I just spent three 11-hour days at an upscale local mall to try my hand at expanding my fledgling e-commerce business into a mall kiosk. What I learned from the experience I'd like to share with my fellow small business entrepreneurs: If you have any ideas about expanding your own e-commerce business into a mall kiosk or a storefront, you might want to rethink your business plan.
Yes, the thought had crossed my mind that a mall location might well be the next step up for my micro e-commerce business. I mean, I'm selling online, which involves the hassle of packing and shipping perishable products. Why not just hand the customer my product in exchange for cold hard cash?
Lots of folks who never dreamed of selling online are hawking things from kiosks. Even a recent issue of Entrepreneur Magazine is touting mall locations as a rung on the ladder of success.
So I decided to dip a toe into mall marketing and I signed up my online orchid company for a four-day stint at a very upscale mall an hour away from me. The show was put on by an outside promoter and the move set me back a $250 fee. But I figured that's only $62.50 a day for four days of prime selling space in a busy shopping mall.
We loaded in our products on a Wednesday night, set up our display and showed up bright and early on Thursday morning to open up our temporary kiosk. I was flying on caffeine and had on my best sales face, ready to meet and greet the throngs of shoppers.
Needless to say, I shouldn't have bothered. Shoppers? The hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on a Thursday at this mall were essentially vacant of customers. You could have rolled a bowling ball down the corridors and not hit a single person.
It picked up a little after 5 p.m., when the after work crowd hit, but my total sales for the first 11-hour day (it's actually longer, counting travel and set up time, but the mall was open 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.) came to a whopping $56. The second day I tallied about $110 for an equal amount of work. Saturday I worked hard all day long to take in maybe $250. I was so fed up I didn't even go back for the Sunday session.
What with gas, tolls, show fees, meals, and the cost of some orchids I had purchased especially for this show, I ended up in the red.
Working the mall is hard work for not much money. You are standing on a hard floor. You are breathing canned air for 11 hours, listening to canned music over the noise from the spray of the fountains and a low hum of conversation, all reverberating around tile floors that seem designed to send waves of echoes. And on top of that another nearby vendor was selling CDs for children, which were constantly playing mindless kid tunes in the background.
The folks walking around the mall in the middle of the week are retirees with no money, moms with kids looking strictly for back-to-school stuff, and bored teenagers who are all trying to be Britney Spears look-alikes in hip hugger jeans and pierced navels or boys walking around in NBA jerseys and baggy shorts with gunboat-sized sneakers. Not exactly my target market.
On Saturday in came the movie-going crowd, and although they munched away at the food court and walked the corridors window-shopping before and after a visit to the 20-screen theater, parting with more than a few Yankee dollars seemed to be the last thing on their minds.
I would have thought that maybe it was just my product line, but all the imported vendors reported slack sales. Even the kid behind the counter at the SunGlass Hut chain store near my kiosk said he made only two sales on Friday.
Wait until the holidays, everyone offered. I know it's August, a time which malls don't usually see something akin to a post-Thanksgiving Black Friday crowd, but geez -- I made more money with much less work in e-commerce sales while I was away at the mall.
So for now I'm sticking to online sales.
I just love those 3 a.m. shopaholics, don't you?
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