>>8355752Then there were distributor games. Splitting up cases to charge two shipping fees. Delivering so late that demand had evaporated. Refusing to replace stuff that shipped damaged. Cancellation fees when they changed terms after orders were placed. And so on.
Then there was the general poorfaggotry of buyers waiting for Ollies. I could no longer balance out "better" profits on hot items with losses on unpopular items. Everything went to Ollies, sometimes even before my shipments arrived. You're paying $16/unit for stuff that's suddenly $7 at Walmart or Ollies. That and "free" shipping from China cost many sales.
And this sort of dove tails into your point about selling different stuff. Fucking nothing worked. No product line had much margin aside from dumb shit like key chains and maybe Pops. One by one, I saw anything that did well enough to at least sell out collapse. Mainline TFs, MP TFs, Marvel Legends, Takara anything after brand merging, Star Wars when it went woke, SHFs, Figmas, Mafex, MLP, anything based on video games, DC through its dozen seizure-like restarts, you name it, it collapsed. Frankly advice to "buy different stuff" is as helpful as the judge in Futurama telling poor people to buy more money.
Only two things helped me:
1. Moving my sales to live conventions.
2. Flipping clearance items (AKA as "scalping" for the Ollies vultures that don't really understand scalping).
Corona fucked the crap out of the first one for this year and maybe next year depending on who you talk to. The second? Not exactly a sustainable business model. It works enough to balance the books and that's it. Going full Jew would be dirty and involve way more effort than I feel like expending on something I want to get out of sooner than later.
Close,
>>8352582, I was trying not to lose my shirt.
