Thursday, July 10, 2008

Snuzzles MY BEDTIME BOOK in MINT CONDITION Added to Catalog



I added the last of our Playskool Snuzzles Blankies Collection to our Catalog today. I have seen this bedtime cloth book before without all the parts, but this is the only time I have ever seen one with not only all the parts, but the pieces still attached. The book has never been used, as far as I can tell, and is in MINT Condition.

We have well over 600 baby plush toys and soft dolls listed online now in our Catalog, and I still haven't scratched the surface of all the storage boxes of plush animals and dolls we have stored. I am nearing the end of the Baby Toys, however, so hopefully I can start soon on some of the other collections we have accumulated.

We are in business, but the Lost Toys Search Service has lit a fire in us to rescue these lovies and reunite them with the grieving children and desperate grownups who are searching for them. Since we are retired, and I am somewhat limited in my physical abilities, this is something I can do at home to help people. And I am thoroughly addicted to it!!!



We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Added My SNUZZLES to Our Catalog - Thoughts on Setting Prices for Collectibles


Playskool SNUZZLES Large Lion Security BlanketSNUZZLES Large Lion Blankie


I added our collection of Playskool Snuzzles to our Catalog today. Some of the harder to find ones are listed for sale on eBay for close to $100! I have tried to price them at what I consider to be a reasonable price, but Snuzzles are some of my all time favorite lovies, and I can't bare to part with them for "bargain" prices.

This brings up something that came up in an email I received the other day referring to a seller's price on eBay for a HTF (Hard to Find) toy being price gouging. Buying and Selling Collectibles is totally a Supply and Demand driven business situation. It really doesn't matter how much a toy cost originally. What matters is how much people are willing to pay for them today, right now. If the price is too high for a potential buyer - they don't buy. If the price is too high for a seller - it doesn't sell. Eventually, everything seeks its own level. That's how auction sites like eBay work to help set the current value of any item.

So, I tried to find that spot where I feel good selling my Snuzzles, and hopefully someone else will feel good buying them.



We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

So Easy to Get Confused

I found a huge mistake in the catalog today, and it took quite a bit of time to fix it. I somehow managed to put up two pages that had some of the same pictures on them. I am feeling so much better now that I did not get all stressed and upset the way I would have back when I made the mistake. I was feeling so bad back then that I can't be surprised for making the mess. I had to change the numbering on a bunch of items, move some photos around, and fix the Google Base feed to correspond to the current numbering, but I did it.

I have now put over 500 plush toys online in our catalog, and we have had quite a few sales from it, too. I am working on putting up the Security Blankies now, but it will take me awhile to get the pages to a point that I can put them online. I have been experimenting with how to categorize them, and I hope I have come up with logical page categories.

I have also taken all the many puppets we have bought over the last few years and re-boxed them into what I hope will be reasonable categories, too, but I am a long way from taking all the photos and putting the descriptions up. But, I see progress in my storage system, and continue to work on making all our toys easier to find when someone asks for help finding a lost lovie on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.



We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

SingleFeed is a BIG Help!

The folks from SingleFeed asked me to write a testimonial the other day, and I figured I would post it here, whether they end up using any of it or not on their own site.

We have been selling on eBay since 2002, gradually becoming more involved and business like as we went. We have also been working toward selling from our own website for some time now, and we finally have a small part of our inventory in our online catalog. I tried uploading our items to Google Base all by myself, but was having difficulties. It makes more sense to spend my time taking pictures, writing descriptions, and filling orders than to get bogged down with the details of sending a perfect feed to Google every time we add to our catalog. Sometimes that can be several times a week, as our inventory is sold and I add more items to the catalog.

Since I started using SingleFeed, I don’t have to spend any appreciable time on this part of our business at all. It took awhile to get the data feed set up the way SingleFeed requires it, but their directions made sense, the download gave me a template to work from, and they helped – something Google does not do. Now that I have a data file set up correctly, all I need to do is add our new items to the file and click Upload on SingleFeed’s site. On those rare occasions when I do make an error in the Excel form, I get an immediate response, showing which items are faulty and what the problem is. I can fix it immediately, upload again, and it’s all taken care of.

We are a small business, so for now, at least, we only use SingleFeed for Google Base. But it is very reassuring to know that if we ever decide to become involved with the comparison shopping sites, we are all ready for it. Some people might think it is foolish to pay for something I could eventually figure out for myself, but my time is definitely worth something and is much better spent on other aspects of our business. Using SingleFeed was a good business decision for us.


We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Can't Find a Website Search I Like!


Eden Baby AnimalsEden Plush Baby Peter Rabbit Animals



I've tried a bunch of free to try software packages that provide a website search, but so far nothing does what I want. I've about decided to pay a programmer to do it for me. We're also considering pulling all our toys off eBay and just using that for our vintage collectibles. There are lots of pros and cons on that one, so we're in no hurry to decide.

I did pay the $100 to try the Business Version of Google's Custom Search. But the directions were basically no less confusing than the regular Custom Search. Looks like all you are really paying for is not having their ads on the page. I canceled it the same day I bought it, and did not have any problem getting my money back.

So I continue to take photos and add to our catalog, making do with the Catalog Search I have for now that is the Google Base search page.


We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Another Lesson Learned - Don't Assume the Cart Was Abandoned

We had an abandoned shopping Cart today. But it turns out it was not abandoned after all. I don't know what caused me to check PayPal today, but there it was all paid, just as it should have been. But PayPal did not send me the email the way they normally do.

I wouldn't have even known about the sale if it had not been that Mal's e-commerce sends an email for each sale.



We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Conrolling the Quantity Available in the Shopping Cart

I am still using Mal's eCommerce FREE Shopping Cart, so it's not surprising that I am having trouble getting it to do everything I want it to do. But, thanks to the support forum, I did find the code I needed to add to each BUY NOW link to stop people from ordering more than one of an item. Well, it almost stops everyone. All someone has to do is click on an item more than once, and it will show up multiple times in the cart. But at least they can't change the number available in the cart any more. That will have to do for now, since every page in the Catalog has a prominent notice that they need to contact me before buying, if they want more than one of an item.

We ran into an unexpected glitch on selling two of an item to a customer recently. Our toys are not new, although we do strive to offer ones that look new or close to it. The buyer was pleased with one of the items, but in comparing the two was not happy that one looked like it had been washed and had shrunk in size a little. I didn't even notice it, but the buyer sure did. We offered a small discount and all was well. But that has caused us to rethink allowing anyone to buy more than one of an item, since the comparison might cause this to happen again. Particularly when we have already received a request to buy that same item again at full price, but we don't have any more in stock.

We have had our first experiences with abandoned shopping carts, too. I abandon carts myself occasionally, so I can't really complain. It's just at this stage of the process I would like to know why they left. I tried emailing one person who abandoned the cart, to ask for some help understanding if it was something in my setup that caused them to leave, but did not receive an answer.


As I get more and more items listed online, the sheer physical task of being able to find the items that have been sold is getting more difficult. That's not going to be an easy problem to solve, since storage space is my problem. Looking for an item means stacking and unstacking quite a few plastic tubs, looking for the specific item. There has to be a better way, but I haven't figured it out yet.



We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Problems with Quantity Orders

We have had several orders from out Catalog lately where buyers are paying for more than one of an item. It is rather unusual for us to have more than one of a particular lovie in stock at any given time, although there are a few, such as Rumples, that we do have lots of, as we buy them every time we can find them. There just does not seem to be any way to stop this multiple ordering from happening. I started by putting a disclaimer on each catalog page cautioning readers that most of our toys were only a quantity of one and to contact us if they were interested in buying more than one. When that didn't turn out to be enough, I went through all 300 items and added a Quantity Available number to each listing, right by the link to buy it. We are still getting orders for more than we can fill.

Mal's cart just doesn't have any way of preventing someone from ordering more than we have on hand. At least I haven't found any way of preventing it. I am going to ask a question about this on the Mal's Cart forum to see if anyone can help. Until then, I will just have to refund payments and email buyers, explaining we can only sell them 1.

Other than that problem, everything else is going quite well. Our Auction Sage program we have used for years with eBay auctions has come out with a new version that makes adding in website sales a whole lot easier, so that will be a big help. I think they were seeing the handwriting on the wall. eBay is in trouble. They have finally pushed the sellers to the point that those little guys like us are leaving in droves. I know we are not listing much for auctions any more, although we do have a respectable size inventory in our Store. It's just too expensive to do business there any more.

Even though we are selling from our own site, eBay still gets a piece of the action because they own PayPal. That means they get a fee from us every time we make a sale. We do have one pending sale waiting on a Money Order, but all the others have been immediate pay through PayPal.

Of course, if we opened a merchant account with a credit card company, they would take a percentage of the sale, too. But it would not be helping eBay. That's almost enough reason to open a merchant account. Well, almost. We are just too small potatoes to do that right now.



We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Haven't Found a Website Search Form I Like Yet

I seem to be stuck on finding exactly what I want for the Search on our Catalog. What I am using now is a refined Google Base Search, but that is on a separate Google page, and not part of our own website. It also, since it is a Google page, has links to other sellers. That's not a good idea, but will have to do until I can find better.

Something else I have realized I need to do is to put a bookmark link to each of the photos on a given catalog page, so when someone does click on the search item it will take them straight to that item, not just the page it is on. Again, a website designer would have already done that to begin with, but I am learning all this the hard way, by trial and error. More error - it seems like! LOL!!

But, we are making sales from the Catalog, so for that I am grateful.


We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Continuing to Add to Catalog

The SingleFeed spreadsheet continues to work well, so I can update Google Base each day. I decided on Mal's Shopping Cart, and I am pleased with the ease of use for a free program. There were a few mistakes I made in the Cart setup, but it only took the first few customers to find what needed to be fixed. They do provide an easy way to see and test the cart while you are working on it.

I don't have to send any information to Mal's, because the code goes in each item listing in the Catalog, and even lets me tell the Shopping Cart where to send the buyer when they finish.

The only real flaw I have found with it is I cannot LIMIT the quantity available. I ended up putting a large warning sign on each page of the catalog, telling people that we only had one of each item in most cases. This flaw showed up when someone ordered 4 of an item. It's free, and even paid software usually has a few parts that don't fit someone's particular situation, so I am satisfied with its performance.


We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Working on Adding our Catalog Blog to Directories

I started our other blogs so long ago that I had forgotten just how many little steps there are to get a blog properly setup on the internet.

I started last night adding this blog to the Directories that will help get traffic, and thus the catalog. I added this blog to our Dirty Butter MyBlogLog Community today.

There's much more to do, but that's all I have time for right now. We usually go to some of our favorite close to home toy hunt places on Monday afternoons, so maybe we will find one of the lovies our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service readers have asked us to find.



We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Waiting on Google to Index our Catalog

OK, I have the beginnings of our products Searchable on Google Base now, thanks to the free trial of SingleFeed I'm using. It costs $4.99 a month, but they fix the mistakes in the data feed so it does not get denied by Google.

You may ask why I'm paying someone to send the feed to Google Base.

The answer is simple.

I never could figure out what I was doing wrong, and Google is no help at all.

You can pay more at SingleFeed and use one form to submit to lots of different shopping search engines like Shopping.com, but Google will be enough for our needs. I have already sent three feeds to them, and it was not hard at all, as I already had most of what they wanted in an Excel file already, thanks to my attempts to send the data feed to Google on my own.

Now my problem is that our subdomain has not been Indexed by Google yet, so I can't create a working Custom Search Engine to put on our catalog pages yet. I have sent a Site Map of the subdomain to Google, so all I can do now is wait. As I add items to the catalog I will send a new SingleFeed upload, update the Site Map, and keep on waiting.

It's that wait that prompted me to start this blog about the process of starting our own website sales. Google is good about indexing blogs pretty quickly, but puts new websites in what is called the sandbox. Basically it means they hold onto new sites for awhile before they acknowledge their existence, in an attempt to discourage spammers from flooding their searches with fake sites. I understand why they do it, but it is very frustrating for those legitimate sellers like us who are trying to get a place in the search engine.



We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Are All the Catalog Links Accurate?

I've changed my mind several times about what the URL of our catalog should be, because I was having problems getting the Google Base Product Search to ignore all the posts on our Lost Toy Search Service blog. So, in the process of creating the links one way, then changing them to something else, and then making a final decision for try number three, I'm having to correct lots of wrong links. I found one today that was caused by using Find/Replace All, when I did not think through what I needed to type in the blanks. So, now I am searching through all our site URL's to change plushplush to just plush!

At least I learned a long time ago how to make custom 404 Not Found pages that would allow the reader to find what they wanted. Hopefully, the links on those error pages are correct. Guess I'd better go be sure of that!

This is a perfect example of learning from my mistakes, but it's still aggravating. Of course, people who make websites for a living would have long ago figured out the best navigation configuration for a product catalog. And I think I have a good arrangement now, but who knows?????


We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.

Starting Our Online CATALOG of Plush Toys

We have been selling online now for almost six years, mostly on our Dirty Butter Store and as dirty_butter on eBay, although we did try the original Wagglepop until it disappeared. Every once in awhile we would make a direct sale to someone who wrote us wanting help.

But we really didn't start selling much from our own site until we started our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.

We quickly reached the point, partly thanks to the MSNBC article we were featured in, that people were emailing us wanting to know where they could look at our toys online. So, back in February, I started taking photos of our Baby Animals and Baby Dolls and putting them in our own Catalog.

I have always envisioned a fun place to look at lots of adorable toys, almost like window shopping, with an easy way to buy them. Hopefully, I have succeeded in making buying from us an easy and enjoyable experience for you. If you see any problems on our site, please let me know. I am still learning, and I'm sure I have made mistakes and some poor design choices.

I have learned a lot while starting the catalog, but there is still a lot more to be learned. This blog will give me a place to share not only what we sell, but also what is involved in the process of selling directly from our own website.


We hope you will find the lovie you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animal Shoppe CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service Facebook Page.