Press Release
A bride-to-be living on a ranch 50 miles from civilization no longer needs to travel hundreds of miles in search of wedding-bell mint molds.
All she has to do is click on eBay, the Internet auction site, type in mint molds and chances are she’ll end up in Pat Dean’s online store.
Dean is the owner of Pat-A-Cake in downtown Norfolk, where, for almost 30 years, she has sold a variety of cake decorating, cookie-baking and party supplies. Now she’s selling those supplies—or at least most of those supplies—to customers around the country via eBay, the Internet auction site that hosts her store.
Dean started selling a limited number of her products on eBay a few years ago and consequently, started receiving messages encouraging her to open a store.
With the help of her friend, Janet Bosler of Nofolk, Dean took the plunge. Now she has around 550 items listed online.
But getting those products listed online is a bigger chore than opening a box and putting them on a shelf.
Dean has to photograph each item and write a description so customers will know if the cookie cutter or cake pan is just the right shape and size.
The procedure is repeated every time a new item is posted or a product color or style is changed.
“It’s time consuming,” she said.
Which is why Dean works at her online business early in the morning—before going to the store downtown—and again in the evening.
“I check e-mail every morning to see if something needs to be shipped out that day,” she said.
Plus, she’s a one-person shipping and handling department, which means she’s come to know the employees at the Norfolk post office on a first-name basis.
If so, she goes to her basement storage room, find the item, prints the invoice and packing slip on the computer in her bedroom-turned-office, sits through the pile of boxes to find one that’s the appropriate size, tapes it shut and heads to the post office.
Credit card payments are made through PayPal, and Internet payment service. She also accepts personal checks, however, items are not shipped until they are paid for.
Both eBay and PayPal receive a small percentage of her sales.
Every time she sells an item, she marks it off the inventory list she keeps in the notebook by her computer. That tells her how many she has in her storage room downstairs and how many she has at the store downtown.
When she’s gone, she posts a notice on the Internet site lettering customers know that it will be a few days before they will hear from her.
Even so, the e-mails pile up quickly.
“I was gone for five days…and had 277 e-mails when I came back. For every item you sell, you might have five or six e-mails,” she added.
They come from customers all over the United States and as far away as Brazil and Europe.
Because of the expense, Dean said she doesn’t ship overseas “too often.”
Despite the extra hours involved in running the business, operating an online business has been a profitable venture for Dean.
“It’s a way to increase sales without increasing expenses,” she said.
- Story Courtesy of the Norfolk Daily News
