The Cake Is in the Mail, Part 2

I got a phone call today from a customer who needed a cake next week and was disappointed that we only offer next-day shipping. She was hoping to pick a shipping date and have the cake arrive, and there are some sites, like 1-800-flowers, that let you order ahead and pick your delivery date.

We're not that sophisticated yet, but I can understand the frustration. If I walked into a neighborhood bakery and said, "Can I order a cake for next week?" and they said, "No, you have to take it tomorrow," I'd find another bakery.

Ordering ahead is one of those simple real-world things that gets very compicated in the e-commerce realm. Our ordering system is designed to minimize the travel time from the bakery to the customer's door, which distresses the pastries as little as possible. That system can't cope with the idea that someone would place an order on Tuesday for delivery three weeks from Friday. We're looking into ways to make ordering ahead work, and we hope to have the system updated by this autumn.

We're also looking at the nifty flat-rate small video boxes that the U.S. Postal service will ship anywhere for $5. I'd link to them, but they're not on anywhere on the Postal Service site.

And one final note on shipping before I leave this subject alone for a good long while: There is no such thing as "free shipping." Every business pays for shipping, and every business pays the same rates, which are calculated either by package size or package weight. If you see someone offering free shipping or discounted shipping when you spend more than X dollars, then they're including shipping in the price of their products. We don't do that, and we don't mark up our shipping costs, though we do round off to the nearest dollar on fixed rates. I think it's important that our customers know what things really cost, and by breaking out shipping, we don't penalize people who place smaller orders.

New Products
Just in time for spring, we've got Baseball, Golf, Retro, and Spring cookie assortments from our friends at Supercookie. Call me biased, but I love their products. The cookies are soft and buttery, and the decorations are bright and cheerful. I had an open tub in the office two weeks ago and everyone was talking about how great these cookies are.

SEO Geek's Corner
I was happy to see that I landed on page two of Google for the word croissants, which isn't easy given Google's emphasis on content instead of commerce. Time and again I hear SEO experts emphasizing the importance of content in search-engine rankings. For Google, at least, I'm happy to report that this is true. There's no keyword stuffing at work, and the only meta tags in use are the TITLE and ALT tags.

If only MSN Search loved my pages this much. I don't feel too bad, because their results are all over the place. The fourth link is a redirect, the sixth is a newspaper article, and the tenth apparently has something to do with soccer. I'm on page two for "croissants online," but looking at the wild variety of results that MSN generates, I've got to wonder if their algo is working right.