The Week of Great Accomplishments!

This week is full of goals and surprises. Austin, Spencer, Vincent and Sal are in for some roller coaster challenges.

Where to start?

1. Achieve 2,000 listings by weeks end. Totally possible with the amount of inventory and the addition of 1 more hand.
2. Vincent will get us to that magical 500 listings on Amazon by weeks end. A nice welcome back goal.
3. Spencer and Austin will be running timed listing races all week long. Lets hope there listing rates per hour
continue to spiral upwards.
4. Sal will be help us with the battle of the bulge as we sell out of perc scsi cards this week. I just know Liz will close the next big one.. she's got a lot of cards played and one hand is sure to bring in the big fish.
5. Cyberinfinity will start coming to life as an entity. Taylor will have the shell wrapped up and we get to populate it this week in between listings. I will be answering most of the emails and asking for help every once in a while.
6. There will be a minimum of 10 new youtube videos added to enhance our existing product lines including at least 5 more gold scrap listings videos. I really love the speed at which the one we had up and running sold in less than 2 days.. Great Job Spencer and Austin.
7. Prezis there will be blogging each and every day by all listing people.... no exceptions. This means your goals must be blogged daily. Non-negotiable. Your future job descriptions are detailed in how quickly and accurately you achieve your goals. Your future is being written.
8. We will meet Greg this week. ( Spencer)
9. There is a rare chance that the boss will surprise you guys with something really big this week. ( Just waiting for more info )
10. And finally, we will be Happy at the end of the week after achieving all the goals the boss set for us as well as the goals that we set in our daily blogs. Please make your blogs accurate and professional. Other decent people just might be reading our blogs and find encouragement in this most bitter and painful economy.
Mario

                                                              So says .......,
                                                              The Boss!!!

Cash Crop

Though I will try to remain from flaming
with the wrath of Lord Inglip.

This is not a blag post meant to entertain.  


 I would like to address a question recurring within our youtube videos from subscribers [and not subscribers alike], regarding the selling of gold scrap from Austin Cyber Shop.
Some of which, are quite harsh.

• First question -

YES, our boss is aware we sell gold scrap.
Now then, that has been taken care of.. 

• Second off, and more importanly--

Do you people have any idea how much time and effort it takes to refine large amounts of gold?
To isolate and remove it from all those boards?
No?

Well, we are continually asked by youtube users why we don't just take all the gold off and sell it that way, or keep it for ourselves.
Allow me to explain, dear reader.

Gold refineries are huge.

Dangerous?

Places where gold is scrapped and melted down are hot, sweaty, dangerous environments, and require many trained workers.

We simply don't have the labor for that. 

Yes, we could probably sell this office and move into a warehouse and melt gold all day long, but we simply don't have the experience for that. We sell and play with electronics, not molten metals.

We're not simply going to do away with the whole business, hire talented and skilled workers, and then become the world's largest distributor [or hoarder] of gold, instead of pens.

Do you have any clue how much work it takes to refine elements all day?

Look, gents, the fact of the matter remains that it is dangerous to spend all day in hot warehouses and in tight, enclosed spaces with lots of hydrofluoric acid and various vapors and extreme temperatures.

Not to mention that it is also quite profitable to sell gold scrap to people.

We leave the dissolving and reverse electrolysis and the melting to the consumer, while we find the faulty electronics to distribute.

Granted, 85% of the people sending us messages about gold scrap are complaining and trying to get the scrap from us for lower prices,

but the 15% that don't complain are the returning customers who know what they're doing and continue to buy from us.

Have a nice day.

--Austin

Innovation

In the past hour, I've listed 5 items.

^ Business blog, complete.

Hopefully I will be able to increase this...

The more listings you have, the more inventory there is available for someone to buy. 

Which is a good thing.

NOW THEN;
I would like to take a moment to kill a little time and talk about innovation.

Yesterday, I talked about how to enhance material to get a consumer to pay more attention, but today...

Today I think I would like to chat about HOW to do this.

Sure, there's always updating listings, perfecting, and enhancing with colours and fancy card tricks,

but sooner or later we will need to flesh out inventory. People will not be wanting to buy motherboards and video cards when the world is rushed into crystalline data storage, space faring craft, non-moving HDDs, and biological machines.

Or build a hovercraft from the engine, and sell that, instead.

...Granted, some of that is still far away, but evolution of product is better than extinction.
In other words, you could sell a vacuum cleaner to a man - or you could scrap the vacuum altogether, and build something interesting from its individual parts, be it a broom, joystick for a computer game- 

So I think you get my point. 

If you can sell a vacuum cleaner, that's great - but what do you do when everyone has a Roomba with cats riding on them? You take apart the old vacuums you have sitting in storage, and you find a way to make people want them. You build hovercraft.

So, what can we do with our older listings? Some of these motherboards will be useless within a few years, with the rise of the tablets and "smart" phones.

Regardless of where I think overpriced and out-dated hardware belongs, people will always want their smart phone and their tablet.

I think that at a certain point, it would be interesting to do more than just recycle and gold scrap out old product ~
when you could take those products and build something new.

--Austin

Woohoo...

This morning we were tasked to keep track of how many listings we complete in an hour....  I was able to complete a whopping 5 listings..  Sooooo tired..   /)-_-(\ (headache)

On a lighter note, Auctiva has proven to be a very nice upgrade from the old Turbo Lister program we used before. And it was totally my idea to switch.  Go me.  <(^-^<) <(^-^)> (>^-^)>

-Sasquatch

01 : 02 : 04 : 21 : 53

It's been a brutal week.

The good news is that the next nine days will go by, quickly. Soon enough I can actually have something to do in free time, again, other than sleep in a tree. :3

The Texas MoBo Massacre.

Between all the blogging about bubble wrap and the massive influx of video cards and new inventory, life can be tough.
Spence is trying out some new VLog thing, but personally, I like this more. The ability to write and entertain is much more... interesting to me than a VLog, though I see the attraction, since most of consumer america is more interested in quick-and-easy entertainment than actually enjoying some good literature.

So, tonight, I shall vent not the stresses of my day, but merely the monotony that happens when you throw a few dudes into a room filled with video cards and a need to push product.



What makes a good blog?
Wit, I think. Witty remarks, and a bit of humor, mixed with a sarcastic and optimistic view of life.
Yeah. That's the stuff. Literary skills will get you somewhere, but more often it appears to be that you have to flood a page with entertaining words and pretty colours to grasp the attention of an audience - and on stage that is simply a beautiful thing ~ but what happened to literature?

I guess I'm asking myself the same thing about consumers, now.
What do you have to do to grasp someone's attention on eBay? On Amazon?
Do you have to flood your listing with pretty colours? Do you need explosions in the background to sell an old Radeon card?
Is it necessary to blur all the images and burn the edges to attract hipsters?

At what point are you no better than Michael Bay?
When has the prostitution of a product gone so far that you're no better than...well...






If I can mesmerize an audience with some spinning lights synchronized to a musical score -
then surely I can mesmerize an audience with words.

Surely a consumer will read text, and care only about the truthful information given to him -
he shouldn't need explosions and lies and bribes to make his way to our online store,
he should be attracted simply by seeing through google search results who we really are.

The World's Leading Supplier in Ball-Point Pens.

--Austin

CRANK

I love the feeling of popping bubble wrap.

Those little hexagonal pods, resembling that of a hive of bees or a colony of creatures creating something as gorgeous as a coral reef, are truly a mystery to me.

It may sound absurd, but those little pockets of joy are so tender and silken to the touch of a finger, they excite the nerves and provide just a little taste of heaven - but they're so tiny and soft, it's easy to pop them, on accident or not - and just enjoy the satisfying *SNAP* that echoes about the room.

It doesn't help that we have bubble wrap lying around everywhere, especially the 50 or 60 feet of it rolled up in the bathroom, as it tends to sit there as a silent temptation, ultimately destroying the lives of those spending thousands of dollars monthly on expedited shipping to have these gargantuan rolls of marshmallowy goodness brought to their front doors, like some kind of rare Egyptian lace.

Of course, all is for naught, as these rolls, these beautiful bubbling creatures of anti-static material are ultimately destroyed and thrown into a recycling plant - only to be melted down and recreated, reborn, reincarnated, again and again and again as gargantuan beasts, containing small windows into the glories of the universe, defending small [and large] delicate materials with their very lives, as cruel human captors snap them one by one, releasing those dear secrets of the heavens they beheld, and sending them as vapor and gas escaping into the air around us, enlightening us, but taking a shred of magic and mystery away from the world with every little crackle, be it accidental or malicious.

If it weren't for the creation of bubble wrap, a substance more addictive than most club drugs or hard-lines, then wizards, witches, and even hogwarts itself might exist amongst us.

Faeries might still exist. Mushrooms in magical forests standing millennia tall and wide might dance and sing and illuminate the night with beautiful bio-luminescence to show the way for creatures large and small that frolicked through this ancient and undisturbed meadows, a land before time, hidden away from man.

Bubble wrap is a wretched and beautiful creation,

and I have an addiction.

--Austin

Exciting Happenings!

We have a potential client coming in today to have lunch with Mario and man am I excited.
Why? Well it's not just because they are having some lean chicken, lightly breaded, with a soft cream orange sauce that makes it melt in your mouth so that...Anyway, this "potential client" has bought a few bulk items from us in the past and he may just be interested in cleaning out some of our older inventory. Can't wait for them to get back so I can hear the hopefully good news!


- Spencer