Sometimes you have to make moves that you don’t want to make

You know, in business, sometimes you have to do things, even when they aren’t exactly what you would want to do.  I just made such a move, and I may have to expand on what I did in the future.

As you know, I have a pretty good number of e-commerce stores.  I guess I have 15 or 20, but who’s counting, right?  Well, in the last couple of years, the profits that I earn have been dwindling, and all for one reason.  Oh, I still make the same amount of money every week, but even making the same number of dollars, I end up with 20% to 25% less to spend every week.  Why?  Because the US Dollar has been falling in value against nearly every world currency that I know of.  As a matter of fact, let’s remove the word “nearly” because I know of no currency that the dollar is gaining on.  The fact is that just 18 months or so ago, the US Dollar was worth about 56 Pesos.  Today, it’s just over 44.  That is a huge loss.  On top of that, prices are always rising here in the Philippines.  So, it’s a double whammy - my money is worth way less than it was, and I am having to pay more than I used to pay for the goods I sell.

On one of my stores, I raised my prices about 10% or so a couple months ago, and it has not hurt sales in the least.  As a matter of fact, my sales are actually up since raising prices.  But, I’ve lost way more than 10% in real earnings over the past 2 years or so, so that 10% price increase is only getting back a little bit of what I have been losing.  I don’t want to make too huge of a price increase at one time, though.  I feel that making that move would really push customers away.

As I eluded  at the start of this article, I made a change today as well.  On one of my sites, I abandoned the Dollar.  I switched all of my pricing to Euros on one of my sites, we’ll see how it goes.  There can be no question that in recent years the Euro has been a much better performer than the Dollar.  I got a bit of a surprise, within an hour after I made the change, I got a couple of orders on that site too!  If I can go a couple of months and see that there has been little change in sales after switching to the Euro, I will make the change on other sites that I own too.

I will say, I have been thinking of doing this for a while now.  I have been hesitant, though, because I worry about the impact that such a move will have on my customer base.  Will it scare them away, particularly the American Customers?  I do feel that a lot of Americans are not too aware of what a Euro even is.  So it will be interesting to watch.  Another reason why I was not too keen on making the move was that as an American, it’s hard to abandon your own Country’s currency.

The choice, though, was a no brainer, really, if you only look at it through your business eyes.  The slide in the Dollar does not look like it will stop any time soon.