Dealing in coins and medals is, of course, a matter of both buying and selling. Unlike retailing, where goods pass from manufacturer to wholesaler to mail order dealer to the public, the coin and medal business is a ping-pong game between dealer and public, goods moving from the public to the dealer and then back again from the dealer to the public. Sometimes dealers trade among themselves, and sometimes indeed the public do, and there are auctions at which all the combinations of dealer to dealer, dealer to public, public to dealer, and public to public may be found. In the main, however, the coin and medal business is from public to dealer and back again, and the mail order dealer must be able to get his prices right when both buying and selling.

Unlike the retailer of normal consumer products, the dealer can’t establish what the trade price is and then work out his own selling price accordingly, confident that he can always pick up further supplies at a known price if he gets a sudden rush of orders. If the coin and medal dealer gets a sudden rush of orders for a given item, he is likely to find himself having to buy in extra stock at a premium. The dealer has to perform a delicate balancing act if he is to pitch his selling prices attractively and yet cover his costs and show a profit. The balancing act is made the more difficult by the inevitable delays between placing advertising and having it published, and between drafting price- lists and having them printed. And yet if you are knowledgeable and able to deal shrewdly, coin and medal dealing can make a profitable mail order business.

Many people live within reach of a bookshop, and most people live within reach of a shop selling books, but shops of both kinds necessarily cater for the general interest. It is very difficult for the mail order bookseller to compete with the shops for the sale of the most popular titles; the Net Book Agreement ensures that most books are sold at fixed prices determined by the publishers, and so have to be sold for the same price whether the seller is a high street city bookshop or a one-man mail trader operating out of his garden shed. Furthermore, the discount publishers usually allow to booksellers is too small to support a mail order operation, being about a third of the retail price rather than the two-thirds that the mail trader typically needs.

However, mail order is worth thinking about for books of specialist interest, ie ones that are not normally found on the shelves of the high street shops, provided that you can get your advertising to the specialist market and there is a sufficient number of buyers in the market and a sufficient number of titles that you can offer them.

Buying and selling secondhand books within a specialist area is also a mail order possibility, as is the trade in remainders (ie publishers‘ unwanted stock sold off to the trade at low prices and not subject to any kind of resale price maintenance).

Books are easy to pack, easy to mail, and with no working parts to go wrong. Follow-up possibilities are good: more of the same. Keep your customers posted with your latest catalogues.

Most mail ordering bookselling is in fact undertaken by publishers direct selling their own titles. To enter the market by this route, you need to have a good number of titles, and the confidence — and money — to have them printed ready to sell by mail before you have any evidence whether they will sell at all. One possible approach is to start by selling books of similar interest published by other people; then once you are sure that the market exists and you can reach it, you can start publishing your own titles, and one by one substitute your own books for those of other publishers on your list.

Calculators

An enormous variety of calculators is available, some little bigger than credit cards, others large enough to be convenient for desktop work, some that also tell the time, play tunes, print calculations, and so on. At the top end of the market are the programmable calculators, which might fairly be regarded as the bottom end of the computer market, but at the more humble level there are low-priced calculators offering a range of functions to meet most needs, mathematical, scientific, financial, or just plain old-fashioned adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

Most calculators are small, lightweight and easy to mail. The price/weight ratio is favourable. Though calculators can go wrong after sale, most are well made and reliable, and the virtual absence of mechanical parts, except in the printing models, means in practice that most calculators live out a useful life without anything ever going wrong.

Although calculators are widely available, most are sold in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion by shops whose assistants frequently understand little of the capabilities and applications of the products they sell. This is where the mail trader can score. Produce sales literature that lovingly specifies every last thing that the calculator can do, and the way it does it. Give worked examples of different calculations, showing how the problems would be keyed into the machine and how the answers would be displayed.

Use either display advertising for off-the-page selling or classified advertising for two-stage selling.

There are many opportunities for follow-up sales to satisfied customers: more complicated calculators, other microchip-based devices — electronic games, home computers, clocks, watches, and so on. You can also follow up with items of related interest; for example, someone buying a calculator with a number of specifically business-type functions could well be amenable to offers of other business equipment, such as typewriters, telephones, photocopiers.

The bicycle as a means of cheap and healthy transport has greatly increased in popularity in recent years. Even so, specialist bicycle shops are not numerous, and mail order is worth considering as a retailing method, particularly for bicycles which are a little out of the ordinary. Consider folding bicycles, for example. These have all the characteristics of bikes in general, but they also have a certain gadgety appeal, a recurrent theme in mail order. They fold down for easy storage at home or in the boot of a car or even into a bag which may be easily carried. The owner can, for example, ride his bike to the station in the morning, fold it into the bag, take the train to town, and then cycle to the office at the other end, hanging his bike up in the cloakroom until he needs it again to go home. Features like these provide excellent material for the advertising copywriter.

From the customer’s point of view, there is the further mail order appeal of the chance to try the machine out for a few days, secure in the knowledge that it can be returned for refund within the trial period. This is particularly important as many potential purchasers will be doubtful whether they have the skill, strength and stamina to use the bicycle to advantage.

If your product is a good one, after-sales problems should be minimal though some are bound to occur and you must be sure in advance that you have the organisation and skills to deal with them. Handling and mailing are obviously more awkward than with many products; you need warehouse space and will probably have to use a non-Post Office carrier. Price/weight ratio is good.

There are no immediately obvious follow-ups; much depends upon the nature of your original sales pitch and the places you advertise. If you sell through cycling journals — and therefore to enthusiasts — you could follow up with other products of the outdoor life, such as camping gear. If you sell through general papers, promoting your product as a means of economical commuter transport, you might follow up with other items which promise to cut the cost of living, such things as devices to reduce home heating bills, or items of self-sufficiency appeal for growing your own food or brewing your own beer.

Binoculars/telescopes

There is a very wide range of such optical equipment available. At the top end of the range, items retail at £100 or more, and clearly this is not a good product for the non-specialist mail order beginner to choose. But at the bottom end of the market, the near-toys need not cost very much at all, and have a strong appeal to the buyer.

Binoculars confer power. You can see things other people can’t see. And at a more mature level, you can use them in sport, for bird-watching, satellite spotting, and so on.

Cheap binoculars may be lightweight, and even good quality glasses with, say a 10 x 50 lens, may not weigh more than a kilogram. The glasses may come in boxes with good manufacturers’ packing, needing only a little more outer wrapping for mailing. Price/weight ratio is very favourable for expensive glasses; indeed, there are many superb glasses specifically made to a very light weight, but that could take you into the £200- plus class where even with postal insurance the mailing costs are relatively insignificant.

Theatre glasses may be worth considering. These are always light in weight, and can make an attractive offer in the gift market.

Even cheap binoculars and telescopes should have a very long working life, and any optical products worthy of the name should give rise to few after-sales problems.

The major strength of direct mail is that your advertising goes only to specified individuals. Provided that the list of individuals you use has been carefully compiled and maintained, none of your money is wasted — as it invariably is in press advertising — sending your sales message to people who are definitely never going to buy your product.

Consider again the hamster example. If you could get a list of hamster owners who have in the recent past actually bought pet products by mail, you could post your advertising literature direct to exactly the sort of people you want to reach.

A further advantage is that you can get much more information into a mailshot than into a press advertisement. The cost of press advertising is roughly proportionate to the size of the advertising space; if a given ad costs £50, another 10 times the size is likely to cost £500. Direct mail costs, however, do not increase in the same simple fashion. Apart from printing — whose unit costs, anyway, decline as volume increases — it costs no more, for example, to mail an A4 sheet crammed both sides with information than to mail the same sheet with just a single sentence on it.

Door-to-door leaflets

Door-to-door leaflet distribution is cheap but indiscriminate, your sales message going to all the households of a particular area with no account being taken of the different interests and inclinations of the people in those households. This form of advertising is probably appropriate only for products likely to interest householders as householders — house security devices, decorating aids etc. There is, however, a system of area classification which aims to identify where there are concentrations of people likely to be responsive to particular promotions. This is the ACORN system and you may like to look into this if household leafleting appeals to you.

However, as has been said already, mail order is a nationwide business, and both press advertising and direct mail can put you in touch with the national market. While it is possible to conduct door-to-door advertising on a national scale, to do so would involve millions of households, and despite the relatively low unit costs, the scale and expense of such an operation rules it out for most mail order ventures. Even if your costs are no more than £20 per 1000, a campaign to reach 5 million households would set you back £100,000, and you would still not have reached the national market of upwards of 30 million households.

If, despite this, you think that the method might be particularly suitable for your product, you can conduct a very cheap experiment by pushing your leaflets through 1000 letterboxes in the nearest town.

Radio and TV

Although these have been used for mail order advertising, the beginner would do well to keep clear of them. You can get through your advertising money at alarming speed, and you depend upon your potential customers having pen and paper handy to jot down — and jot down correctly — price, address, phone number and other ordering information before your message vanishes into the ether.

Prestel and other interactive electronic media

These have not yet established themselves in a big enough way to make them suitable for mail order to the general public. They are perhaps worth considering only if your product appeals specifically to those enthusiasts who are already hooked up to electronic mailboxes and other marvels of the moment.

The inclusion of an order form in your advertised offer, like the reply envelope considered below, is less an inducement than its absence is a disincentive. Without it, the customer must find some paper to write on, work out how to say what he wants, and make sure he writes it down clearly and unambiguously. For most people, these are not among the most challenging tasks in the world, but for some they are. And for everyone, an order form that may need no more than the writing in of one’s name and address definitely simplifies the ordering procedure. All the customer needs is a pen. He may be able to complete the form immediately he has read the ad. No need to go in search of other materials, risking being sidetracked by a demanding cat, a chatty child or by any of the other siren voices that seduce prospective customers from the straight and narrow path that leads to your order book.

Envelope

You can provide an envelope for your customer in a number of ways, and all of them offer at least a marginal advantage in cost and convenience to him. Equally, they all add to your own costs, and, as with so much else in mail order, the balance of advantage in any particular case is only to be ascertained by testing.

Printed unstamped envelope. This is the simplest and cheapest offering you can make. The customer will still have to find a stamp, but he is saved the chore of finding an envelope and writing out the address.

Printed stamped envelope. This is the next simplest but by far the most expensive of the offerings you can make. By putting a postage stamp on the reply envelope you enclose with your advertising, you exert a slight moral pressure on the customer, possibly making him feel that it is ‘only fair’ to send you a reply since you have gone to the trouble of sending him a stamp for the purpose. But if that moral pressure is resisted, you have done nothing but push up your advertising costs by 13p a prospect. It may still be worth your while if you’re selling an expensive product with a substantial profit margin, but probably not otherwise.

Business Reply envelope. For a licence fee a year the Post Office will accept your pre-printed envelopes — subject to their design requirements — without requiring the sender to pay any postage. You pay the full postage plus 0.5p for each Business Reply item you receive. This is significantly cheaper for you than pre-stamping reply envelopes as you only have to pay postage on items that actually get posted to you.

You can opt for either the first- or the second-class post for your Business Reply envelopes, but whichever you choose, your post will normally come in the second rather than the first post of the day.

Freepost envelope. The annual fee and the per item cost are exactly the same for the Freepost service as for the Business Reply service. The Freepost service, however, is more flexible. While you can, if you wish, provide your customers with your own printed envelopes — as with the Business Reply service — you can also quote your Freepost address in your advertising so that the customer can use it when writing to you on his own stationery. This means, for example, that you can use a Freepost address in your classified advertising.

There is a slight risk in a Freepost address in that it is available for anybody who wishes to write to you on any matter, even if they are doing so just as a joke or to make a nuisance of themselves, and you have an open-ended commitment to pay for all replies. With the Business Reply service, on the other hand, the only people who can use your stationery are those to whom you have deliberately chosen to supply it.

Customer‘s stamped addressed envelope. In two-stage advertising, you may wish to consider asking the customer to supply you with a stamped and self-addressed envelope (SAE) for your reply. Such a request would hardly be an inducement for people to write in for further details — indeed it would be a positive discouragement for them to do so. But there are times when a negative inducement of this kind does serve your purpose.

As always, it comes down to arithmetic. The cost to you of sending replies to enquirers will sometimes be a significant part of your total advertising bill. It may be that if the customer pays the reply postage, an unprofitable advertising campaign can be turned into a profitable one. This is most likely to be the case if your product is very low-priced, and you find that the number of enquirers who go on to make a purchase is rather low. It could be that the first stage of your two-stage advertising is attracting too many frivolous enquirers, people not seriously in the market for your product who send off for details out of idle curiosity and because it costs them so little to do so. Requiring them to send an SAE for details may be just enough to put them off, and so improve the overall quality of your enquirers and therefore the percentage who go on to make a purchase. Thus, asking for an SAE may in some cases help you to target your advertising more effectively.

Money-back guarantee

This is one of the phrases that mail order has given to the English language — and one it can well be proud of. It is quite extraordinary to what lengths high street shops will sometimes go to avoid refunding to dissatisfied customers. Here at least mail order shows the way. It may be a commonplace of mail order advertising; BCAP and the MOPS may require it whether it’s stated or not; the general public may expect it as a matter of course. But still, always mention the money-back guarantee. You’re going to make refunds to dissatisfied customers anyway, so why not say so? The words are comforting to prospective customers, and their use is one of the simplest ways of attempting to turn ditherers into purchasers.

Free offers

Offering the purchaser something additional to the main product at no extra cost can be a powerful inducement to buy. BCSPP warns about the possible misuse of the word ‘gift’, and both it and BCAP require that anything described as `free‘ should be genuinely so, and that the price of a related product should not be increased in order for the ‘free‘ offer to be made.

However, we all know that nothing in life is free — somebody has to pay for it; and in all businesses except those that go bust, that `somebody’ is the customer. If you build the free gift into your advertised offer from the start, you will be able to pitch your product price accordingly without giving offence to anyone. If you add the free gift at a later stage, as a refinement to your offer, you should hold your product price steady, and aim to recoup the increased costs — and indeed enhance your profits — from the additional sales generated by the inducement.

While all markets are different, free offers work best if they have a genuine appeal to the purchaser of the main product. A piece of jewellery offered to purchasers of handbags, or blank cassettes with cassette recorders are the sort of offers to consider. Some advertisers seem to succeed with seductive offers of ‘mystery’ free gifts; and although the mystery, once revealed, is frequently trivial and disappointing — a packet of needles or a plastic comb are typical — the promise still retains its allure for some purchasers. Study the other advertisers in your own market and see what they’re up to.

Limited offers

Most mail order purchases are made on impulse. Your customers buy your product not because they have reflected long and hard on the matter, and have got up that morning thinking, ‘Right, today’s the day I’m going to send off for one of those Whatsits’; it doesn’t work like that at all. Your advertising forces itself upon the prospect’s attention, either because it happens to be on the page of the paper he’s looking at, or because it’s something that’s just dropped through the door. If your sales message interests him at all, his most likely response is to think that he might do something about it later; but ‘later’ almost never comes. Other things catch his attention, and your advertised offer is forgotten. If it is to succeed, it must succeed now.

Whatever the limit, it must be a genuine one; and that makes it something of a two-edged sword. While it may effectively create a sense of urgency, and thus produce a number of sales that might otherwise have been lost, it may also prematurely kill off the ad so that anyone noticing it for the first time after the deadline may well be discouraged from ordering anything at all.

to be continued

On balance, it is usually better to identify the p&p charge separately. In display advertising and illustrated sales literature you can have the best of both worlds by featuring the product price prominently in the main part of your sales message, with the p&p charge appropriately and less discouragingly included in the ordering instructions.

Payment terms

The easier and less risky you can make it for your customers to pay, the more sales you can expect. Unfortunately, anything that makes your payment terms more attractive to your customers also makes them less attractive to you. So choose with care.

Cash with order (CWO)

The simplest and, from your point of view, the best payment terms. The customer sends a cheque or postal orders at the time he places his order, so you have his money in your hands before parting with the goods. Postal orders are normally totally secure. If you have any doubts about cheques, allow 10 days after paying them into your bank before despatching the goods; a bad cheque will have bounced by then.

Cash on delivery (COD)

This is safer for your customer, more troublesome for you, and more costly for both of you. The customer places his order either by letter or phone, and pays the postman or other carrier when the goods are delivered; the carrier then remits the payment to you. If you send your goods by post, you have to complete a special form for each package and hand both form and package across a post office counter. If you use the parcel post, you have the normal postage plus the COD fee. If you want to use the letter post, the package will only be accepted as a first-class registered item, which means a registration fee in addition to the first-class postage and the COD fee.

Giving credit

There is little doubt that offering to send goods in advance of payment will boost the number of orders you receive. But there are three tricky problems that credit selling gives rise to: (a) deciding upon the creditworthiness of those who place credit orders; (b) ensuring that you receive the payments due to you; and (c) financing your business while waiting for payments to come in. All three problems can be solved, but only at the cost of extra business organisation and extra money. Wait till your business is well established before trying to weigh up the advantage of supplying on credit against the disadvantage of having to underwrite the risk.

On approval. In effect all mail order goods are sent on approval. BCAP, for example, stipulates that purchasers should be able to return goods for refund within seven days of receipt. However, expressly advertising to supply goods on approval is generally understood to mean that you will supply them in advance of payment; as already indicated, that is probably not a good system for you in the early days.

Accepting credit cards

Credit cards are attractive alike to buyer and seller. They permit a customer to order by letter or phone, the credit card company guaranteeing the seller that payment will be made, while at the same time affording the buyer some degree of security against the seller‘s possible default. Additionally, of course, the buyer enjoys the opportunity of making purchases beyond his immediate cash resources, and if he does so, the seller finds that rather enjoyable too.

Barclaycard and Access alone have something like 14 million cardholders between them, a very sizeable section of any seller‘s market.

But, of course, there are difficulties for the new mail trader. Before accepting you into their schemes, the credit card companies normally look for a business track record of at least a year. They will probably not be too happy if individual transactions are typically less than £10, or if your total expected volume of credit card business is below about £4000 a year. If they do accept you, you will have to pay a joining fee of about £50 and a commission of anything up to 4.5 per cent of your credit card sales.

Treat all the above figures as rough guidelines only; in all cases it comes down to a matter of negotiation between you and the companies. But as to whether the schemes are worth joining if you can, the unqualified answer must be: yes.

Part payments

This is a compromise between CWO and credit, and the comments made above about those two payment terms apply here also. The customer sends only part of the purchase price with his order, undertaking to pay the balance within a certain period after receiving the goods. This makes the transaction seem less risky to the customer, and so encourages him to send for something he might be hesitant to order on full CWO terms. By the same token, of course, it is more risky for you. If you offer such terms, you should ensure that the initial payment at least equals your cost price and delivery expenses so that if the customer defaults on later payments, you will not be financially worse off than if he had not ordered at all.

• Why should the customer buy this product?
• Why should he buy it from me?

The mail trader must additionally find an answer to a third question: Why should the customer buy the product by mail order?

Mail order is rarely a first choice

If all else were equal, most people would feel happier handing their money across a counter and being handed the chosen product in return. That way they can see what they’re buying and can get their hands on it the moment they part with their money. They have no fears that the order might go astray and their money be lost, or that the goods might fail to arrive for weeks on end or be unsatisfactory when they do arrive, or, worst of all, that the offer might turn out to be fraudulent, the supposed mail order dealer vanishing with the loot without supplying anything to anyone. Despite the MOPS, many people continue to be uneasy about shopping by mail, particularly when dealing with a new firm.

So why do people buy by mail at all? Leaving aside the few who live so remote from shops that they have no choice but to use mail order, most people only buy by mail if the particular offer made is not readily obtainable in the shops. This is the mail order appeal, which may be something special about the product itself or in the way you offer it for sale.

What makes mail order appealing?

There are some ways of making mail order purchases attractive that can apply to any product: a refund guarantee for unwanted goods returned within 10 days, a chance to examine the product at leisure at home, delivery of goods right to the customer’s front door, and so on. Such things should always be stressed in your advertising.

Other features may relate to the particular product. If it is of your own manufacture, for example, it may be unobtainable elsewhere. Or your prices may be lower than shop prices. Or the product may be one that can be effectively tested only in the particular circumstances of home: hi-fi equipment, furnishings that must be seen in place, products that need to be used to be judged. Or the product may require regular servicing, which you guarantee to carry out, as needed, by return of post. Or it may be something that the purchaser feels embarrassed to buy in person. Again, whatever the mail order appeal, draw attention to it in your advertising. Hammer it home if appropriate, eg:

Try our latest stretch covers on your own favourite armchairs. See how good they look! And remember, we’ll send you your money back by return if you don’t agree they’re fantastic value.

Or, more tactfully, if that is appropriate, as, for example:

For just £5 (refundable with your first order) we’ll send you under plain cover our latest sensational catalogue of sexy underwear.

No mail order appeal: no sale

When deciding what to sell, consider the product‘s mail order appeal, and if it doesn’t seem to have very much, and you can’t think of how to give it more by the terms of your offer, then avoid it. Unless the customers can see clearly why they should buy the product, why they should buy it from you, and why they should buy it by mail, then they won’t buy it at all.

We have already seen that it is not just the product‘s inherent nature that matters; remember the can of beans example. A product sold successfully by mail by a trader who runs his business from the back bedroom at home may lead to speedy commercial collapse if the business is transferred to rented warehouse premises. A good product for you to sell by mail may be a bad one for the mail trader next door. You must make your choice for your business. While some of the considerations that make a product suitable for mail order have a general validity, others relate to you personally and the way you run your business.

What sells?

There is nothing that sells by mail that does not also sell in the street market, the village shop, the high street chain store or in some other non-mail order way. What you’re looking for is not something labelled ‘mail order product‘ on a wholesaler‘s price- list, but a product which you judge to have the characteristics that make it suitable for you to sell by mail. Partly it’s a matter of the physical attributes of the product, partly it’s a matter of your own circumstances, skills and knowledge in relation to the product and its marketing, and partly it’s a matter of estimating whether the sums will come out right at the end of the day.

The thing can be stated in the opposite way too. Just as anything that sells by mail can also be sold in other ways, so anything that fails to sell in other ways is very likely to fail also to sell by mail. Mail order is not a device for unloading stuff that you can’t otherwise get rid of. An unsaleable product doesn’t transform into a saleable one just by putting it into a different shop window. Remember that it’s the same public out there whether they buy in person or by mail.

So what does make a product suitable for mail order selling?

Checklist

You should be able to give favourable answers to the following questions:

• How well do you understand the product?
• Does the product have mail order appeal?
• Can you make a unique offer?
• Is there a market for the product, and are you sure that it is large enough and that you know how to reach it?
• Can you price the product competitively?
• Is the quality right?
• Is the product‘s price/weight ratio satisfactory?
• Is there a satisfactory gross profit margin?
• Is there a satisfactory gross profit/advertisement cost relationship?
• How easily can the product be despatched?
• How easily can you handle the product — both singly and in quantity?
• How easily may the product be advertised?
• How difficult are after-sales problems likely to be?
• Are there attractive follow-up possibilities?

These questions are considered below, and once you have familiarised yourself with the thinking behind them, you should work through the checklist to assess your prospective product. In the real world, of course, perfection is rarely to be found and you may have to settle for a product which offers a preponderance of favourable characteristics even though it has negative ones also. The important thing is to get a clear idea of the product‘s advantages and disadvantages for mail order selling by you in your business, so that you can make an informed and intelligent decision.

How well do you understand the product?

Resist the temptation to trade in a product, however suitable it may be in other respects, if it is one that you don’t fully understand. Mail order may seem on the face of it to require no more knowledge than of the way to pack and despatch whatever the customer has ordered; and it is doubtless possible, with a bit of luck, to sell things you know nothing about, provided the customers are so anxious to buy that you have only to name the product to be overwhelmed by orders for it — the mail trader‘s dream. In practice, however, customers rarely demand to be sold to: they have to be persuaded to buy.

Without an understanding of the product, you cannot have an understanding of the market, and without that, you are unlikely to make reasonable guesses as to what the market will buy. Once you have chosen your product, you need to know which features to highlight in your advertising and sales literature, and you need to be able to assess what your competitors — and not just mail order competitors — are selling, so as to determine how best to promote your own product. Advertising will have to be prepared, enquiries answered, after-sales problems dealt with — all requiring a genuine knowledge of the product.

Indeed, long before you come to deal with your customers, you will have to deal with your suppliers, and will need to know how to purchase wisely, and how to judge the merits of different though similar products.

A reasonable starting point in your search for a product to sell by mail is to identify an area of interest in which you have special knowledge and understanding.

In mail order you can begin in a very small way. It’s quite possible for someone working single-handed, or perhaps with just one or two others, to start and run a small mail order business. It can be done with little capital and without previous experience. That is not to say that it is easy to launch a successful business in these circumstances, but it is possible. Regard any small, low-capital venture into mail order as in the nature of an experiment, a toe in the water, a means of researching possibilities with a view to exploiting them on a larger scale if the experimental results are promising.

The possibility of entering the business cautiously and with minimal risk is one of the attractions of mail order compared with other forms of trading. You couldn’t, for example, open a bookshop with only one title in stock, or a hotel with only one bedroom. But there is no problem in beginning in mail order with a single product, only adding others on the basis of experience in the market-place.

Indeed, this tentative, experimental approach to mail order is the only sensible one for the beginner to adopt. And not only the beginner. An important characteristic of mail order is that it lends itself to experimentation; it is almost always possible to try things on a small scale before taking risks on a large one. The established traders do it all the time; and so should you.

Keep your options open

In its experimental stages, mail order is flexible in a way that other business ventures are not. If you try selling computer software, for example, and the results are poor, you can switch to selling digital watches or religious books or ladies’ underwear or whatever. You can even try more than one line of goods at the same time. Flexibility of this sort is not to be enjoyed in most other forms of trading. No shopkeeper, for example, can stock out his shop with computer software, see how it goes for a couple of months, and if things aren’t looking too hopeful, clear everything out and try his luck with religious books on one side of the shop and ladies’ underwear on the other.

Note, though, that the advantage of flexibility in mail order is lost if you make too large a stock investment in untried products. It will be no use discovering with your first few advertisements that there isn’t, after all, a demand for table-top concrete mixers if you have a warehouse crammed full of the wretched things. Mail order gives you the chance to experiment on a small scale: don’t throw that chance away.