Don't Get Taken Advantage of by Vendors
Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day.
Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 28. This is the third episode in a three part series about not getting taken advantage of and just making sure we're keeping more of our own money. At the end of the day, we're in business to make money and there's no reason we should be giving away free money. So in this episode, we're gonna talk about not getting taken advantage of by outside vendors. In the first episode in the series, episode 26, we spoke about not getting taken advantage of by customers. In the second episode of the series, we spoke about not getting taken advantage of by employees. In this third episode, we're gonna talk about, again, outside vendors. And this is super important because like your outside vendors, while they are a part of your business, they're not as important to you as customers and they're not as important to you as employees.
So you need to be a little bit more ruthless with them. There are much less emotions involved. They are most likely businesses trying to make money on your business. So you need to be careful. Um, so we're gonna talk about four things. Um, four very basic things that will save you money. And it's just, you know, things, it's just things that everybody should be doing as a business owner to make sure that, again, they're keeping as much of their own money as possible. So first things first, I can't stretch this enough, but check your credit card statements. As simple as it sounds, you'd be surprised how many people don't check their credit card statements on a regular basis. And there are definitely things slipping through there that you may not have known about that you should be canceling. Um, and just take a look every month if you have three credit cards, look through every single transaction that goes through those credit cards.
Now you're looking for a few things. Number one, you're looking for just unauthorized charges or something you thought you canceled a while ago, something that you paid for already and got charged. Again, anything that's suspicious, you wanna just make sure that you handled. But the second thing we're looking for is we wanna make sure that we're not getting charged for things we're not using anymore outside of business. This is, these are things like, Hey, I have a Netflix account that I didn't even know about, but maybe you signed up with a company that you just don't use their services anymore and they're still billing you but you forgot to cancel or you canceled and they forgot to take it off. So, you know, that quick 10 minute look through the, through the credit card statement is extremely important. Next thing I wanna talk about is just make sure you check your cable bills.
And by cable I mean your internet and phone for your store. You'd be surprised how often they just jack up the rates every six months. Every year they, they say things like, oh, you're out of contract, or, you know, our rates rose or whatever. And you know, most of the time if you call them up and tell them like, no, you need to reduce my rates, they will reduce your rates cuz they don't wanna lose customers at the end of the day, they're selling air and a hundred bucks a month from you is better than $0 a month. So if one day you realize, oh, my bill went from one 20 to one 60, give them a call. And guess what? Even if your bill did not go from one 20 to one 60 and it's still at one 20, just give 'em a call anyway and see if they'll give you $10 a month off, $20 a month off.
Like, I understand it's not a lot of money, but like maybe it's a 10 minute phone call. And if you could save $50 over the year and it's a 10 minute phone call or a 20 minute phone call or even an hour phone call, who doesn't wanna work for a hundred dollars an hour? I mean, I would work for a hundred thousand an hour, no questions asked. Third thing we wanna talk about is we want to check your credit card processing statements. So we did a whole episode on this a few months ago. It's episode 14 if you want to go and listen to it. But this is extremely important. Every sale that you put through your system via credit card, you're paying a credit card processing fee to a credit card company. It's in that credit card company's best interest to charge you as much as possible, as horrible as it is to say it's the reality of the situation.
Most of these credit card companies are huge global conglomerates. They're most likely public companies with multi-billion dollar, um, market caps. And their job is to make money for their shareholders. Their job is not to keep you happy. They need to make money so they know that their credit card statements are sometimes a little bit complicated. So they do what they can to, to raise your rates. So my recommendation is just like every few months, look at your credit card statement and see how much they deposit versus how much did they charge you in fees and just make sure it didn't go up. It'll go up and down a little bit each month based on your card mix and if you're charging more debit cards versus ammo cards. But if all of a sudden you realize that your ch your credit card processing fees went from 2% to 4%, you gotta give 'em a call and you know, you gotta threaten them to leave if they're not gonna change your your rates back.
The last thing I wanna talk about is pretty important and it's, it, it's not necessarily an expense, but it is the, has the biggest impact when it comes to cash flow. And this is when you buy goods from a vendor specifically at trade shows. When you know, you, we all know that how trade show is as a retailer, you're running around, you're placing orders and it's just crazy. And as a buyer you cannot be expected to know to reme to know or remember what you purchased or how much of it you bought or how much money each item costs. So you must write down and save your purchase orders at the show. Can I think how many times that as a buyer I've placed an order for, you know, 50 pairs of jeans at $20 a pair and I get the invoice once they get delivered three months later and it says, here's your 50 jeans and they're 2250 a pair.
And if I didn't write it down, I would would never ever know if I didn't have a purchase order and put that purchase order in my computer. I would never ever know that they were ripping me off. And it's not necessarily they ripping you off. Maybe they don't know either they had an estimated price at the trade show cause they delivered it, they were getting it delivered from China and then there's inflation and then there's duties and taxes, delays, whatever it is. But guess what, that's not your problem. You made an agreement to buy the item at a certain price, a certain amount of the item at a certain price and they're gonna stick to that. And all it takes is you to call them and say, Hey, I have a purchase order here. Um, slows $17 a pair, but you charge me 20. So can you, you know, change it and they will always change it for you. It's one of those things where you might think it never happens, but you'd be shocked at how often it happens. The wholesale industry is not necessarily that organized. Um, so you see these things happening all the time. Um, well anyways, that's it. I hope this series really helped kind of just keep more money in your pocket. That's it. Looking forward to the next episode.
