Its now Jan 2010 and I am finally getting over the holiday rushes and slowly things are starting to settle back down. Since I am pretty much a lone operator, I decided this year to hire a call center with a virtual office. Basically this means they will take all the calls and take orders but most importantly they will also be processing those orders with my vendors. So I don't have to do anything! This will hopefully free me to up to be able to work on the sites, add new products and best of all, create another store for 2010. I will let you know how it works out but for now, I am extremely excited.

Ya know, they always say it takes a team to build a business and honestly I think I have done a superb job doing it all by myself but I am ready to goto the next level and it seems to be that having a virtual staff to handle the calls and order processing may just be the answer. The phones ringing, customers calling about order status or tracking updates and the manual entry of placing orders (can you believe there are still some drop shippers that make you place orders on their site manually??) and anything else that happens to pop up will now be handled for me so I will have no distractions. I don't hardly know how I am going to react yet.

Now, along with this, my wife and I decided we are moving to our vacation home in the Mountains of NC. Luckily, because of my success with Yahoo Stores, I am not tied down to any location. Since its all drop shipped and I have no inventory, moving my office is simple enough and our location in the world means nothing at all to our customers. So, we put our house up for sale last week and we are heading to Boone, NC. I guess you can call it early retirement except that I am not actually retiring. No matter how to slice it, its nice being your own boss, owning your own ecommerce business and not being tied down.

So what's new? Well, I am working with 2 people right now. The first site is LARPDirect.com which sells LARP Swords and LARP Weapons for kids, stage use, re-enactments and of course Live Action Role Play events and fairs. The second is ReplicaGunz.com which, as the domain refers, sell Replica Guns, Replica Western Pistols and other cool things. Both sites are coming along nicely and should prove to be successful as the year goes on.

And now, with my new found time that will be coming, I will be working on something new for my own arsenal of sites. Any ideas?? Hmmmm