LostCarPark's Journal

I spent the day helping my sister move out of the pet shop she's been running for the last couple of years. She had a quite successful first year there, but then a couple factors conspired against her in the last year. The first has been almost continual road works in the town where she was based, so lay a gas pipe line through the town. This has had a significant impact on her passing trade. The second was, unsurprisingly, the economic downturn. She's been negotiating with her landlord to reduce the rent, but he's only offered a 10% reduction, which was not enough to keep the shop viable.

However, it's not the end. While her sales through the brick-and-mortar shop have been steadily declining, sales through her website (which I set up for her) have been gradually rising. It's not yet at a level that would sustain the losses the shop was making, but it has certainly been a significant proportion of her business for the last while. So we hope we can continue to build up the online business despite not having a brick-and-mortar store.

So (and apologies for the blatant plug) come visit us at http://www.brendaspets.ie.

I am pleased to announce my newest website venture. It's a joint venture with my sister, who already runs a bricks-and-morter pet shop. it's called brendaspets.ie.

For the initial launch you need to create an account to access the shop. You can do this at brendaspets.ie/user. If you have a pet, it's the perfect time to buy them something nice for Christmas. The online catalogue isn't complete yet, but we're working on adding more items every day. If you don't see something you're looking for, leave some feedback and we'll add it as soon as we can.

Unfortunately we're only taking orders from Ireland (north and south) at the moment. We'll look at expanding this soon, but it probably won't be very practical to ship a 15kg bag of dog food internationally.

So far I'm pretty happy with how it's working out, but feedback is always welcome.