Store expenses

[Barbanio]

Context:

After the publication of the 2024 Budget for AsyncAPI Initiative, arise a proposal to reduce the costs of having the store and its maintenance.

The store is mainly used for sending swags and merchandising that AsyncAPI Initiative offers as gifts to mentees, mentors, ambassadors and contests like the ones made at the launch of V3. Of course, it's open as a store to the public, but we don't get much profit from this side.

The whole process of store maintenance (through Shopify), product replenishment, storage, packaging and shipping is delegated to the company Pinnacle Branding, which is the one recommended to us by the Linux Foundation. To reach this decision, we compared their services and prices with other companies, and finally, we considered that they could be the best option. TSC accepted this proposal and the budget.

Details:

We can find all the details of the estimated budget for the store in 2024 in this document. The $5060,68 shown in the budget reflects store maintenance of the store and inventory. The maintenance is $113 (plus tax 8.625%) per month. The cost of product storage is higher than the store maintenance cost. This expense depends on the number of products in inventory and the product type.

For example, in the December invoice, we can see our products and their storage cost. When we purchased the products and their printing, we requested the minimum number of products offered by the company in order to have the least possible number of products in stock. So we can't save on inventory.

Proposal:

The initial proposal is to lower the cost of store maintenance, which we could do from AsyncAPI.

Ideas, thoughts?

If you need more information or details, do not hesitate to tell me 🙂

@smoya @AceTheCreator @derberg

[derberg]

To my knowledge $5k is not only the cost of the website, but also cost of shopify licence and inventory of the produced swags and their storage.

previous solution like threadless was not good as for all initiatives like mentorship - @Barbanio had to order stuff for people, and shit it and care about transport issues, and expense her costs. Long cumbersome process that took @Barbanio time that she can no spend on other topics - this is saving that is hard to estimate and not visible in costs

also for some other situations we were using some other swag services that were expensive and process was also not best.

disadvantage of above is that all of it was of bad quality.

to have good quality and custom approach it means we need a warehouse, upfront produce swags that need a warehouse. These things costs.

If anyone knows a better way - please share. Just please when you approach costs estimation and you write: we can create our own webstore and backend (in our case shopify at the moment) please estimate it as well, the cost of maintenance and who will be responsible for it.

If there is a competition for Pinnacle Branding that you know of that provides the same services with the same quality but cheaper then lets start working on a change for next year 🚀