How many prospective customers would you have to pitch to before you get that solitary sale though.
Maximum 3 if your sales skills are as good as Tim's.
Also there is an upside to this "big ticket solitary sales" - those that are not your customer are also not your liability.
Whereas if you have 100 customers you made $5 from you still have 100 liabilities and not much of a provision to handle complaints or refunds which could wipe out all your profits from dozens of sales.
Also let's not forget that there would be just as many businesses selling skateboards as their would be motorised scooters (if not more).
The decision to buy a scooter that costs thousands is not as easy, and it's something that most people will want to do in person.
I agree that many people would like to "talk to someone" when it comes to buying items that are $1000+ - but I beg to differ on the "in person" statement.
These days I suspect 90% of people would be happy to buy over the phone if it saved them 10% - 20% and if you had the supporting digital material, ie digital versions of your brochures, photos and videos.
And I know from experience this business model works on higher capex products.
I was talking to a guy last year who runs the same type of business as me. His overall revenue is only slightly higher than mine, but his average per client is a massive 20 times higher than mine.
You'd think his model would be the better one, but the difference is that his office goes into meltdown when a single client is at risk of leaving. Mine on the other hand loses a few clients each week and it's just part of the business.
So from a risk perspective, I'd rather have 100 clients paying $5 than 1 client paying $500.
I agree that de-risking a business is important - though in this situation I think it's subtly different, in that scooter and skateboard sales are one time events rather than an on going sale.
This reminds me of a domainer who once made the argument that towels.com wasn't worth much because anyone can buy a towel for $5 from K-Mart and why would anyone buy a towel from somewhere else?
I don't think it is worth much either nor do I see a multi-million dollar having being built on it...
So I don't get your point.
Do you regularly buy crockery?
Do I strike you as a regular crockery buyer...
I've already decided to buy my kids scooters for christmas so I'm in real trouble if they are thinking of what you linked to above lol
HAHA
I'm just visualizing your kids opening their present on Christmas morning with a disappointed look on their faces as they turn to you and say "What the hell dad! What's sort of budget scooter is this?!? What do you mean I have to push it myself?!? Where's the damn engine Paul?!?"
so based on that if it is the razor then i'm still with skateboards, skateboards have stood the test of time, they may be going through a slump but they are not going away, razors are a fade like a yo yo and their sales will do that. they will boom then bust, where as skateboards will just be rolling wave forever.
See my thoughts are the complete opposite - scooters have been quite popular since the second world war and their sales each year are very much inline with previous years.
I'd bet my bottom dollar skateboard sales have fluctuated all over the place depending on what's cool with kids at the time - ie when roller blades took off no doubt skateboard sales went down - now that scooters (the kiddie type) tare popular that would be eating into skateboard sales - hell even the internet and game slike World of Warcraft probably hurt skateboard sales...
Skateboards are an entertainment toy - they depend on being popular with kids.
Motorised scooters serve as a functional way to transport oneself around the place which is always required.
With Scooters the main market is your general commuting scooters for regular inner city folk (not necessarily hipsters).
That's what I would have thought.
