Search Engine of Independent Retailers and Small Business Resources

Well, if we’ve learned anything over our ten years of owning and operating a brick and mortar store, it’s that it requires YOUR time and dedication. In our efforts to keep thriving as a land based gift retailer, we lost ground in our inability to juggle all of life’s demands including other full time careers, children, and family life. For that ten years, we seemed to handle it, but it wasn’t easy and quite less than ideal. We had employees to manage the day to day operations, but as efficient as they were and as much as we cherished them as family, they’re not going to have the same motivation and vision that you will as a business owner.

We considered and tried to go to ecommerce only with our gift wares and essentially ran into the same issues. We still had to rely on our employees to carry out our vision and do what we could to inspire them to be innovative while at the same time dedicating our own time to coaching and nurturing them as well as our business. Of course, that’s aside from keeping up with retail gift trends, attending trade shows, selecting and purchasing inventory, maintaining stocked shelves, etc….

So alas, we are going through the process of liquidating the tangibles and shutting down our brick and mortar store. As we started this blog resource for independent retailers, I outlined several small business models including brick and mortar, click and mortar, and strictly ecommerce. Within the ecommerce realm, there are yet more options. You can still market, promote, and sell tangible items, OR you can work with intangible items such as software and/or ebooks. These are the directions we’re moving toward.

Ideally, I thought the best business model (and I still dont’ argue that it’s not) is a high demand, easy to ship, consumable product that could be sold over the Internet. I like this even more than downloadable software and ebooks because consumable products bring you the same repeat business at fairly regular intervals. Software and ebooks have their advantage also (mainly being best suited for complete automation).

So, what we’ve decided to do was essentially both. We’re of course keeping IndieRetailer alive and will be expanding it to showcase some of the tools and resources that we’ll be using to market and promote our consumable, tangible, easy to ship, semi-automated product based business.

Dollar Card Marketing will be our tangible product based business. At Dollar Card Marketing, we customize $5, $10, $20, and $100 dollar bill drop cards and sizzle cards for any business to use. As effective as they are at simply being sizzle cards and drop cards, they’ve also been used with a great deal of success as eye grabbing business cards.

So still being in the arena of being an independent retailer, that will be our primary retail/ebusiness and IndieRetailer.com will be our business journal, so to speak. Here, we’ll not only focus on our tangible consumable product, but because we’ll have freed up some time by not working the brick and mortar store, we’ll also be pursuing other online interests including promoting other people’s Internet products and services.

I hope you’ll look forward to witnessing and participating in this new evolution as we will enjoy making it happen!