As many of you may know, I run an on-line "store" for small press genre titles. The site is called The Genre Mall and it has been around for quite a few years.
Traffic and sales have been increasing at the site, and I'm working on ways to try to maximize this. The most obvious reason for doing this is that I've been looking for a "real" job for a while, and haven't had any luck, so we need any extra income we can get.
We're using three different approaches to try to increase income from The Genre Mall. The first, and most obvious, is that we've added donation buttons to a number of the pages. I've heard mixed reviews on taking donations from a wide variety of genre sites, so we'll see how this goes.
The second thing we're doing is contacting the publishers that have been with us for a while that we haven't had any recent updates from. We're hoping that they'll decide to stay with The Genre Mall, and that they'll have a lot of new titles to add.
The third thing we'll be doing is making a big push to sign up some more publishers.
All of this is a lot of work, and it really needs to pay off, or we may be forced to pull the plug because I can't invest a lot of time in something that doesn't pay off if I should happen to find a real job.
If all of this does pay off, then I'm hoping to make some changes to the site...mostly cleaning it up, and if it pays off big enough than I'm planning on setting up some kind of store front, because the current site is just too clunky right now, and I haven't been happy with it for quite some time...
Thursday, August 05, 2010
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2 comments:
J,
How does the Genre Mall work? Do you have inventory or do you call the publisher and have them ship?
You might look into Zen Cart which is a whole store package. My only complaint with it is that changing the look and feel is not as easy as you might think. The good thing is that it allows you flexibility in shipping, is configured for paypal, and also set up to do digital downloads like PDFs and files for kindle and Sony reader.
I agree about the design of the Genre Mall - it is hideous. The SamsDot site is very 1990s, but somehow friendly. The Genre Mall on the other hand is off-putting. It is badly in need of a face lift.
The orders come to me, and then the publishers ship them...hopefully in a timely manner.
Yes, the site is definitely in need of some work, but it's such a big project and I can't find the time. In all honesty, I never thought the site would grow to be as big as it is. I figured I'd end up with six or eight publishers, and that would be it.
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