|
AbundaTrade's online sales give pair a new voice [The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C.]
(Post & Courier (Charleston, SC) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Feb. 13--Kent Wagner and Clayton Woodson had a front-row seat for watching the decline of retail music stores a decade ago, as electronic downloads and file-sharing pressured the business of selling new compact discs at businesses like the Millennium Music chain Wagner founded.
Today, the two Mount Pleasant residents have turned the music-selling model upside-down. Instead of selling new CDs at a brick-and-mortar retail location, they run a growing operation that's harnessed the reach of online sales to sell vast numbers of used CDs, DVDs, books and even some vinyl records.
On any given day their business, AbundaTrade, mails about 2,000 items from an office park near the Wando River to addresses in the U.S. and abroad. Sales are driven by its policy of consistently undercutting online prices for used items, across multiple websites.
"December and January were our best months ever," said Wagner, a 47-year-old father of two whose office walls sport many of his children's drawings.
AbundaTrade's warehouse is a bustling place that's holding on to bits of an old-school record-store vibe. Bootsie the cat wanders about freely. Music posters and old albums decorate the walls. Woodson, reflecting the company's liberal dress code, arrives at work one recent day wearing a bright fuchsia shirt with black suspenders and sporting a purple streak in his hair.
The company has been growing and employs 25 people. Wagner said orders have grown each year, starting in 2008, and their main challenge is not selling their wares, but finding enough used items to buy.
To see where they are now, it's helpful to see where they came from and how the business evolved.
Singing a new tune
By the late 1990s, Wagner's CD Superstore in West Ashley had blossomed into Millennium Music with five locations in the Carolinas, including one at Mount Pleasant Towne Centre and another at King and
Calhoun streets in downtown Charleston. The flagship downtown location eventually sold new and used CDs, rented movies, sold books and audio gear, hosted live classical music performances, and had a restaurant inside the store.
The core of the business was selling new music, and as music consumers switched from buying new CDs to buying single songs online -- or illegally downloading copies -- two North Carolina franchises of Millennium Music were the first to close, followed by a Wilmington store in 2006 and Towne Centre in 2007, and finally the downtown location in June 2008.
Woodson, who joined Millennium Music in 2004, had launched the concept of letting customers trade used CDs for a new iPod. The music store had quickly accumulated a vast library of used CDs and began selling them online, often to people with new Apple iPods who would buy used CDs and copy the music to their new players.
The online used-CD trade led to feedyourplayer.com, a concept where Wagner and Woodson planned to pair selling used CDs with free digital downloads of the same recording.
"It was a good thing, but we got cold feet," said Wagner, explaining they feared music industry legal challenges.
But feedyourplay.com laid some of the groundwork. When Millennium Music closed in 2008, AbundaTrade opened a week later.
The business buys and sells used CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, books and so on and resells them online. That's something any person with a computer could do, but AbundaTrade does it on a huge and highly competitive scale.
Inside the warehouse, neat and carefully cataloged boxes hold around 200,000 items; all just waiting for the next click on AbundaTrade's website, Amazon.com, Half.com, or any of the other websites where AbundaTrade's inventory is listed.
Lower profile
Where Millennium Music had a bustling high-profile site in the heart of downtown Charleston, AbundaTrade is housed in an anonymous-looking building at the back of an office park that backs up to some woods. Woodson said he prefers the new location and the lack of headaches related to parking and the urban retail trade.
"No $300,000 in rent, no $400,000 in payroll, no bums showering in the bathroom," he said.
AbundaTrade is a business that combines high-tech, algorithm-driven software with physical, repetitive labor.
The software, developed by Cyber Sprocket Labs in Mount Pleasant, tracks pricing and demand for items across multiple websites, along with AbundaTrade's inventory. It's that software that allows someone who has a used item to sell to type in the barcode number on the website and immediately get a price.
The physical side of the business starts when the used goods arrive at the warehouse, where they must be received, evaluated, cleaned, cataloged, labeled and shipped -- thousands of physical items daily.
AbundaTrade might buy a few used CDs from an individual, but they also acquire stock by doing things such as buying pallets loaded with merchandise returns from big-box retailers. Every now and then, they find something special.
"It's like Christmas here some days," said Wagner, showing off a vintage "Wizard of Oz" pop-up book.
AbundaTrade also participates frequently in local fundraisers, where a school or nonprofit group might collect used items and sell them to AbundaTrade. The company gets more merchandise to sell, and the school or nonprofit gets some money.
"We price our items to be one penny less (than the lowest price online for the same item), so it's easy to sell them," said Woodson. "Selling is easy, but buying the items cheaply enough that we can sell them for a penny less is the challenge."
The selling happens almost anonymously. Search for a used CD on Half.com and there might be dozens of listing. If AbundaTrade's software works correctly, its disc will be the least expensive. As far as the customer is concerned, they are using Half.com's website, and they might hardly notice AbundaTrade's name.
People can buy directly from AbundaTrade's website as well, but the site's ability to search the company's inventory is not intuitive, so a buyer has to know exactly what they are looking for. Type in "The Beatles" and you'll get plenty of choices. But there's no way to browse through CDs for sale, for example.
Online, AbundaTrade competes with countless other sellers of used items.
"It's a crazy market, because every household is a competitor," Wagner said.
In addition to making sure its prices are competitive, AbundaTrade said it works to keep customers happy, because online customers are able to rate and rank the companies they buy from. Its efforts appear to be working, as the company has a 4.9-star rating on Amazon.com (out of 5 stars) and a 97 percent positive lifetime feedback rating from more than 185,000 buyers on that site.
Reach David Slade at 937-5552.
___
(c)2012 The Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.)
Visit The Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.) at www.postandcourier.com
Distributed by MCT Information Services
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
TMCnet LOGIN
Webinars
