Joe – PulseTV

The Dirty Little Secret Called “Free” Shipping…

There’s a reason it starts with the letter “F”, that’s what you’re getting!

Are you spending more for an item to get free shipping? The answer is most likely YES!

The saying that there are no free things in life is true when it comes to free shipping.

Shipping is a real cost that MUST be added into the product price. When you buy multiple items from a website that offers “free” shipping, the shipping cost is built into EVERY item. In most cases when you tally up the total with “free” shipping, it will cost you more than a site that charges shipping and handling up front.

Let’s look at some popular sites that give you “free” shipping and PulseTV.com that actually charges shipping.

Example:

Amazon price for Hurricane Spin Scrubber is $39.99 free shipping. Now, Amazon use to be at $35.00, but even then…

PulseTV Price is $29.99 PLUS shipping, for an average price shipped in the US of $36.90. Slightly higher… HOWEVER… buy two from Amazon and your price was $70.00.

From PulseTV you get a $10 discount for buying two so it’s $49.98 plus shipping for a total of $58.97.

Add more items at Amazon and your so-called Free shipping gets more expensive, while at sites like PulseTV.com that charge shipping, your price per piece shipped goes down.

Why you ask?

Because you are paying for the full shipping on EVERY item. You’re paying for multiple boxes even if they use one box. You’re paying labor as if every item is being boxed separately, plus your postage on sending one item is always more expensive than sending multiples.

Sites like Amazon count on your buying multiple items to actually profit on their “free shipping”. While sites that charge for shipping are just trying to break even on all the costs.

Another example of FREE Shipping that costs you more; let’s look at Rakuten (formerly known as buy.com)

Sure it’s free shipping but let’s look at the PulseTV price that charges shipping. It’s $9.49 for the item… add shipping and handling the total comes to: $13.48. You’re saving right away.

Buy two and here is the breakdown:

Rakuten $31.98

PulseTV: $22.45

Let’s go back to Amazon and another item called SafeT Air…

You will pay $29.95 and get “free” shipping.

At PulseTV.com you’ll pay $24.99 plus shipping for a total of $31.46. Cheaper to buy on Amazon by a dollar or two… but here’s where the free shipping sites get you.

PulseTV.com gives you a discount of $5 per jar when you buy two or more. So on two jars at Amazon you’re paying $59.90.

At PulseTV.com you’re paying $39.98 + shipping of $6.77 for a total of $46.75. Pretty substantial savings to actually PAY for shipping.

But guess what… the average person buys 3 jars, so let’s look at what free costs you.

Amazon: $89.85

PulseTV.com $59.97 + shipping cost of $6.91 for a total of $66.68. WOW! If you got free shipping you just paid $23.17 MORE.

Notice how little the shipping went up from 2 to 3 jars. From $6.77 to $6.91.

CONCLUSION:

Almost any site that “gives” free shipping is selling you a bunch of baloney. Remember free starts with “F” and that’s what they’re doing to you.

Granted if you are just going to buy one item, maybe you’ll save a dollar or two, but when you combine products you’re taking money OUT of your pocket.

At PulseTV.com we want to save YOU the maximum amount of money so we do a few things.

We give you discounts on most items when you buy multiples.
We increase shipping based on weight and your location only.
We only fold in the labor and packing costs on your first item.

The average PulseTV.com customer purchases 4 items per order. Looking at the examples given above look how much more you would be paying for a total order buy getting FREE shipping.

From “Shagmail” to “Gophercentral”: Did you know PulseTV also offers free eZines?

If we were to take a look back 22 years at a little suburb of Chicago, IL we would find the roots of what would become one of the biggest email newsletter networks on the Internet.

All the way back then it was called “Shagmail”. We can thank a popular James Bond spoof film which came out that year for that. At that time email was exploding. AOL was mailing out free trial discs by the millions and the general public was just discovering the convenience and immediacy that email provided.

In the 90s, PulseTV.com was selling videos via direct response television advertising and they began collecting customer email addresses along with all of the normal contact and billing information as a matter of course. That was the original email list, and it didn’t take long to discover that people loved getting email and were very responsive to email advertising.

The next step was a no-brainer; provide content people want to read in their email and they will be more likely to open it and look at ads. Shagmail.com started with about 10 email magazines, or eZines. Titles like the clean joke list Clean Laffs, the adult joke list Laff-a-Day, the home-cooking column Daily Recipe, and Bizarre News were all written and published in-house by PulseTV staff.

As the popularity increased so did the number of titles. Shagmail was adding content as diverse as a professional wrestling review and a daily Bible verse, among many others. With a dramatically growing audience the decision was made to re-brand Shagmail with a somewhat more inclusive name; GopherCentral.

Eventually GopherCentral.com included a catalog of nearly 80 email publications with millions of unique subscribers. It was even being mention on radio and national television. But the Internet being what it is, within a few short years fatigue began to set in and the momentum began to slow, especially after the dot-com bubble collapse in the early 2000s. Despite this GopherCentral.com was still a juggernaut and had a huge presence for years to come.

These days GopherCentral.com is more of an email boutique than a superstore. The most popular publications are still there, with a core audience of fans who forward their favorite issues around to their friends and still patronize PulseTV.com. Now GopherCentral.com is starting to grow a social media presence as well. If you have never read a GopherCentral.com eZine they are all free, like they have always been, and the editors are just waiting to say hello.

Gearing up for the holidays.

For the rest of the world, the big holidays including Christmas are still months off, but for retailers Christmas is right around the corner. Here at PulseTV.com we have already started gearing up for the fourth quarter.

In the last couple months we have sent our team of buyers to the big ASD consumer trade show in Las Vegas, the Consumer Electronics show, also in Vegas, and our own local show, the TMC Merchandise Show in Rosemont, Illinois.

And they discovered some great products we are really excited to introduce to our customers.

We have had tremendous success with the Streak Free Cloths we have been carrying for years, and we have found something we hope is going to be just as big. They are called ‘Dura-Fresh’ cloths and they are made from natural wood fiber. That makes them completely natural, non-toxic and even compostable, but the great thing is that simply rinsing them in hot tap water eliminates 99.9 percent of germs and bacteria. That makes them perfect for use in the kitchen for clean up or as dish cloths.

We also found something we think is going to be a hit with homeowners. It is a light up sign box. Basically it is an illuminated sign you can customize with a bunch of included letters, number and symbols. So you can put your address in the front window, or ‘PARTY ROUND BACK’, ‘WELCOME HOME’, or ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’. Anything you can think of.

And we certainly haven’t forgotten about the kids. We found a really neat remote controlled truck that shoots bubbles. That’s right, a bubble truck (we’re going to try and come up with a better name for it). We really think kids are going to go nuts for it.

These are just a few of the many great new products we will be introducing over the next couple of months. The fourth quarter is always the most exciting time of the year and we believe our customers are going to share our excitement when they see what we have found for them.

PulseTV Celebrates their 20th Anniversary on Facebook Live

Did you know that we have a Facebook page? Well, a lot of people and businesses do, but this year we are celebrating our 20th anniversary and we have taken advantage of Facebook’s ‘LIVE’ feature to let you celebrate with us.

Our first Facebook Live Event takes you into the mysterious and rarely before seen world of a small business office. We show off some of our brand new products, give you a Video Studio Tour, Office Tour with some employees, and a Birthday Celebration for a special little guy!

Our PulseTVDeals page has over 32,500 fans, but if you are not one of them you can still watch the video by clicking the link below. You’ll meet the people behind PulseTV.com and the Deal of the Day, and the most important person in the entire office; the Customer Service manager.

Watch the PulseTV Facebook LIVE event

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!

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.