Motorcycle mailboxes can be created in a garage

In 1903, 21-year old William S. Harley and 20-year old Arthur Davidson made available to the public the first production Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The bike was built to be a racer. The factory in which they worked was 10 x 15-foot wooden shed with the words "Harley-Davidson Motor Company" crudely scrawled on the door. Many great companies were started in a garage, for example HP and Apple. Motorcycle mailboxes can be created in a garage also.

motorcycle mailbox and old motorcycle laws

The motorcycle, built in 1884 by an Englishman named Edward Butler, looked pretty silly. It had three wheels, not two, and was really just a tricycle with a motor. Nevertheless, people were afraid of Butler's motorcycle, so afraid that they asked the government to pass laws against the new machine. One law said that there must always be three people on a motorcycle. Another said that a man with red flag must run ahead of the motorcycle, waving the flag and yelling to warn people that a motorcycle was coming. The old motorcycle mailboxes can look ridicule, but not so ridicule like such laws.

A motorcycle inventor and motorcycle mailbox

A steam velocipede built by inventor Sylvester H. Roper in 1857 may be the earliest known motorcycle. The coal fire steam engine unit is a part of a specially built chassis than an add-on and had no pedal crank. While Roper's two-wheeled inventions never found commercial success, his innovations provided inspiration and direction for inventors in the gas-powered motorbike ear at the turn of the century. Significant later were invented other products. such as a motorcycle mailbox, that can be associated with motorcycles.

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and motorcycle mailboxes

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in 2005 marked the 65-th anniversary. This famous bike event attracts about 600000 visitors and participants. Looking at this event, I was interested, how many between these 600000 people, may have a motorcycle mailbox.

A geographical market of motorcycle mailboxes.

Motorcycle are popular in many counties, for example in Japan. Few outside Japan are aware of the scale or duration of Japan's motorcycle industry, which comprised roughly 200 manufacturers in 1955. For decades, a crown jewel of Japan's postwar manufacturing industry, motorcycles remain one of Japan's top exports.
But the main market of motorcycle mailboxes - USA. Just few of them were sold to Europe and none to Japan.

Motorcycle races and motorcycle mailboxes

Daimler's motor-bicycle of 1885 could reach 12 m. p. h. Britain lagged behind France and Germany in the development of racing at first but in 1907 Brooklands was opened and the first Tourist Trophy race in the Isle of Man was held. International competition was organized by the Fédération Internationale des Clubs Motor-cyclistes (FIM). Speedway racing was introduced into Britain from America in the 1920s and a league started in 1929. After considerable vicissitudes, it is now re-established and organized by the Speedway Control Board. The popularity of motorcycle races increased the motorcycles popularity, correspondingly people started to buy other motorcycle products, as, for example, motorcycle mailboxes.

A motorcycle mailbox as a motorcycle object.

Anybody who likes motorcycles would interested in books about motorcycles and other objects that can be connected with motorcycles, as cups, shirts or motorcycle mailboxes.

Here is a good info regarding one motorcycle book: "The Spirit of the Motorcycle" is the first pop culture history of motorcycling in North America, featuring great large-format photography of stunning vintage and current motorcycles and rare archival photographs, historical images, brochures, artwork, advertisements, and collectibles."

Unfortunately we don't have such good info regarding motorcycle mailboxes.

The motorcycle mailboxes advertising.

In 1961, Honda began a major advertising campaign using the slogan: “Nifty, Thrifty, Honda Fifty.” The campaign placed the Honda 50 in the spotlight as a motorcycle that appeals to both men and women by its design. Honda had great success with this motorcycle that sold for a reasonable $250.00.
By December 1962, the American Honda plant sold more than 40,000 motorcycles annually. Honda realized that in order for sales to keep increasing, they would have to keep changing the public perception of motorcycles. The advertising campaign: “You meet the nicest people on a Honda,” blanketed the country and changed the American perception of motorcycles forever.
Motorcycle mailboxes followed the motorcycles popularity. But we need to think about a slogan for the motorcycle mailboxes advertising campaign.

Dolphin mailbox and other mailboxes in Mailbox Picture Collection

I always like to look at the Sam's Mailbox Picture Collection http://sblom.com/mailbox/

This collection has very funny novelty mailboxes, for example unusual dolphin mailbox, whale mailbox, train mailbox, golf mailbox, airplane mailbox, flamingo mailbox, motorcycle mailbox and so on. Some of these mailboxes people can buy, for example at http://mailbox-plaza.com/. But some of these mailboxes apparently were made by the owners.

Novelty Mailboxes that relate to small businesses

I can see often that small businesses like to use a mailbox that relates to the business. For example a small airport uses Airplane Mailbox as their mailbox. Golf course uses Golf Ball Mailbox or Golf Bag Mailbox. On Hawaii whale watch or dolphin watch businesses use Whale Mailbox or Dolphin Mailbox. But I never saw a fire station that use Fire Engine Mailbox. Apparently fire stations don't like fun

Customers from Florida

It looks for me that a big percent of our customers are living in Florida. And every day we are getting several visitors from the different Florida cities. I think that we need to do something to be more attractive for this Florida visitors. For example, we have a very nice testimony from Florida that has such statement " You can see it (i.e flamingo mailbox) is weathering the harsh Florida sun quite well. It seems to be a quality product"

I believe that people from Florida have to see this message. But many, many people open info page, and almost nobody open our testimony page. I think that we need to offer our testimony page more actively.

Confirmation Page

When somebody buy our mailbox he or she will be readdressed to the PayPal confirmation page. This page has a message "your order is now complete " and at the bottom "Continue" button. This button has a link to our confirmation page. Usually users don't click on this continue button, because "order is now complete", correspondingly they are not readdressed to our confirmation page. It was our problem. Using PayPal parameters in the hidden form we changed the message on the button from "Continue" to "Finish your order". After that users started to click at this button. But more clean decision will be to use our own confirmation page instead of paypal confirmation page. I took paypal perl script that has to accept and verify POST from paypal, combined it with our html, put this script in cgi-bin directory and used for the name extension cgi. Then in the hidden form I placed a tag notify-url. I made everything that was described in paypal help and guides, but then still paypal confirmation page was shown. I don't know what was missed. I will try to investigate this issue.

Golf Ball Mailbox

One of our customers was so kind to send us warm words and even pictures of Golf Mailbox Mailbox he've purchased!

Here they are:

The mailbox arrived about ten days ago completely assembled and has been upfor over a week and working fine. I apoligize for not Emailing you soonerbut we were out of town over last weekend. Thanks again so very much foryour diligence in following up on the shipment and seeing that I got what asatisfactory product. You are GREAT!!

O.G. Sarasota,FL

Mailbox Plaza History: Europe orders

January-February 2007 was just empty. We've frozen all PPC .
End of February - March was very strange. There was about 6 cancelled orders in a row!!
Most of the orders were from Europe. Hummingbird Mailbox and Train Mailbox are the most popular in Europe orders. Although we pointed out on the website that shipping out of continental USA includes a fee, customers were pretty surprised to know that the only shipping method is UPS and shipping fee is about $130.

The manufacturer uses UPS only as a shipping method. As far as I understand, because of convenient pick up / delivery service. Now we do PPC in USA only.

Mailbox Plaza History: September 2006-December 2006

End of the year brought more orders. The mailbox manufacturer was overloaded and delayed the orders and sometimes sent incomplete sets! Even more problems we had with our bonus - house number stickers set to attach to these mailboxes. The number sets were wrong, or forgotten almost every other order! E-mail exchange with angry customers took a lot of my time, effort and emotions.

Finally, we made some changes:
1) eliminated bonuses - number sets and screen saver. Number sets, we just realized create too much troubles. Screen saver bonus looked lonely as the only bonus. I consider using this screen saver as opt-in instead of newsletter.
2) we raised the price.
As we see now, both changes did not effect conversion at all, while making our life much easier!