BGG Secret Santa
November 19th, 2009 Posted in businessI doubt anyone’s surprised that I’m not posting as much recently. With Christmas on us, my ability to update the blog for non-essential posts has been restricted badly. The only reason I’m posting now is that I’m typing while the site updates stock information.
The BGG Secret Santa program has always done quite well for us - the first year, it generated nearly a 1/5 of 1 month’s revenue. Of course, back then we were one of a few retailers and had only been in business for 4 months. These days, we’re one of 6 major retailers taking part in Canada.
Still, I enjoy doing BGG Secret Santa, mostly because I get a sneak-peak at what is being sent around. It’s also a ton of fun and I think, a good cause. The only problem is that operationally, it’s a bit more of a hassle.
Each order that comes in no has to be double-checked to make sure it’s not a Secret Santa order. Next, we need to pull the games aside, gift-wrap each game individually and then, if there’s a note (90% of the time there is); decide if we’re going to handwrite it on a card or print it out. Generally, we handwrite it on the card - printing is reserved for really, really long notes. After that, we have to pack the boxes and double-check that we don’t add the invoice to the order.
It adds between 5 - 15 minutes (depending on the order and difficulty of wrapping) processing time to each Secret Santa order. And this is during the busiest time of the year, so I’m generally pulling these orders aside to deal with after I’ve done all ‘normal’ orders. Sometimes, it means working later than normal in the office to get the orders wrapped and packed for the next day.
In fact, today, due to a customer pick-up that took longer than expected and the gift-wrapping of a game, I missed getting all our orders out. Canada Post arrived earlier than they usually do and I just wasn’t ready. So a ton of orders (including 1 BGG Secret Santa order that is now 2 days old) aren’t going out till tomorrow.
Realistically, I just need to update my timelines even more. I guess I’m going to be sleeping less and less 
