Business/summary

VBZ.NET is an online retail portal which has existed in one form or another under essentially the same ownership since December, 1995. It was conceived and built entirely without the involvement of investors or even substantial capital of any kind, pretty much entirely by me (Woozle). (My former business associates attempted to claim that they had written the software, among other things, but they definitively lost the case.)

The software VBZ runs is called VbzCart; it is self-written and open-source.

Selection

Items currently available tend to be mostly t-shirts, mostly with licensed artwork, along with a number of other clothing items (such as caps) and "gift" items such as printed mousepads.

This was not my original intention when I first went online, and I would like to expand into other areas such as independent music (which is what the store first carried) and more practical items. I could launch into a rant about the lack of online ordering or even inventory searching on our local grocery co-op's web site, for example, and would like to see that done right, one way or another.

That said, I currently still have more than adequate stock to resume business operations as soon as the web site is ready again.

Something's wrong with the web site?

We had a family crisis here starting in 2007 or so; I was able to keep the store limping along for a few years, but when part of the checkout process broke I felt I couldn't fix it in a timely way, and took the store offline. I've been rewriting it ever since. Though this has taken much longer than I originally expected, due largely to a wide and colorful selection of personal and family issues, I am much happier with the state it is currently in than I was the last time it was functional – especially given that most of the back-end operations were handled in single-user proprietary software up to that point.

"Portal"?

By "portal", I mean that it not only handles customer-facing tasks (basic "shopping cart" stuff, order management and tracking) but also behind-counter operations like shipping, stock management, and ordering from wholesalers ("restocking"). One of the VBZ software's particular strengths, for example, is facilitating the manual entry of printed catalogs, since most wholesalers we've dealt with still do not provide their catalogs in a format which can be imported into a database. (Progress has been made in that at least now we can get their print catalogs in PDF form.)

Cashflow

Bearing in mind that operations from 2002 onwards were pretty much a single-person operation (i.e. me), here are the gross cashflow numbers up until I had to take it offline:

	Expenses				Revenues	TOTALS
When	Merch	s/h In	Inv Tot	s/h Out	Sales	Gains	Losses	NET GAIN
2011	-	-	-	103.34	848.35	848.35	103.34	745.01
2010	251.25	9.58	260.83	40.33	233.90	233.90	301.16	-67.26
2009	-	-	-	155.20	886.66	886.66	155.20	731.46
2008	742.18	-9.89	732.29	291.28	1752.35	1752.35	1023.57	728.78
2007	1910.83	173.00	2083.83	623.45	4181.68	4181.68	2707.28	1474.40
2006	4581.37	465.12	5046.49	932.06	6964.38	6964.38	5978.55	985.83
2005	6001.99	523.02	6525.01	1312.23	11253.82	11253.82	7837.24	3416.58
2004	8297.15	544.96	8842.11	2407.83	15128.65	15128.65	11249.94	3878.71
2003	13918.51	698.11	14616.62	2136.12	17759.04	17759.04	16752.74	1006.30
2002	8368.86	772.34	13819.52	3319.16	17311.23	17311.23	17138.68	172.55

(Additional years are probably available here.)

...and also bearing in mind that it was not a portal for most of its operational existence. Retrieving new orders, for instance, involved a somewhat complex manual process with Microsoft Access 97 at one end. Most behind-the-counter operations were in Access, so it was difficult (at best) to delegate any portion of operations.

Future

Part of why I have found this project worth continuing, in spite of all the delays, is the opportunities it offers for "disrupting" capitalist models of online business. See The Virtual Bazaar Manifesto and federated retail for more discussion of this.

Needs

As of 2017-11-23, there are no hard obstacles to resuming operations; it's primarily a matter of scraping together enough time to finish up the last few pieces. I'm currently working on reorganizing the virtual servers I use, for technical and financial reasons, and this has taken time and energy away from working on VBZ per se.

That said, what would be of the most help in moving things forward with more certainty and a more reasonable pace would be (a) a lot of personal secretary and (b) a little bit of income. Both of these would help as far as dealing with a lot of the competition for my time, and income would ensure that I won't have to shift over to spending a lot more of my time on money-saving endeavors such as cooking or possibly attempting (likely without success) to find more immediate employment.

Again, though, I feel reasonably confident that the store will go back online one way or another, barring disaster, though I hesitate to make a time-prediction as I have been saying "within the next few months" for several years now.