We placed our 1st order......and were hijacked by pirates!

We finally placed our 1st order; a bunch of customer electronics returns on a leading liquidation site. We were able to snap up the merchandise last minute using our recently developed bidding model that calculates max bid price based on historical sales prices, transaction & shipping costs, etc to meet your required net profit margins. All said and done, we won the order and we were anxious to receive our first batch of merchandise.

About 10 days into the process, the UPS tracking stopped. we immediately called UPS, who told me a tracer investigation had to be initiated by the merchant who sold me the goods and initiated the shipment. Can you beleive it, even though UPS is currently trying to locate the shipment, we are fully convinced that our first shipment had been snatched by local band of pirates in San Pablo, CA (see tracking information below). At this time, we are not very hopeful to ever see the merchandise but are not too concerned since the shipment was fully insured by the merchant.


A few days later, we placed a similar order, this time a bunch of GPS navigation systems, at a great price. Hopefully, this shipment will not be hijacked and finally we'll be able to celebrate the arrival of our first purchase order.

2008 wrap up. Where to go next?

2008 was pretty turbulent for MediaLoop. Born in September 08 with early revenues that came to an abrupt end in October. No defined direction at this point, which makes 2009 a wide open place to be. For the last few weeks, we did some research and poking around on liquidation.com and other liquidation sites to see if we could pick up some deals for resale on certain auction sites... Not sure if this is our thing, but at this time, it's about keeping it simple and to the point. For some reason, I keep coming back to e-commerce retail. I've been warned, but there is something to it that attracts me more than lead generation and financial services.

Not sure of what's holding us back at this time: a poorly defined business plan or the fear of not having a paycheck coming on every 2 weeks? Probably a combination of the 2....

Read a pretty interesting article on CNN.com today: They left the corporate cocoon to blossom - CNN.com . The guy interviewed had an interesting name....Schellen The article featured people leaving cushy jobs pursuing the dream of a start-up, increased control,happiness, and all that good stuff...easy to say when you left Google with 10,000 shares @ $500/share!

Anyways, we have to set our direction. Something tells me financial services affiliate marketing and lead generation is the safe way to go. At the same time, this e-commerce retail thing is so intriguing. Can it be combined? It's out there. We just have to find it...10-4.