GoodBuyGuys Blog

I’ve never been a big sports fan, but I began to follow some major sports when we had a chance to supply some very high profile events like the Super Bowl, NFL Playoffs, and The Kentucky Derby, etc. Knowing that we might have gaffers tape on the goal posts or batteries in the referee’s wireless mic has made me more interested.

Along with this interest comes an interest in reading the sports page. Some of the best writers for our local newspaper, The News and Oberver (Raleigh, NC) appear in the sports section and I have found myself drawn there every day. That may be about to change.

Yesterday’s front page of the sports section was really incredible. Out of six lead stories on the first page, only one was really about playing the game, whatever that game might be. Every other story was about some level of corruption in yet another major sport. The dog fighting scandal involving Michael Vick, Barry Bonds steriod use, doping allegations in the Tour de France, and gambling by an NBA referee all stole space from scores, trades and activity by local teams. It was more like reading a tabloid than a major newspaper sports page.

I grew up idolizing big league athletes, but my children have little interest in big time sports. This may or may not be related to the level of scandal, but, regardless, it means that they, and lots of their friends, won’t be buying tickets and purchasing merchandise.

We’ll continue to work with our customers who are involved in supporting major league sports, but if things don’t improve dramatically on the front page of the sports section, this is an industry heading for a major fall.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your microphone accessory and battery needs.

Because our web site, buybattery.com, scores so well in Google search, many consumers assume, incorrectly, that we are actually Duracell, and they contact us about customer service issues- even if they did not buy batteries from us. Mostly, they email to relate problems they have had with batteries, regardless of who the manufacturer or vendor is.

Unfortunately, I now have my own battery problem to relate. I periodically blog about wireless microphones, since we are the host of wirelessmic.net and because we were in the audio visual equipment rental business for many years. We still occasionally rent wireless mics.

I was preparing a rental package for a local sound company and discovered that two of our wireless transmitters contained corroded batteries. These were Everready Energizer Industrials, not the Procell batteries we sell. The offending batteries were well within their “use by” date code but they had leaked acid all over the battery contacts. Fortunately, the damage was limited to the battery contacts, but there was damage nonetheless.

If you are a regular user of wireless mics, the Energizer Industrials certainly don’t get the GoodBuyGuys.com seal of approval.

If you are interested in some more tips about batteries for wireless mics, click here.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your microphone accessory and battery needs.

After working on it for almost a year, last summer we were finally able to get a dealership for MagLites. I have enjoyed using these flashlights for years (every stagehand has one) and I was confident that the would be a big seller. I assumed (obviously incorrectly) that lots of our customers would be familiar with this line of flashlights and if our prices were competitive and our selection was good, they would sell.

We registered the web site, buymaglite.com, built a good e-commerce and information site, linked to goodbuyguys.com and waited for the orders to roll in.

Nothing!

We can’t give them away. Our offer on flashlights is always “batteries included“, we were never “out of stock” (I wish!), and the other sites affiliated with goodbuyguys.com were generating lots of traffic and lots of sales.

The quality of a Maglite has never been in dispute and the company does lots of national advertising to support the brand. These flashlights are durable, bright, and have a great warranty.

After several months of working on the web site, it scores well with major search engines, so it seems that buymaglite.com should be easy to find if someone actually wanted to “buy a Maglite”.

We’ll keep working on the site, but this problem is a real mystery to me.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your flashlight and battery needs.

I have periodically written in this space about the problems with using rechargeable batteries in wireless microphones. My primary concern regards being able to accurately predict the discharge rate for this type of battery and the problems they can cause in wireless mic use. These batteries use lithium technology, and it now turns out that there may be a much more significant problem when using rechargeable lithiums.

Information Week, a highly regarded technology publication, reports in the latest edition about exploding batteries in Chinese cell phones, including one that killed a Chinese welder. This was reported to be a Motorola phone, but Motorola’s response has been that the phone and/or the battery may have been counterfeit. If so, then Motorola might not have responsibility.

However, problems with counterfeit batteries or counterfeit Chinese products could easily invade the audio-visual market. There are many Chinese made wireless microphones on the market and lots of users think that they can save money buy buying offbrand lithium rechargeables for their mics.

Information Week is not the only source of info on exploding cell phone batteries. According to Engadget.com The Consumer Product Safety Commission reports 83 complaints on this matter in the last two years. They also point a finger towards suspect third party battery quality.

Furthermore, the problem seems to be made worse by overcharging the batteries, something that happens regularly with wireless mics, as they are often left in charge mode long after they are fully charged.

We don’t know of any reports of exploding AA, 9Volt or AAA lithium rechargeables, but the high number of reports about problems with all sorts of Chinese products gives me pause when thinking about any battery powered device that I might hold in my hand or close to my face.

For the time being, this would appear to be one more reason to wait for better future developments on rechargeable batteries for wireless mics and stick with alkalines.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.

I have written a number of times about the recent retiring of the Permacel brand name for gaffers tape. It has caused a minor upheaval in our marketing and shipping departments, but most customers seem willing to accept the change. It’s true that Shurtape had been making these products under a license from Permacel for the last couple of years, so the only real change has been in the name.

Now a new question has arisen. Who, among the major tape converters and distributors, is going to be the first to totally abandon the name Permacel and go with the designation Shurtape 665. We have played with different labeling designations includeing Permcel/Shurtape 665, Shurtape-Permacel 665, and just “665 Gaffers Tape” but nothing has taken hold. Most of the resellers of this product continue to call it Permacel 665 and the primary converter continues to call it Permacel 665 on their own web site.

Furthermore, Shurtape has been slow in updating their own web sites to show the correct specifications and colors for the products that have been rebranded Shurtape.

We work with many high volume customers who base their purchasing decison on maufacturers specifications and it has been difficult to convince them that the products are unchanged. When we tell them the product are the same, yet the Permacel and Shurtape web sites disagree on the specs of the tape, it is difficult to support our position.

It will be interesting to see if individual resellers are allowed to make the name change at their own pace or if the manufacturer (or Permacel) will force an accelerated adoption of the new name. More later!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your gaffers tape needs.

We’ve been trying, with some success, to establish an Ebay presence for some time. Our Ebay store, BuyMicStand, has had some limited sales success and I guess we will stick with it for awhile longer. The difficulty of posting. selling, communicating with customers, etc. is so harder on Ebay than running your own ecommerce site with a shopping cart that is difficult to understand Ebay’s success. We’ll probably eventually add items like mic stands and extension cords, but it is so difficult to do that I keep putting it off.

I guess that if you have only a single item to sell or you only sell occasionally, then an auction site makes some sense. But Ebay stores are entirely different. They almost always use the “Buy It Now” concept, so there is no real auction going on, and the fees that Ebay forces you to add in order to list your product are far beyond those that are necessary if you run your own shopping cart.

There is so much information pushed at a merchant who is trying to manage his online store, that you sometimes feel like you are going to go blind trying to find the link you need to manage one aspect of the store. The user interface is rarely updated and the result is that Ebay pages are so stuffed with images and text that it is impossible to focus on any one thing. This may be okay if you are shopping, but if you are a merchant, its different. You should be able to link to a page where primary merchant functions like adding an item or adjusting a price can be done without having to seek these functions out among others like “Eligible for Relist Fee Credit” and “Change my cross-promotion preferences“. These may be useful tools for power sellers but they shouldn’t be given equal status with user functions like “Sell My Item“.

Ebay has continued to maintain its dominance for online sales but they are ripe to be challenged by someone who does it better.