/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>847310

If I get a email that starts with 'hey guys' it usually goes straight in the trash without reading further..

>>847322
The smiley face is odd as well.

>>847310
Call main number. Ask for sales, no secretary ever screens out inbound sales calls, ask sales to sell you stuff. /

>>847322
basically the problem is that it looks like its written by a negro or a 16 year old kid.

that's your whole problem, get more professional.

>>847310
no no no no no

Pickup your phone your autistic piece of shit, never ever email a person when first establishing a relationship. When contacting potential clients you first have to call them and personally talk with them then at the end of the convo you then send all the relevant information about your buisness to the email that they give you. Now everything in that email should be a more detailed version of what you explained to them over the phone. No one checks emails, and if they do they easily delete without a second glance. How hard is it to get off the phone with someone? Probably a lot harder then deleting a unwanted advertising email. A rule of thumb you need to follow for the rest of your life should be, that emails are for ESTABLISHED relationships with a client and should not be used as a base to build a relationship on. But sure I guess you can send out 100000 emails a days and hope for that 1 or 2 responses (which is really what you will get) but these responses will most likely be telling you to fuck off in a polite way or they just string you along with no personal interest vested in you because hey its a email not like real person right.

Copy and pasted from another thread exactly like yours.....never email always call

>>847310
write them something like this (Bare in mind that English is not my native language)

Dear sir/madam associated with Ernie Ball

Currently we as an independent music store are looking to expand our product line of music instrument accessories.

Could you please get us in touch with your sales team/department as we are interested in your products.

With kind regards,
Anon
bumfuck village 902010
tel:
email:

etc

OP here, thanks. I've never run my own business before so this is really all new to me. Thanks for the tips :)

>>847348
Serious question, what profit margin does your shop has? I can't really see all too much profit rolling in.

>>847357

It varies. We sell alot of 2nd hand vinyl - mostly rare and hard to find stuff and alot of that is donated or we give pay hardly anything for it. Often we'll have collectors come from hundreds of miles away to browse through for a few hours and spend £200-300 on rare records that we got in a job lot of 40 for like £10. Any shit records we put in the £1 bin and sell as a job lot on Etsy for craft supplies.

Because of this we don't have a consistent stream so looking into other means of more consistent income. In one month we could take £2000, the next near nothing.

>>847366
Is there a particular reason you limit yourself to Etsy? I don't want to push eBay all to much, but it could boost your sales. On the other hand, you could set up a small website with your inventory on display, thus saving people the time to drive to you - face it, for every man coming in there are twenty who can't be bothered. Accept reservations for certain items, because if you trade with rarities, you can charge quite a bit for it.

>>847373

I've only recently come into the business. My father ran it for 3 years and it was an absolute joke. He didn't even do any accounting until i arrived and just let shit build up. He hadn't paid rent for 6months, just pocketed all the cash he made and just chucked any crap records into a storeroom he also pays rent on.

I've managed to wrangle him down and start making things clearer (i actually have him using a till now, not a cardboard box full of pennies). As i'm ebbing into the finances of the business, i'm not 100% sure on where he owes money and what his profit margins are but i'm slowly taking over all of that and am paying back people he owed money too instead of him losing half of it on horse races and desperately scraping money together for mortgage payments.

Back to your question though, there isn't any reason other than Etsy is dirt cheap to list things on and seems like we'd get the best return on that. Once we've tested out sales on Etsy a bit longer, we'll look into using eBay more, but we fucking hate using Paypal.

>>847387
>but we fucking hate using Paypal.
Stop being edgy, it's not good for business. People on eBay want to buy things with Paypal, and I can understand why. See the good side of it, you also get your chunck of the protection it provides.

>>847373
I've been a big time second hand vinyl seller (sold thousands of records during the years) mostly hard to find and rarities..

There is a huge amount of records that will never ever sell for their musical content, not even for 1 dollar, they are either totally garbage or had an initial pressing of millions of copies (think about Michael Jackson or elvis records)

etsy is good alternative to get rid of junk/garbage records (and better than throwing them away, like we used to do, containers full of them went into the trash coz worthless)

>>847398

With MJ or Elvis or any big artist, it might be worth finding a crafty person to make the sleeves/record centres into a collage. Superfans love that shit.

>>847392

Its not about being edgy, its just a shit service. Last year my account was suspended for 3 months for no apparent reason unless i faxed, yes FAXED, a copy of my driving licese to them -.-

>>847460
>>847392
It's true, Paypal is notoriously terrible and it's a shame that so many people need to use it for one reason or another.

>>847330
I'll have to try that. Although I don't understand why a company would put its e-mail on a website if it wasn't going to respond to inquiries.

>>847794
Its there for major companies bigger then yours....as in companies with an established record of buying....most distributors do not sell to startups because they arent established yet. For fear of lack of payment or even possibly getting cheated on. To get any real business done is all over the phone, email is there for the hard details and any other relevant information that you cant convey over the phone. Its the same in every industry. No different to yours. Plus you can reach twice as many companies over the phone, and you dont have to sit around all day wondering if they read your email. Good luck man