Faith Selling

We posted a how to pray the rosary article from EWTN here for instruction.

A while back we wrote two guides, one for the pre-Vatican II (Tridentine) Mass and one for the post-Vatican II Mass, explaining the different features of the various missals.

We moved these guides over to our main store site so they will be more helpful for people looking for Mass missals.

The Tridentine Missal guide includes:

• Saint Andrew Daily Missal
• Saint  Joseph Daily Missal
• 1962 Roman Catholic Daily Missal
• The Roman Missal 1962
• Tridentine Mass Booklet from Ecclesia Dei

The Vatican II Mass Missal guide includes:

• Magnificat Magazine
• St. Joseph Sunday and Weekday Missals
• Vatican II Sunday and Weekday Missals
• Daily Roman Missal

Last weekend I attended a men’s conference at a local parish. The keynote speaker was Danny Abramowicz, a former wide receiver for the New Orleans Saints.

He talked about his life in football and his re-conversion to the Faith. A fascinating story.

He also introduced everyone to his “Spiritual Workout” which is included in his book. If you like sports analogies and are looking for a step-by-step manual for improving your spiritual life, this is a great book. Each chapter starts off with a section about football and then relates it to spiritual growth. There is a brief timeout section to consider the main points and then each chapter ends with a quick action plan.

There isn’t anything groundbreaking in this book as Catholic spiritual growth has been written about countless times over the past 2000 years. This is just a unique spin on the topic from a former All-Pro NFL receiver who likes to mix the Faith and football.

Following on the heels of a post discounting most of the reasons people give for not shopping at Catholic stores, comes a post aimed at stores. While you as a store owner may think that you deserve people’s business, you don’t: and here’s why.

1. You think God is going to run the store for you. Just because you think God inspired you to open a Catholic bookstore doesn’t mean that He has any obligation to also infuse you with business sense. In fact, the act of opening a Catholic store is very likely a sure sign that you don’t have business sense. Several hundred Catholic stores open and close each year, many in the same town. In a town near where we live it is almost a joke the number of times an individual has closed and reopened her store.Think carefully before you spend your money opening a store. Do you have connections with local parishes? Are the local parishes actually Catholic enough that the parishioners take their Faith seriously? Does the bishop like you? How little money can you live on and for how long? Those projections you created showing profitability in three years - burn them and make it six.Do you have any of the skills necessary to open a store? Are you capable of being an accountant, sales manager, marketing manager, bill collector, store manager, inventory controller and have a life outside of the store? When I finally admitted that I wasn’t an accountant it took several months for a real one to straighten out our books. More on opening your own store.
2. You think your store can look like a fifty year old curiosity shop and attract people.Complete with burned out lights, dusty counters, faded posters and books, the average Catholic store is one of the least appealing places I can think of to shop. You are going to have to go see where people buy books (hint: Barnes and Noble) and copy those designs. Good lighting and a clean store can make all the difference in that important first impression.
3. You think that organizing your store means putting books on shelves instead of the floor.I am not joking. I have been in more than one shop where there was no categorization of anything. Jewelry cases (something you should definitely get rid of) are full of stacks of dusty items. Books were mostly on shelves but also stacked on window sills and on the floor.You have got to make it easy for people to find what they are looking for. Tower jewelry spinners and clearly marked book categories with some kind of rational ordering within those categories are essential. Group like items together - statues, crucifixes, scapulars, etc. People are much more likely to notice a display of crucifixes than a scattering of them throughout the store.You also have to be able to find things when people ask. There isn’t much less confidence-inspiring than being told “I’m sure we have one of those somewhere.” as you wander aimlessly around the store.
   
   
4. You think that your customers should pay for your inefficiencies.So, why do you have your jewelry marked up 3x wholesale? Is it to make up for your lack of a computer that keeps your ordering inefficient? Is it to cover the costs of doing your bookkeeping by hand instead of with Quickbooks?You have to automate as much of your business as possible to keep up with the rest of the world. I know that the owner of the largest store in a nearby state places orders by walking around the store to see what isn’t in stock. Of course he has no idea what he actually sold and what was stolen. More on fair pricing.
   
   
5. You Don’t Know What You’re Selling.When a customer comes in and asks for help differentiating between the Vatican II Sunday Missal and the St. Joseph Sunday Missal, can you provide a coherent answer? How about when a customer asks about differences between the Revised Standard Bible and the New American Bible?If you don’t know your product, your customers won’t trust you when you make suggestions and you won’t set yourself up as a local authority. You want customers to trust that you know what you are selling. If they trust you, they are more likely to shop at your store and more likely to say yes to an up sell or cross sell.
   
   
6. You Don’t Discriminate in What You Sell.Take a look at what you have in your store and ask yourself, “Is this a Catholic store, a Christian store with Catholic stuff or an anti-Catholic store?” If you sell books that contradict the Faith, you are committing business suicide. If you don’t have a clear Catholic focus then change the name and marketing associated with your store to attract the audience most in line with your products.If you really want to run a Catholic store you are going to need to commit to selling things that build up people’s Faith. You are going to have to be discriminating about the books you carry and have the courage to explain to shoppers the reasons for not carrying books by Anthony de Mello and Fr. Mc’Brien.
7. You Don’t Pay Attention to Trends.Remember when the Passion of the Christ came out a few years ago? Did you plan ahead? Did you find merchandise that related to the movie? Did you set up a display with The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ and other books by Anne Katherine Emerich? Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?If you want to be seen as the go-to source for Catholic things, you are going to have to stay on top of trends in Catholic culture. You should subscribe to the National Catholic Register, a couple of Catholic magazines and read your diocesan paper. Make note of books and authors that are featured and pay attention to topics that show up repeatedly. Did you do anything to beef up your pre-Vatican II Mass resources ahead of the release of Summorum Pontificum?Not only should you make sure that you carry products that relate to trends, you should also do enough research that a shopper with questions about the trend and not specifically about the products can still count on you for a knowledgeable answer.

Hopefully these tips will give you some things to work on so that the Christmas rush gives you the chance to really make such a good impression on your shoppers that they will recommend your shop to others - not because it’s the only Catholic store in town but because they really enjoy shopping there.

If you don’t own a Catholic store but can identify these problems with your local store, why don’t you offer to help as a volunteer once a month to clean up or organize the place?

Yesterday we launched a revamped checkout process that doesn’t require you to create an account or remember passwords to create an order. If you forget your password or don’t want an account, you can just fill in all your information as a new customer and get your order shipped. One less hassle to worry about.

I like poinsettias decorating my church just as much as the next person but it has just come to my attention that doing so will most likely contribute to the betterment of Planned Parenthood. 70% of the country’s poinsettias come from the farm of the Eckes family in California. This family has given a quarter of a million dollars to renovate an abortion mill and also thousands of dollars to defeat parental notification laws in California.

You might want to bring it up with your pastor now so that alternative decorating plans can be made come Christmas.

You would think he would have learned his lesson but Bishop Han just wouldn’t stop being Catholic. Now he’s dead. In China.

Enjoying your cheap porcelain Nativity set now?

With the launch of our new church goods site, we thought that posting AdWord ads on Google would be a good, quick way to get our name out. We were wrong. The site launched almost a month ago and until last Saturday we were unable to get any ads to run on Google because every landing page we created was labeled as “poor” and every keyword we tried was going to cost us $10 a click!

I spent hours creating new ads and new landing pages, chatting with and emailing tech support and posting on forums. The only reply I kept getting from tech support was information cut-and-pasted from the quality landing page documents. I kept asking the Google techs to point to anything in the these guidelines that we weren’t doing correctly and not once did they ever provide an answer.

I then compared their guidelines to the ads running for the keyword phrase “clergy shirt” and found that more than half of the ads and landing pages were not following the guidelines and not just in little ways. Two of the sites running ads didn’t even sell clergy shirts or mention them anywhere in their ads or website. Three of the sites are comparison shopping sites that just run a search when their ad is clicked and pull up results from people who pay to be in their listings. One of these came up with no results but did display the same clergy shirt ads found on the Google website. Talk about double-dipping. The rest of the sites were basically the same as ours - a list of clergy shirts for sale. However, we had more to offer and actually had partial descriptions of each shirt on the page while others simply had a single link buried in the mass of other links to their clergy shirts.

As a test I copied an article on choosing a chasuble from the new site and dumped it into an item page for the St. Rita DVD on our Aquinas and More site. I tried creating ads for both. The Catholic Church Supply ad was $10 a click and “poor” quality while the ad for the Aquinas and More site was .10 a click and “great” quality, even though the article was on a page that still had information about the St. Rita DVD on it. It was obvious that Google had “slapped” our whole church supply domain as some kind spammy thing and wasn’t going to give us reasonable ad rates no matter what we did.

After two weeks of ranting at Google, our landing pages suddenly became “Great” quality and our click cost dropped to about .20. I also received a note from Google saying “I would like you to know that I re-consulted the issue since my last correspondence with you, and confirmed that your page was not correctly evaluated by our system; since then, we’ve fixed this error.”

Google really needs to own up to its problems and actually explain what it thinks is wrong with a domain instead of hiding behind documentation that actually justifies the advertiser’s outrage. Considering its importance in the online advertising world, it has to be transparent about its calculations in order to maintain its credibility.

Interesting news coming from the religious education world today. A non-denominational Christian group, CFM Religion Publishing Group, recently purchased Benziger and Resources for Christian Living religious education programs. Both of these programs are what you expect to find in Catholic parishes: watered-down pap that is only on the USCCB’s approved religious ed list because it doesn’t contain anything explicitly heretical. If you don’t grasp the fine distinction between orthodox and not-heretical, read this.

Last Friday the new company, RCL Benziger, announced the acquisition of the Silver Burdett Ginn religious education series, another nominally Catholic program. A partial review of the First Communion program is available.

The company behind CFM Religion Publishing Group is The Wicks Group, a venture capital company. The web site describes CFM Religion Publishing Group’s offering as “The Company offers true-to-the-Bible materials including classroom and group-based curricula, books, and magazines, as well as Christian-themed toys and games”.

Considering that the buyer has no experience in the Catholic market and the three absorbed publishers have no experience producing quality, orthodox, Catholic education material, it’s a match made in Heaven.

Hat tip to People of the Book.

Funny, the People of the Book blogger mentions that “Loyola Press (for whom he works) and Sadlier are the other two publishers of Catholic religion curriculum” but doesn’t mention the only companies that are actually producing high quality, no-question-orthodox religious education programs, Ignatius Press and Midwest Theological Forum.

Ignatius Press produces Faith and Life and Image of God series for grade school and Midwest Theological Forum produces the Didache series for high school. If you actually want your children to live the Faith and stay Catholic, I suggest that instead of taking your chances with everything else that passes for Catholic religious ed, you take a look at these series.

It took a while to put together but I think this is the first definitive article and checklist of everything you need short of altar and pews to stock a sacristy.

Properly stocking your parish sacristy requires a good checklist of initial needs as well as a regular schedule to replace consumables before they run out. This article provides suggestions for both. I will start with the standard things that every parish needs and then also provide a list of items you should have if you want to fully follow the General Instruction of the Roman Missal. Read the whole thing.