A Man and his Penguin

6-cell Aspire One battery from Australian retailer: $130

9-cell Aspire One battery from Hong Kong eBayer: $109

Stay in a burns unit at hospital getting “spray-on skin” applied to the top of your legs: $400 per night

Buying the more expensive, lower-capacity, less-likely-to-explode battery instead: Priceless!

—————-

“Knocked Up” on Blu-ray: $39

“Superman 2″ on Blu-ray: $35

Noticing those same titles on HD-DVD for $9.90 each and remembering that your Blu-ray reader can also read HD-DVD: Priceless!

I’m suddenly finding all sorts of things that I could do online now that I have a Visa card. Shop or sell on eBay, become an Amazon affiliate, buy some web hosting and a domain name, subscribe to a porn site, donate money to open-source, get Skype-Out credit, buy commercial Linux software or just an Ubuntu t-shirt… the sky is the limit. So far I’ve just bought the Mylene Farmer DVD which will be shipped on the 23rd of March (and will arrive during April or early May, grrr) from Amazon, and the two abovementioned HD-DVDs from DVDownunder, but it seems that all sorts of opportunities are opening up.

In particular, I have an idea for a website for music fans, where they can chat and share news. The fresh idea is that there would be software they could install to turn their computer into an impromptu web server, and they could download files from eachother. Another fresh idea is that I could join the Amazon.com or Sanity.com.au affiliate plan and place a customised web store on the site. For every purchase made through that store, I’d get a certain percentage of the sale price; and some of that would go back to the fans as money they can use to promote their favourite artist, buy concert tickets for underprivileged fans, pay for web hosting, or anything else that a group of music fans would want to do with some money. Of course, it would be in their best interests to get as many fans on my website as possible to chat, so that they can contribute to the fan group’s funds. Oh, and of course contribute to my funds!

I’d only create this infrastructure for bands and artists who I think have fanbases who could make some money and organise themselves properly. For instance, I wouldn’t create a forum or a kitty for Miley Cyrus fans as they don’t own credit cards and couldn’t buy merchandise online. I wouldn’t create a forum for Sneaky Sound System fans as there isn’t a lot of SSS merchandise that can be bought. I would, however much I dislike her, make a forum for Pink because her fans are old enough to know better than to like Pink buy things online, and to organise themselves properly to take full advantage of the services I’d be offering them. There are enough of them and there are probably lots of concert DVDs, CDs, T-shirts and stuff that I could sell.

Good idea? Yes? Let’s do it!

In other news I’ve removed the “mount your Walkman” functionality from Blacklight and I’ll give it a test a bit later on. It was causing some people some trouble, apparently.

I hope the new X-series Walkman supports playback of music through a wireless Samba network, or at least through Zeroconf/Bonjour/Avahi/UPnP/Whatever-Apple-calls-it-now music sharing. If it does, and if it supports drag ‘n’ drop music and video loading, I’ll be first in the queue to buy one.

I read an article on Current.com.au about the new 100 Mbps Telstra broadband that will be rolled out to people in a 100 metre radius of the centre of the Melbourne and Sydney CBDs. Well, okay, it’s fibre optics and it will service about 3 million people in Melbourne and Sydney.

One thing that rang alarm bells was Sol Trujillo claiming that a family could “download a high definition movie in just over a minute”. This didn’t sound right to me, so I got my calculator out and wrote the following letter to Current.com.au:

I don’t think Sol Trujillo has his figures correct.

Take that, Sol!

I hope Telstra doesn’t use “download a high definition movie in just over a minute” in any of its advertising, or they’d be in very big trouble! Actually; I do hope they use it and that they get fined a LOT.

Retailers are complaining that netbooks are too cheap and that there is not enough profit margin in them. This, my friends, explains why retailers are going under at the moment.

You don’t make money from the main product. That’s not entirely true - you make a small profit after you’ve discounted the product for the customer, because they will almost always ask for one. Where you make your money is in the add-ons.

Let’s show how this works with netbooks. Somebody buys a netbook from you, and you make minimal margin. Once you are assured of getting the sale but before the customer has paid, you ask them “Do you need a carry case?”. The customer didn’t think about that, and they will admit that they pretty much need one (netbooks are made to be carried), so you can sell them one. You get the carry cases from the supplier for $15 and you can sell them for $30-40. Money made there.

While selling the product, you can both spruik up the battery life (it lasts 3 hours which is long enough to last a plane trip from Perth to Melbourne) and also try and sell an add-on battery (…but we also have higher capacity batteries available with a 6 hour battery life in case you need to use the machine all day in between charges). I don’t know how much batteries go for or how much they cost the retailer, but that’s an extra add-on sale.

Extended warranties. All electrical retailers have them. There’s usually 50% GP (gross profit) in them. Sell them. Miniature mice - many people don’t like trackpads. Sell them. The Atom chipset can handle 2 gigabytes of RAM, and Windows people seem to think that the more RAM you have the faster the computer will go - sell some more RAM.

Start with the most likely add-on sale and keep going until you get a “no” for two of your suggestions.

When I bought my netbook, I wasn’t asked about any add-ons. I wasn’t asked about a carry case, a battery, extra RAM, a mouse, a warranty or anything else. In fact, the salesperson was practically pushing me to the counter and I had to say “Hang on a moment, there’s something else I want to get, I’ll see you at the counter in a moment”.

Before you all start giving your salespeople extra coaching for selling add-ons, remember that they can only sell addons if you’ve GOT THEM. I tried to buy a carry case for my netbook - “Nup, we don’t have them”. “But you sell netbooks!” “Yes, but we don’t have any cases for netbooks, only for bigger notebooks”.  This happened at several local retailers. I went back to the place where I bought my netbook and asked if they had bigger batteries for them. “No.”

Retailers, if you want to survive you MUST SELL ADD-ONS, and in order to sell add-ons you must THINK about what you can add on for each product (especially low GP or low priced items) and make sure you have them! Of course, once that’s done, you can tell your salespeople “Right, we’ve just got in some big batteries and carry cases for netbooks, so don’t forget to suggest these to the customer.”

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for the last little while, the reason I haven’t been posting is not because I’ve been too busy, it’s because my life has been pretty boring. I plan to try and write a post every week, whether it’s about selling, technology, furniture (yeah right…) women, or whatever!