So today, I thought it might make sense to talk about the very first thing I tried in my online commerce fiesta, and also the thing I’ve had the least success with: selling a physical product. Because it was my first large venture, I have a fair amount to say about it. But, because it hasn’t been a runaway hit, you may not care if I say it.

Meh. You might as well read this anyway, because otherwise you have to get back to work. Or maybe surf for porn. (If it’s the latter, go ahead. I’d make the same choice.)

So here’s what happened.

It started way, way back in the early days, in the year of Our Lord 2008. A young and in-love Rihanna made us dance with “Disturbia.” We learned that a panda can practice Kung Fu, and the big-eared guy running the USA was still Republican. It was a simpler, more idyllic time — a time when a guy from Ohio thought the best way to start his humor career would be to self-publish a tangible, on-paper book, called May Contain Nuts.

I had shopped my book around to traditional publishing agents for a while, and had unsuccessfully done the same for a novel I’d written years earlier. Unfortunately, these agents didn’t recognize true awesomeness when they saw it, so I decided to self-publish my collected works as a print-on-demand book.

After a fair amount of research, I decided to go through Lulu. Lulu had a much better profit structure than competiors like iUniverse, which charged large setup fees and kind of stuck a broomstick up your ass with regard to royalties. Lulu was solid because they didn’t require holding my hand and charging me for the privilege. I already know a lot about layout (I grew up in my mother’s graphic design firm), so I could do the grunt work myself, give Lulu a Microsoft Word file and a PDF of the cover, and they’d just print what I’d given them.

Now, if you’re thinking about publishing a book, you’ll want to run the numbers yourself, but I found that I could greatly increase my profit if I had the books shipped to me and then reshipped them to buyers. That’s not the way most people do it. Lulu will handle the fulfillment for you if you want — you can just put a link on your site and when someone orders, you’ll get a set royalty. Using that setup, I would have made around $4.50 per $9.95 book sold, and the customer would have paid $15.50 once shipping was factored in.

But I realized that if I had 30 of them shipped to me at once and then sold one at a time for the same total cost of $15.50, the shipping got a lot cheaper and I could make $7.50 per book. And as a bonus, this approach allowed me to sign the books, which caused many satisfied customers to proclaim, “Hey asshole, why did you write in my book?”

I have sold quite a few copies (though not nearly as many as I’d hoped), and it’s neat to be able to say that you have a book because it’s not obvious to most people that any idiot with a computer could publish anything they wanted. (Naomi’s note: For the love of God, click that link. Do it quickly and then X out of the browser while you still have some of your innocence. You KNOW you want to.) But if you’re in the brainstorming phase of your business and don’t yet know what you want to do, I’ll just mention that I didn’t dig the physical products biz as much as I dig the other OBS modules.

Here’s why I’m not as keen on selling a tangible thing:

1. You have to pay to get it, make it, and/or process it in the first place, so the profit is often less. In my case, I had to “pay” over half of the total plus-shipping cost of my book (the $15.50 paid by my customers) to Lulu, the post office, OfficeMax for mailing supplies, and so on. If you’re selling hairnets at a markup, you have to buy the hairnets. If you’re knitting hats, you have to buy the yarn. The costs associated with services, downloads, consulting, and so on are usually much, much less. (Sell a $15.50 e-book and guess how much of that you keep? No big bonus if you answer correctly.)

2. There’s usually more work involved. You have to write and format an e-book the same as you have to write a physical book. Similarly, you have to create systems to sell your own knitted hats the same as you’d need to create systems to sell someone else’s knitted hats as an affiliate. But you have to pack up your books and your hats. You have to fill out the mailing labels. You have to take them to the post office. You have to buy the yarn, order the books for printing, and of course do the knitting. Now, think about an e-book: You put it online, set up the purchase options, and then can pretty much forget about it.

3. This is totally my opinion and may be really wrong in many cases, but I felt like it was harder to sell physical products online. I think that in many ways, deep down, we as people like to touch the “touchable” things we buy. The internet has changed that, and people are getting pretty comfortable with buying without touching. But I think that buyers still wonder on some level, “What will that knitted hat look like on me?” “What will that book feel like in my hands when I’m at the beach, and does its paper and printing make it comfortable to read?” (Ever notice that the paper in most books is off-white instead of bright white? There’s a reason for that.) Amazon can sell based on “touchability trust” (I’m going to trademark that term), but can you?

4. The cycle time is usually longer. Physical shipping adds days to each end of the process, and it means a delay between the time a customer orders and the time she receives the product. Hats take time to knit and even print-on-demand books take time to print. e-Goods can be online fast and are delivered fast — and you can have satisified customers fast, perhaps telling you that what you do kicks Richard Nixon’s ass.

Of course, buyers have questions about intangiables as well: “Is this person a good coach?” “Will this e-book be any good?” But the internet doesn’t add as many barriers to these things. Yes, you can look a coach in the eye if you’re face-to-face, but you’ll wonder if she’s a good coach no matter how you found her.

Now: There are of course advantages to physical products. Tangible goods can be more unique (there are more “hand-crafted” opportunities in the physical world), and people often find more value in something they can touch and hold. Technophobes are more comfortable with physical products (but probably not with buying them online), and certain tangibles have huge profit potential.

But for me? Not so much. I know that physical products are the cornerstone of the world’s economy, and that many of you make or will make a great living by selling “real things.” I know there are dozens of advantages I haven’t mentioned. I know that to many people, a physical book (for instance) is way more satisfying than an e-book. Hell, I agree. I hate reading e-books.

But as a seller? Personally, I’m not a fan.

Trading physical goods is how things have been done for centuries. However, I kind of thing that it’s mainly because nobody could work out the logistics of how to download a goat during a barter.

(Naomi’s other note: He’s just bitter because his book sucked. OK, if I’m honest, it didn’t suck. But he started the book thing before he met my shining self and learned how to actually sell shit. If he were to do it again with yours truly, I think he’d like the whole thing a lot more. Just sayin’.)

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But wait, there’s more! I have two P.S’s. They’re both as fantastic as they are stylish and handsome.

P.S #1: If you get my upcoming product once it’s available, you’ll have so much sex that you won’t know what to do with it. It’ll become annoying and you’ll be like, “What the hell am I supposed to do with all of this sex?” So you’ll pack it in boxes and label it and put it up in the garage attic and then years from now your spouse or kids will be like, “Do we really need to keep all of this old sex?” And you’ll be like, “No, it’s all old and moldy. Throw it out or give it to the dog.”

P.S #2: I’m knocking $35 off of Blogger-to-Wordpress migrations until the end of the month. If you’re on Blogger and have finally realized how unprofessional it makes you look (it’s on par with using a Yahoo! email address for your business and wearing Hammer pants in meetings), now’s the time to move. Tell your Blogger friends, too. We’ll move over together, glory in our escape from a stupid medium, and then collectively laugh at Blogger and make fun of how small its dick is.