The Purpose of This Blog

So far in my career I have had quite a bit of experience with the Internet and ecommerce. I started my career in an IT consulting firm specializing in the healthcare industry. While in IT consulting I worked my way through the ranks to become a practice director. I had the good fortune to work with many of the largest healthcare organizations in the United States and Canada on some of their most challenging IT projects.

After seven years in the IT consulting industry I decided that I wanted to venture out on my own so I founded Bundlecity.com. We started the business selling consumer electronics on eBay. With a lot of hard work we grew Bundlecity.com into a multi-channel retailer selling on several marketplaces as well as on our own retail websites.

As our online retail business progressed, we looked for expansion opportunities and decided to launch a wholesale division. Since we had become good at shipping individual products for our own online retail business, the next logical step was to offer to ship individual products for other online retailers – a process known as “drop-shipping.” Offering to drop-ship reduces a lot of your customer’s risk and expense, making them more likely to try your products.

As our business progressed, we realized that TV wall mounts were selling very well. After doing some market analysis, we decided that the TV mount business was yet another expansion opportunity so we launched our Arrowmounts line of TV mounts and brackets. Having our own line of products gave us a good competitive advantage. What’s more, since we had built a strong drop-shipping business, we gained customers quickly by offering to drop-ship for them. Today we offer a full line of TV mounts to both online retailers and to brick-and-mortar stores.

Needless to say, the road from selling on eBay to where we are now was not easy. I can think of several instances where I seriously thought about throwing in the towel. Running a small business presents you with many difficult challenges. Sometimes you feel as though you are bombarded with some of the most difficult problems you can imagine. These include financial difficulties, employee issues, technical disasters as well as a host of other things that you would have never imagined. Nevertheless, no matter how difficult things got, we kept plowing forward – each time learning from our mistakes and our successes.

I quickly came to the realization that these experiences in ecommerce are valuable and should be shared with other small business owners. While I don’t profess to be an expert by any means, I will do my best to share what I know about useful technologies and what it takes to run an online business. I will discuss the best strategies we have used to succeed as well as the steps you should take to avoid making some of the same mistakes we made. I will also discuss some of the tools we use on a daily basis to run our operations. Some of these tools include great open source software that has worked well for us. Hopefully others will benefit from this information and use it to build their own successful businesses.

Before I close this passage, I want to briefly explain why I chose the name “Pezlogic” for this blog. The name was coined by a few childhood friends of mine to describe my debating style. Throughout the years my friends often said, “There you go again Pez. You’re using ‘Pezlogic’ to make your point.”

Well, “Pezlogic” or not, it’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. As I lay out my opinions in this blog, I welcome your feedback. I especially want to know when you think I’m using “Pezlogic” to make a point. Happy reading!