LOL you're kidding, right? Ever sell on eBay? Get a 200 feedback rating from selling, and ask that question again. BTDT.

Packing and shipping products is a LOT of work. Even if you pass all the shipping costs onto your customers, it's easy to end up earning about $2.00/hour by the time it's said and done.

Packing materials and shipping can eat you alive. FedEx and UPS charge ripoff rates to random walk-ups... and no discount to low volume contract customers. They charge 75% less to huge top-tier customers... who often get to top tier by offering the use of their shipping dock to employees (at cost)... who run small online businesses out of that. Those are your competitors.

Now what will you sell? You buy online, right? When you shop for something do you 1) buy from Habitat for Humanity or SDRM because you love their mission... or 2) buy from preferred vendors (eBay, Amazon) or 3) buy mainly on price? Right, usually the last two. I absolutely hate setting up yet another account, and I Really Really hate 100-question checkout where it blows errors three times and keeps erasing fields that I've already entered like Visa/MC type or CVV#. You've had that experience if you've bought online, and you're not stupid, these pages are terrible. So I'll prefer Amazon or eBay because I'm already set up there and can buy with a few clicks.

So what will you sell again? Any commercial product that your shop buys from outsiders, Thomas, books, silly whistles... nobody's going to buy from you for the above reasons. So I'm going to leave all that out of the discussion.

That leaves things totally unique to your shop, like your logo T-shirt, hat, mug, etc. Here's where we cue up


Those are not gift shops going online! They're just user accounts.

Both CafePress and Zazzle are "Print on demand" companies. They have inkjet printers that print on T-shirts. They don't print it until you order it, and it ships from CafePress etc. at their top-tier UPS rates. The person at the museum doesn't even know you ordered it until they see the report at the end of the month. The museum collects the amount you paid minus $18 or whatever.

Anybody can set one of these up in about an hour.

This is a good example of outsourcing, but in these case it also sucks all the profit out of it because their prices are outlandish. The F40PH group is only making a couple bucks per T-shirt, the default profit is $2 on a $20-ish shirt, unless you raise the T-shirt price.

There are lots of other outsourcing options. For an online presence and Visa/MC processing, Yahoo offers "online stores in a can". Or you can become part of the Amazon or eBay marketplaces, which dilutes your brand, yes, but makes you a hell of a lot more findable, and gets rid of that horrible small-site checkout experience, which greatly increases business quite often.

For actual shipping, you can do Staples like Amtrak did, or you can do the same thing at Amazon -- ship a bunch of your product to Amazon, and Amazon ships it out of their giant magic warehouses. Like this product here. "Sold by <somebody else> and Fulfilled by Amazon". So it ships for sure tonight, and qualifies for free shipping via either "Super saver shipping" or Amazon Prime if your customer has that. Honestly I'm 3 times as likely to buy a thing if it's fulfilled by Amazon because I have Amazon Prime.

For T-shirts, Cafe Press etc.'s prices are outlandish, and you are probably way ahead on profits if you throw a bunch into Ziploc bags and have Amazon fulfill them.

The point is -- I'm talking to you old stuck in the mud fogeys who don't want to change anything -- the Internet has created incredible, new opportunities for outsourcing that just didn't exist in the world before. Because of the automation possible on the Internet, you can get these services at very very low cost. They have to write the software and rent the servers that do the work, but they only have to do that once, and their costs are the same whether you're on board or not. So it costs next to nothing to bring you on. They actually are making out like bandits because their costs are so low.

These things are so cheap that doing them is a "no-brainer". These include:

- Visa/MC merchant -- these days getting an ole-fashioned Visa/MC merchant account isn't even stupid. They charge you 30 cents per transaction plus 1.6%. But they'll require you buy a $1000 credit card swipe machine, pay a $500 information systems tax, nickel and dime you to death until you're paying more like 7%. Now they have services like Square that charge 2.7% and that's it. They are cheaper because they automate the business relationship - you rarely talk to a human - and they make money in volume - by giving so many new businesses and consumers access to Visa/MC.

- Membership renewals - PayPal and Amazon will set up automatic annual payments for FREE, which cuts down on the labor of renewal letters to send out.

- Online ticketing holy tamole! The cost of a system like Eventbrite or Brown Paper Tickets is all in the initial construction of the software. Once it's built, the cost of adding an event to it is ZERO. And that's why they'll let anyone and their dog create an event, even a baloney event. It doesn't cost them anything to do so, and they'll make out like bandits on the events that do sell tickets. Now in a full soup to nuts relationship like Whistletix, there's a little more overhead, but it's still small enough that the convenience charge more than covers it.

These things are new. They didn't come along until a few years ago. "Conventional wisdom" doesn't know anything about them.

Anytime you can use one of these new automated approaches to outsource, you free up that volunteer to do something ELSE for your organization -- more interesting and more sophisticated that betters your organization. The volunteer that isn't manning the reservations phone 6 hours a day, is instead calling TV stations and newspapers to promote the event, getting a coat of paint on the equipment, fundraising, etc.

If only we could outsource scraping paint!

Edited intentionally as I wanted to do the article in sections.

VMT has a nice online store. Much of the merchandise on the website is proprietary, lessening the impact of the "Big Box" online guys. They carry a much larger selection, especially books on site, as well as some local heritage HO models. The traffic flow in the museum is well set up also to have visitors "exit through the gift shop"

:http://shop.vmt.org/_store/default.asp

The main advantage a "Gift Shop" has, and it is subject to how the management stocks and organizes it (a major topic for a different thread), is that it is an impulse satisfy-er.

You come back from the ride, or looking at the exhibits with your troop of (friends, siblings, relatives, progeny, zombies (all types)) and you want a rememberance of your 10 minutes to half a day spent at this place.

Period.

Unless you want to, and are able to, compete with the local (regional) hobby shop/Barnes & Noble/Dollar Store/Ocean State Job Lots/etc, there is no reason to do so.

Having an online presence, again, unless you have a unique product WHICH SELLS is an exercise in futility.

And I'm not talking about carrying a dozen copies of SnailPace, TrainZ, Railroad Muddler etc which amuse the membership once a month when they carouse the bookshelf looking at the latest rail porn.

Been there, done that and DON'T have the t-shirt to prove it.

A well run gift shop does and can provide anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands of dollars of additional revenue (read profit, not cash flow) to an organization. But, you need the volunteers (forget paid staff) not only to staff the joint, but to have a good retail sense and to work at it.

As an example - back when RR videos were just starting to come out (and were about $40 per VHS cassette), I was managing a gift shop and doing the "RR show circuit". I stayed away from videos because of the price/profit structure (40% discount - gift shops need a 100% markup or better). But, I had an increasing number of people ask me about videos over a few months & dove into it heavily.

We sold $7,000 worth of vids in 1989 one weekend at a show. Just after that high water mark, everyone & his uncle got into selling and discounting vids. We got out over the next 2 years as our inventory was drawn down. I couldn't see making $5 or less per video for all the effort and competition.

What I'm trying to say is the gift shop business is dynamic and you have to be on top of your game. One way (Strasburg) is to carry everything. You can do it because the world walks through your doorstep. The other way is to carry generic trinkets (low cost) with your name on it & sell rememberances.

Having an on-line presence to do either is massively time consuming or futile or both the the result being is that you will have people on the payroll getting paid and subtracting from the overall profit (if any) or a monthly "web store" bill with a few dollars being generated.

Rambled too much on this one, but it is near & dear to my heart & experiences.

(The local Ferengi)

This whole discussion illustrated the "Why don't you [fill in the suggestion]" often heard in railway preservation circles. One that we get at Orange Empire is "why don't you activate the old roadside diner that's now on display?" The answer to this is: Bringing it up to Health Dept. and other codes (it was last used for actual food service at least 20 years ago when it was sitting next to US 395/I 215 a few miles north of Perris) for two days a week at lunch time just doesn't make financial sense. There are some suggestions that may not have been feasible 30 years ago that with modern technolgy are now practical, but museum managements must weigh all aspects of these ideas before spending money or volunteer time on them.

I suppose if you consider the question, "Why don't you do something that would likely get you more money for the operation that is alligned with what you're doing already?" to be along those lines, then, I guess you're right.
Many museum gift shops are pretty impressive affairs in some cases. I've sene plenty who have paid staff, handle operations like a normal retail store, yet don't even offer basic souvineer sales online. I website with a teaser photo and bullet comments about all the neat stuff they have (you gotta show up to buy anything, though) seems to blow holes into the 'impulse sales only' theory, as you wouldn't need to mention said gift shop if you don't expect anyone to want anything ahead of time...
It's not just RR museums, of course. I've seen some very well-run (and large) museum gift shops that aren't on line for other subjects, too. I'm equally befuddled as to why they're not even trying to enhance the revenue in that way. Heck, some well-known operations don't even know what to do if you call asking about something. For example, I deeply regretted not buying a cap from the Cunbres & Toltec (the nice black one with the two-flag logo they have right now) when I rode it last fall. A few months back I called them and asked if I could buy one over the phone. They had no idea how to handle that and took my info down. They didn't charge me postage and wound up eating the cost of the postage and I think maybe got a couple of bucks from the sale! The Grand Canyon RR (a purely commercial venture) fared no better with a friend of mine when he called looking for something as well...

The WW&F Railway Museum (http://www.wwfry.org) has its entire gift shop inventory on-line, linked from its home page. It does a pretty decent business selling two-foot gauge books, hats, clothing and similar items to two-foot enthusiasts world wide. The volunteers who run the gift shop keep the listings up-to-date, too.

You might want to check out this Web site. The link the the gift shop ("Online Store") is plainly displayed on the home page.

http://coloradorailroadmuseum.org/

Mike

The California State Railroad Museum has a very strategically located (right next to the main entrance-can't miss it) and well-stocked gift store, including a wide variety of books. Their store is also available online, and it is linked from the homepage on the left-side column. Sixth item down, below "Home" (return to), "Visitor Information," "Events & Exhibits," "Train Rides," and "Explore & Learn," in that order. Homepage: http://www.csrmf.org/.

I haven't done an item-by-item comparison between their physical location and their online catalogue, so I don't know if they have the same exact number of products available on the web as they do in Sacramento. But if I had to make a guess (looking at the website), there's very few if any products available at the museum that are not available online.

The online edition of the store is categorized and sub-categorized, so you don't get lost in a long, multi-page list of every item available listed in no particular order. For example, the website has 91 different railroad books listed, and 16 railroad dining books listed, for a total of 107 in the overall book category (1 of 12 total categories).