March 2016 – PulseTV

New and Upcoming Products on PulseTV

Every spring there is giant trade show in Las Vegas where vendors from around the country and even internationally come to sell their products. We go every year to find products our PulseTV.com customers might be interested in. And like Forrest Gump’s momma said, ‘You never know what you’re gonna get.’ This year we were lucky.

Our buyers came back with dozens and dozens of new items that we will be featuring on PulseTV in the coming months, and we thought you might like a preview;

The Key Ninja

This is designed to replace a disorganized key ring. It is like a Swiss Army knife for keys. Your keys fold in for a sleek compact holder less than 3 inches long. It’s easy to organize all your keys with expandable pieces, and eliminates the bulk from a pocket or purse.

Color Oxy Meter

This is for health-minded individuals. It is a fingertip clamp that measures blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate. It is non-invasive, involves no blood and takes measurements in seconds. We think both people who are keeping track of their health and also people who like to monitor their workout progress will be very interested.

210 First Aid Kit

This is a product pretty much everybody could use. This tiny little First Aid Kit holds 210 items! Sure, a lot of them are things like cotton balls and alcohol wipes, but it also includes things like wound dressings, bandages, disposable gloves, a cold pack and even an emergency blanket. An amazing deal..

Flex Sonic Therapy Massager

This personal massager comes with three interchangeable massage heads which allows the user to try different applications for their pain relief. Plus, it also includes a pain relief therapy gel which turns this product from a simple massager into a pain relief system.

Pressure Cooker

Everybody who has tried cooking with a pressure cooker loves them. Options in cooking seem to be very popular (like our hugely popular low-fat fryer) and we think our customers are going to love the option to cook nutritious, delicious and convenient meals with a little pressure.

Metal Detector

We have carried a similar product before and it was a hit, so we feel pretty confident about this one. And who wouldn’t like the adventure of discovering a hidden treasure at the beach, in an empty lot or even in their own back yard? And with the deal we got just about anybody can afford to become an amateur treasure-hunter.

There are a whole bunch of other products we will be introducing this spring and summer, these are just a few off the top of my head. Stop at PulseTV.com now and then and see what’s new on our ‘New Stuff‘ and ‘Top Products‘ pages. With the number of items we’re adding you will probably find something new every day!

Vegas, baby! Vegas!

Several members of the PulseTV staff recently returned from the ASD Market Week in Las Vegas. The ASD Market Week is the most widespread trade show in the country. Every year the ASD brings in the widest variety of retail merchandise for the ultimate shopping experience. How could we pass that up?

So, in our case “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” does not apply. We will be populating PulseTV with more than 150 unique items that we picked up. From housewares and flashlights to gizmos and gadgets, we really hit the jackpot during this trip; and soon you will too!

New products are going up daily so be sure to checking in frequently.

CEO’s Lunch with a PulseTV.com Customer

Hello, my name is Jaffer Ali, co-founder and CEO of PulseTV.com. A couple of days ago I had a lunch meeting at the Housewares Show in Chicago. It was a great lunch with Rus Sarnoff, an industry veteran.

Before we got down to discussing business, he said, “Jaffer, I just have to tell you, my wife and I are REALLY fans of PulseTV.” I smiled and thought he was being polite. But he went on, “I have to say that you guys have the best customer service we have seen in a long time. I ordered a dashboard camera and it was defective. I called to return it and get another one, and everything was so simple. I sent in my unit, but forgot the SD card in the unit. I called and Brynn in your C.S. department actually tracked down the unit I sent in, retrieved the card and sent it back to me. That is customer service. And by the way, my wife buys all of your flashlights!”

That is an almost verbatim story about our customer service. I came back to the office and gave Brynn a high five for going above and beyond for our customers. It is always great to hear good things unexpectedly. Oh, the potato leek soup they served at lunch was awesome too!

–Jaffer Ali, CEO of PulseTV.com

The best insurance is a good Dash Cam

My 20 year-old daughter asked me to bring her one of our dashboard cameras.

“What do you need a dash cam for?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? Haven’t you seen all the dash cam footage of Russian meteor, plane crashes, murders…”

I squirmed a little. “No,” I said. “I’m not into pop-culture.”

“What does pop-culture have to do with dash cam footage?”

She then pulled out her phone, typed something really fast and pulled up a wide variety of dash cam footage. She showed me accidents, a shooting, two meteors and a drunk guy getting arrested.

“That’s all real life shot on a dashboard camera, Dad.”

“Ok, I’ll bring you one. What do you hope to capture on it?”

“Nothing interesting, I hope.”

Here are a few of the dash-cam videos we watched:

“We have to fail faster.”

The boss once said, ‘We have to fail faster.’ It sounds a little counter-intuitive for a business model when you first hear it. The purpose of a business is to succeed, not to fail. But in application it makes a certain kind of sense.

For an e-commerce company like PulseTV.com success means connecting our customers with products they want to buy. Not exactly an easy thing since the interest of buyers is notoriously fickle. I would hate to admit how much guess work actually goes into finding successful products. That is why it is important to fail and fail fast, because the successes, when they come, are what keep the customers happy and coming back.

And we have had more than our share failures. The hair highlighters are a great example. At a trade show somewhere one of our buyers found a vendor who was willing to sell us tubes of hair highlighter for practically the cost of the product. The highlighter was a water soluble coloring that you could brush into your hair to create accents and highlights, and then simply wash out with shampoo. Safe, simple and fun. We figured it would be huge with teenagers and younger people.

For the price the vendor was offering we committed to tens of thousands of units. And while the highlighters sold, they weren’t the hit we needed them to be to justify the huge purchase we made. We ended up with thousands of them. That is just one example of many.

But what pays for the failures are the successes. Like Smitty’s Glass Wax for example. It is not a very exciting or unusual product, just something you rub on eye glasses or glass screens to keep them from smudging or smearing, but the customers love it. I can’t even tell you how many units we have sold over the years. Sometimes we have trouble keeping it in stock.

Unfortunately it is impossible to differentiate between the hair highlighters from the glass wax when looking for new products. But we keep trying, and sometimes we fail and sometimes we succeed. But the customers know we are always looking to bring them products they need and want. And that is part of what keeps them coming to PulseTV.com.