Dunnersfella:

 

Was your commission at the end based on turn over, or on a share of profit?

 

What was the general vibe when DSE got into the appliance market in a serious manner?

 

Who did you see as the biggest brick and mortar competition? JayCar? PB's? Harvey's? Noel's? JB's?

 

Originally pure sales, so if you sold $6,000 worth of anything that day, you'd get a set percentage of that. Then later it changed to being a % of profit, 1.5% I believe. However that "profit" is a highly debatable number, because it wouldn't have included kick backs head office got. So while we might appear to lose money from a TV on special for example, in reality head office were getting paid by the manufacturer. That's standard in the industry.

Thankfully anything sold at a loss didn't count against your commission, so you didn't lose any commission.

Returns did, but then again you could return the item under someone else's staff code who wasn't going to get commission that month anyway. There were quite a few ways to manipulate the numbers to hit higher targets, lol.

The vibe when we got into appliances? Having seen the profit in those, I could understand it. Sell one high end coffee machine and the profit was probably about the same as selling 10 or 20 laptops. But we all saw it as a strange move because people didn't know to look for those products at Dick Smith, and while the profit seems great, stores like Briscoes discount them like crazy. So while we could understand the reasoning, mostly the vibe was 'Oh this could go badly'. And they did not sell fast at all.

Biggest brick and mortar competition? haha I should have got a commission with all the customers I sent to JayCar. It probably came down to each individual location, because in general most customers are fairly lazy to drive far. However if there's a Noel's in the same shopping center or area, they'd be major competition. In our case, it was Noel's, Harvey's, Smith City, Power Store, The Warehouse and The Warehouse Stationary.

PB Tech is good, but the average consumer we served didn't know such a place existed.

All the competition between brick and mortar stores is crazy though, and online too. Companies like Canon provide them with items like a camera, at a healthy margin, then one store slashes the price, then another, and soon enough nobody makes any money from the camera. Then you push the accessories. The whole sale culture is a weird one, and great for consumers, but if things continue I guarantee Dick Smith won't be the only major electronics retailer to go bust.