Just had my first online order.

I am very very very happy.

I thought I was being smart.  Turns out Tesco are way cleverer (or should that be sneakier and underhand) than my humble self.

While I was waiting to see if the Co-op Bank would give me a business Visa card I thought I'd box clever and use my personal Tesco credit card to buy my initial stock, which was worth about £2000, using the 30 days free credit I had left before the next payment date.  I clear the card every month, if I use it at all so it wasn't going to get confused with any personal purchases.

As I was buying stock from several different wholesalers, purchasing equipment for my trade stand and paying for printing the charges went on over a couple of weeks.  I kept an eye on the rising costs, especially when I was within a couple of hundred quid of the limit and thought (in my big soft head) that if I reached the limit my card would be automatically declined.

Not so.  My card was declined in Argos while I was trying to buy folding tables (total bargain) so I just used my own bank card, went home and called Tesco to pay some off.  To my surprise I'd gone £150 over my limit, I cleared the excess and asked how it was possible to do that.  Tesco told me all cards have a kind of buffer limit which we can dip into if we need to and I wasn't going to be charged for it.

Well I have been!  Got my statement yesterday which comes with a natty £12 charge attached for going over my limit.  Well blow me down and call me shorty if that's not just plain old theft.

Tell me, Tesco how do you get away with it?  Where is the clause in your small print that states 'we reserve the right to not decline your purchases (because we're really bad at adding up), then charge you for the privilege?'

I'm more than a little bit hacked off and I suppose all credit card companies do it, it's not just the supermarket behemoth.  I'm off to check the small print.

Yesterday was an eye opener.  And a bit of a worry as it’s thrown up what could potentially be an expensive logistical problem.  A customer of mine rang to ask for 4 bags of dog food and asked if I could bring it to the Sussex Country Fair at the weekend as we’re both trading there.  Not a problem says I, I’ll see you there.

I rang around a few wholesalers in my area (by area I mean from Kent, through Sussex and into parts of Hampshire!) as I had an order to place for various bits and pieces and wanted to tag it onto the end of that.   Not a chance. 

I ended up ringing half a dozen wholesalers who, although they sell the treats this company does, don’t stock the food.  If I heard ‘sorry love/sweetcheeks/darlin’ (delete as appropriate) we don’t stock it, it’s niche’ once, I heard it again and again yesterday.  It might be niche, mate, but it’s the fastest growing sector of the pet market today.  So wake up, Sweetcheeks, and get some stock in!

It could be a costly problem for me as I try to consolidate my stock list.  Because, if I have to order all my products from each company separately that’s one delivery charge for each instead of no charge for the lot.  Not profit friendly.

Luckily, the company who’s food I was trying to order where great and reduced the charge, but I still ended up ordering more than I needed because it just made financial sense.

I’m sure it will all come out in the wash, it’s a business in itself, natural pet products wholesaler.  If I had the cash I’d do it in a heartbeat.

But while my website isn’t up and running properly yet (I’ll save that one for another blog) I have to keep my stock low.

So, if you’re about this weekend and looking for something to do come and see us, we’re opposite the working dog arena at the Sussex Country Fair.  If you ask nicely I might even have a spare bag of dog food hanging about.

All together now ‘Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like……’ like bank holidays and flood warnings!  Yes, we’ve had another washout trading weekend and this time it was so bad I actually lost quite a lot of money.  But as we were just north of Birmingham we had the best curry this side of the M42 so there was some consolation.

I think my sister secretly vowed never to help me out again but my stepsister actually volunteered, bless her foolish heart.  And the sun shined.  That was Friday.  Saturday and Sunday it rained so badly that by Sunday afternoon there wasn’t a soul in sight and most of the traders shut up shop and went home.  By half past three I was lying on my hotel bed watching Mission Impossible, wondering if I would ever be too old to think Tom Cruise is actually quite fit, while the rain lashed on the windows.

Monday morning was glorious and I took more money in three hours than I had in the previous 2 days.  My highlight was a woman who came back to the stand and gave me all the cash she had to buy vegetable chews for her dog saying they had all but cured his foul dog breath.  We aim to please!  But then the inevitable rain started up again and we all packed up and shuffled off.

My shop fitting redesign worked though and I sold some quite expensive and obscure stuff as a result.  We also ran a competition and I reckon I’ve got 100 punters signed up to my email newsletters.  Should my website ever get up and running.  Which is another story entirely.

I’ll be at the Sussex Game and Country Sports Fair on the 16th May for the weekend.  Come down and visit if you're about, try your hand at clay pigeon shooting or falcon racing!  So fingers crossed for the same weather we’ve got currently.  Because this is my most important fair to date, crammed with my target market, if the sun shines.

In the meantime I’m reading a couple of very good books I can highly recommend if you’re trying to market yourself on a non-existent budget.  The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook and Guerrilla Marketing for Free by Jay Conrad Levinson.  Well worth the money, you can pick them up on Amazon or for less using their ‘new and used’ button.  Another good place to go for free marketing courses (great for making flyers etc) is the Hewlett Packard site.  Yes really, they offer free marketing courses, peppered with references to their printers of course but they’re module courses you can walk away from and come back to later when you have five minutes.

Highly recommended.  Back to tent drying.