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The Hero Hunt Saga: Store Closing
— November 29, 2007 Leave a Comment
To anyone who visits this site:
You may have noticed the lack of updates to this site in about six months. There is a reason. Unfortunately, the store part of Hero Hunt is closing ASAP. Now that most of my inventory is gone and all pre-orders have been taken care of, I have no reason to keep the store open. Thus the decision to shut it down. The site will be sticking around though. This blog will also continue. I will be launching something else here soon, so stay tuned. I hope you will like it.
Why I am Closing my Store
I feel I need to talk about closing my store here, and this is the place to do it. I have been wanting to talk about the ins and outs of the business for a long time, but it never felt appropriate, mainly because I didn’t want to bite the hand that feeds, i.e. Diamond Comics. I think the need for a series of blog posts detailing my different business experiences with Hero Hunt is necessary. Probably more to come on that. For now, I’ll stick to why I am closing the store.
The main reason is simply competition. There is too much competition online right now in the collectibles business. There are many established online stores selling the same items I was, and more are cropping up everyday. And the 600 pound gorilla in the room in this business is eBay. It was not profitable for me to operate an online store, therefore it was not worth my time. So about six months ago, I stopped accepting pre-orders through the site. After that I began trying to unload my inventory through various outlets, mostly through eBay, at less than wholesale prices. More on this also later.
There are other reasons besides competition that it was not profitable for me to run an online store. Competition is just the main reason, I feel. One of these other reasons is Diamond Comics, which is also a huge part of the problem of competition. I have very strong feelings for Diamond Comics, most of which are negative. Diamond deserves a whole post in itself, so that is about all I will say right now.
Other contributing problems were e-commerce, as a whole, and the collectible industry in general. I have more to say on all these subjects. So I don’t think I am finished yet. If you want to know more about this, stay tuned. Thanks.
