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.
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 issues, I am much happier with the state it is currently in than I was the last time it was functional.
"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.)
