesn't work, try something a bit different.

We'll never have the sales base in Mountain Home itself to sustain the store, I know that now with little or no doubt, but we do have some sales base.  Without the store, I would not have been able, for example, to sell  the fly rods on line.  No wholesale distributor will sell me fly rods to flip on eBay, but they will sell me fly rods to stock our little store.  While the bulk of my sales on line are things I have crafted, like the tying tables, selling the fly rods does boost the ante somewhat and creates a turn over of merchandise.

So, if the little store is going to survive -- and L, last night, in bed, said she wanted nothing more than for it to survive -- the on-line sales will need to be a significant part of the strategy.  For the numbers minded, right now, I have $512.60 in sales for the month of August.  In the store I have another $350, so that's about $850 in sales total.  There are some things I could do to boost the on-line sales, mostly just having a greater variety of things to sell and explore different venues.

For example, as we moved away from tying to sell the side tables, I had pretty much given up on Etsy.  Since they have gone public, however, they have become more aggressive in their push advertising and I've seen more Etsy ads of late.  Side tables are clearly not the thing -- we've pretty much had to give the damn things away -- but the crafter side of fly fishing, the hand crafted rod cases and fly boxes, and the fly tying, might be more in the Etsy "community's" wheel house.  Something to explore so I've posted two of my rod cases, and two of the tying tables, and just keep posting things as I make them.  We'll see ...