Monday, July 30, 2007

CHA Indecision

I must confess. I am having a hard time deciding what to order from the CHA Summer 2007 releases. There are so many beautiful products. That's not the problem. Limited space and limited budget are the problems I have.

One of the tricky things about an online store (versus a physical store) is you don't really get to see your customers and their responses to products. Sure, you can comb through web logs and see in general how long people stayed on a given page... But you definitely lose something in the communication process.

So, I will spend a day or two diving into forums and blogs to see if I can get a peek into the online customer's mind. And decide if I should order the entire BasicGrey line, or just the collection packs...

Oh, life is hard for the indecisive!

Monday, July 23, 2007

Evil SPAM and the Quest to Communicate

I never realized quite how problematic SPAM can be until I started an online store. There is a constant concern that an e-mail might not have gotten to the recipient. SPAM filters are a great tool, but I'm as guilty as anyone of deleting all junk mail without checking for anything I might need or want in it.

Well, not knowing whether or not an e-mail reached it's intended recipient is a large part of why we are changing to a new Newsletter software.

We hope our customers will find it easier to manage their subscriptions and cancel them easily when desired. We hope to create increasingly professional and useful e-mails that our customers will look forward to receiving. We hope the software will help us stay better connected by making news easier to produce. But mostly, we expect the new software to allow us to see if our customers are actually receiving the news they requested.

I'd love to hear what you think of the newsletter! What would you like to see added/removed from our e-mails? What kind of scrapbooking information are you not getting elsewhere?

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Introducing... The PaperCents.com Blog!

Welcome to our new blog. We hope to discuss a variety of topics, including the business side of online scrapbook stores, product reviews, our personal challenges, news and offers for our online store. And we really look forward to hearing from you!