Not Giving A Puck

These puck lights are good for lighting under cabinets and such, and require little installation know-how. One weird thing: You can only string together 4 of them at a time even though we’re selling 6-packs, so you’ll be figuring out if you want to do 4 and 2 or 3 and 3 or 6 alone or whatever. Aside from that, this is pretty straightforward.

Last time we offered these at $20 and sold 347 packs, which the bosses considered “pretty good.” This time we’re selling them for $5 less and expect to sell more — maybe 500 or 600.

67,215 people visited Meh.com the day we sold 347 packs, which means we wasted the time of ~66,900 visitors. That’s 99.5% of those who voluntarily came to our site that day. And that’s “pretty good.”

We might, by dropping the price $5, only waste the time of 99% of our customers. That would be fantastic! And if we fritter away precious seconds for only 98% of our customers? We’d be popping champagne.

Where else in life do you get to claim victory for a 0.5% success rate? Holes-in-one, maybe. Or plugging a USB cord in the right way up on the first try. But that’s a miserable rate for most everything else.

“Conversion rate,” or the number of customers who purchase per customers who visit, is the holy grail of metric for most e-commerce sites. But we couldn’t care less. We’d rather you come every day and have a good time (or at least a not-totally-wasted time) than visit three times a year and buy something each time.

In fact, these product writeups are generally aimed at entertaining non-buyers more than informing buyers. The latter are already getting something from visiting – a product – and we want to treat the former to some “entertainment” for their trouble. It’s the shittiest consolation prize imaginable.

We hope more people buy these puck lights at a lower price. But mostly we hope more people come and dick around on our site instead of doing work.