Jump to content
Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble

hockeytroncanada

Members
  • Content Count

    5
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1
  • Feedback

    0%

hockeytroncanada last won the day on October 19 2014

hockeytroncanada had the most liked content!

Community Reputation

2 Neutral

Equipment

  • Skates
    Bauer Vapor 7 (circa ~2004)
  • Stick
    Alpha (wood stick), Tron 405XS, Tron Anchor Grip
  • Gloves
    Tron 5000
  • Helmet
    Bauer 8500
  • Pants
    Tron Elite
  • Shoulder Pads
    Bauer 2000
  • Elbow Pads
    Easton Synergy
  • Shin Pads
    Reebok 6K
  • Hockey Bag
    Tron Pro Travel Bag

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Spambot control
    789456123

Recent Profile Visitors

1090 profile views
  1. By the way, you'll also notice that many of our prices are actually lower than you'd pay after the exchange rate because we recognized we probably can't sell them higher.
  2. Hey Mickz, Haven't been on here in awhile, but thought I'd respond to a few of these points just to offer a bit of a different perspective on everything said above. Jerseys - Although it's not our intention to only be involved in jerseys, there are companies that stay afloat solely on that. Bigstick.ca for example purely does hockey jerseys and no other sports (although they're pretty unique in that no one seems to match their hockey jersey selection). The jersey market is a little bit bigger than most people realize. Shipping - We actually do offer free nationwide shipping on orders over $95, just to clarify, so really not that different from the examples you mentioned. We've got a few things in the works to help reduce shipping costs as well :) Online shopping - grnmtnvt explained this well. Expensive shipping and little selection is what's kept Canadians from shopping online as opposed to simply not liking shopping online. If you read non-hockey forums, tons of people are constantly complaining about products they want to buy online that aren't available in Canada. I've spoken with a lot of companies in other industries and the thought is, "Why would we set up a Canadian operation when the market is 1/10 the size when for less effort we could just increase our American market share by the same amount?" Hockey is a bit of a different story since per capita we play loads more hockey. Market size - Shrinking doesn't mean disappearing totally. We're not too concerned about there not being enough hockey in Canada to go around :) Middleman - As I mentioned before, our prices are going to (and have) come down a bit as we iron out our operations. Although it'd be completely silly of me to reveal all the details, just want to point out we don't have R&D costs like our American counterpart, which means we can operate at slimmer margins. Stating that we're just an unnecessary, non value-add layer that will never achieve great prices isn't exactly the most accurate. Time will obviously tell, but we are well aware of all these concerns and pretty confident we can address them all in the long term. Lots of other stuff I'd love to share, but probably better we keep them under wraps until they're live (i.e. nothing you see us doing is completely static...give us some time!). Hopefully a few of those thoughts intrigue you a bit. Also, hope the season is going well for everyone here!
  3. Hi again Mickz, Our American supplier who actually owns the brand is in charge of the certification which is why I don't have a ton of detail for you. It's something I've been pushing him on and he tells me it's in the process at the moment. Sorry I don't have any more information. John
  4. Hi Mickz, We're in the process of obtaining CSA approval Thanks for your question, John
  5. Hey althoma1, Thanks for checking out our site. Just wanted to address your concerns here. Maybe a bit long-winded but I wanted to make sure to fully address everything. 1. Less selection We're working on building up our inventory, but we can get any Tron product upon request What you see on the site now is what we've prioritized based on a number of factorsWe're planning on adding new products to the site more or less every month 2. Higher prices Trust me, we'd love for things to be as simple as applying an exchange rate as it would have made our lives a lot easier Unfortunately, we have a number of factors beyond exchange rate that affect our costs Here are some examples (this isn't a complete list), listed roughly in the order they affect us:MUCH higher shipping costs in Canada (I'll save the explanation as to why, but this is the biggest factor keeping ecommerce from growing in Canada)We had a choice of maintaining a similar free shipping threshold and incorporating those costs into our product prices OR having a higher free shipping thresholdWe decided to opt for the former to make it much easier for our customers to achieve free shippingShipping affects some products more than othersDuties and taxes: some products still get taxed extra when crossing the borderGenerally higher costs of operation in Canada, including, but not limited to (none of these things on their own kills us, but collectively they add up):Labour costsPackagingTelecomTaxesEtc.Currency fluctuationsWe don't want to be changing our prices constantly to remain at a perfect ratio with our American counterpart, so we need to price to ensure realistic currency swings don't cause us to lose money on each sale; we're working on hedging these fluctuations at the momentOur size​We still don't have the economies of scale on any of these expenses that our American counterpart does, but as we grow we should be able to reduce these costs to some degree (although, as I mentioned, many are just an inevitable part of being a business, particularly an ecommerce business, operating in Canada)All that being said, we did try to price all of our products competitively in relation to products in Canada of comparable quality from the big brandsSome products' prices were bumped up by even less than the exchange rate to ensure we remain competitiveEverything is priced so that customers should both:Save money in relation to comparable big brand productsAND receive a better product than they usually would at the same price point from the big brands3. Discounts We've chosen to take a different discounting strategy than our American counterpart. We will have frequent discounts available, but the nature of each will be different in order to address a wider variety of buying behaviours (e.g. bogo sales, free accessories with certain purchases, free shipping on particular products, product giveaways/contests, etc.). John
×
×
  • Create New...