| Hamster Promotion/ Marketing |
| Promoting, bartering and selling - This the payoff, so to speak. If you are not doing it for the love of having the animals, and for the excitement of meeting some great new people, then don't do it! But, here are my tips on making your name out there in that market place and how to get your foot in the door! Sometimes a vendor has to do something to make sure the market owner knows they are there AND that the product is good. So you have done you homework, and have a retailer or two that is willing to take you hamsters. Fine, so we take or little hammies to market. The best thing to do is to call the buyer when you have a litter hit the ground, giving them a heads up that your next litter(s) will be ready on or about a certain date. Set a time to meet them and bring the hamsters. Now few pet shops have a problem taking in a bunch of happy healthy hamsters, and the free ones will always get taken by most shops. This is why you want to have everything set up with a owner/manager ahead of time. This includes the price and form of payment. When I first started out as an adult, some shops only wanted to pay 50 cents per head for my hamsters. That is what I was getting in grade school, selling plain short hair goldens to the local shop in the '60's. But, I worked it out that I would get $2 per hamster in store trade. So 10 hamsters, $2 each would get me $20 in retail merchandise. These type of barters worked well for the shop owners, and I got what I needed to keep my little hobby going. I deliver all my animals to the stores myself, and do no ship. Sometimes, I would take a few hammies into another shop, show them the sample I have to sell them and ask for cash, settling for barter if that was the only way I could get a deal with them. This did a couple of things. It got my name out there, they had my better then average hamsters to sell, and I added one more shop to my group that would be interested in future shipments. The more you can build you service base, the more you can be selective on who and where are getting your hamsters. Now, in some ventures, people would look at this building of the base as that many more shop I can sell to , the more hamsters I can raise, the more money I can make. But, I am more concerned about keeping my quality high, not just creating quantity. That has to be left to the multipliers. If a shop is not careful about placing males in one cage and female in another, then I would only sell them one sex, and insist that my hamster went into one cage, away from the rest of the exisitng stock. As time goes on, I found that there were a few outstanding shops that wanted outstanding animals in the displays, and were willing to pay a better price. Those lesser shops are no longer on my route, and they may never get the opportunitiy to see my animals again. I currently sell most of the excess pet hamsters to two locations. I no longer barter for goods, and leave a bill when I leave the animals, getting a check in the mail in about 2 weeks. And I am getting 2 - 3 times the price as I was getting back in the days if those barters! More on selling to the shops or the public For a brief time, I dealt with a small local chain. They were always needing dwarfs, and I could make a short drive once a week to take them the stock they needed, and picking up a check, One week, the owner told me that they would have to stop for now, that the hamsters I was bringing them were dying! I found out they treated ALL hamsters with DriTail in the water, as per the company policy. I educated him that dwarfs do not get wet tail, and they needed to stop the practice. When he called later, I declined to sell them hamster ever again. |
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