I closed down the audio/video sections on the store. I updated our FAQ in case anyone writes me to ask why:
Frankly, we were not making any money from them, and it was becoming an increasingly difficult thing to manage. Some people may think I'm not being charitable to just keep going with it for the sake of others, even when we're not making money on them, but I don't have the money to keep investing in them. Please keep in mind that the store had to be run like a business, and also keep in mind that all the information on the products we sell at the store were also available for free on the website, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a business model giving stuff away for free will not be profitable, which means the business will fail, and in my ministry, I'd rather rely on charity from the Lord than profit from sales.
For example, let's look at the thumb drives, which used to contain a whole year (about 80-90 hours) of audio teaching, plus the PDFs, all organized into individual tracks for easy play access. In order to purchase the Year1 thumb drives, one of the men in our church gave me the money for it because I couldn't afford to get them at the time, and in order to make them profitable, you have buy them in larger sets of at least 50-100.
I had each year color coded and labeled on the thumb drives, so that's a 50-100 order for each year (which begins in August every year). It's not cheap. We had considered just labeling them ourselves, but we found out that the custom sticker labeling would have been more expensive than just getting it done on the thumb drive itself. That's just an example of some of the things we learned along the way, of why we ended up having to do things the way we did, but the main problem we were running into is that no one really wants them.
For example, right before I shut down the audio/video products in the store, which was the first week of April of 2019, we had an order for one of the thumb drives, which we sent out to the customer. Prior to that, our last order was in December, which means we might get an order for one item every few months, which is nowhere near the amount of volume we would have to do to break even on investing in the next year's worth of thumb drives, which is also why some of you may have noticed that I only had the first three years available, even though we're most of the way through year six as of April of 2019.
In short, I couldn't justify continuing to spend money on them when we're were having to invest more than we were getting back, and considering that all the information is available for free on the website, I highly doubt we were ever going to sell enough to make it profitable. It was also a huge amount of time and hassle to not only divide up the tracks and the files, which takes more work than I think most people realize, but also to update all the changes in the store details on Paypal and the website respectively, which is a lot of coding for someone like me who does everything by myself, directly coding in CSS and PHP. (i.e. Most people hire others to do these things for them; I can't afford that, and I don't think it would be worth the investment anyway.)
After I calculated everything, if I shut down the audio/video products now (first week of April of 2019), it would mean we've pretty much broken even, even though it took three years after purchasing the set of Year3 thumb drives to get to that point, but I cannot justify continuing to invest money into things that no one wants. We have bills to pay, my wife's farm to invest in, and other Christians we're trying to help out with their living conditions; I would rather invest in those things than do something that didn't work from the start.
The only reason we still keep the books section open in the store is because I've got an agreement with Kindle Direct Publishing, in which I self-published my books through them, but they handle all the store, printing, and distribution side of it, and pay me a royalty percentage from it. That simplifies the matter, but again, those royalties are almost non-existant because I offer the draft for the book available for free on the website, and we know that when people get things for free, they often don't bother to think about paying for anything, and charity is often forgotten as well.
Just for example, from Jan-Apr of 2019, we've received royalties totaling $18, and that's an improvement from last year, so I hope readers don't think we make tons of money from the books. A published author is not equivalent to a profitable author. We even tried sending out copies of the book to some sanctified Christian Youtube or internet radio hosts, but we got almost no response back, meaning that they either don't care about the topic, they didn't like the book, or they're too nervous to cover it because it's too controversial for them.
The point is that all these things take me time, money, and energy to do; it's not like I just lay around all day waiting to collect paychecks like I've seen from a lot of church building pastors. There's so much more work I've got to do, I just don't want to put a lot of that effort towards trying to build up a store that nobody wants. I'm just thankful for the mercy of the Lord God in bringing around the small handful of people who have been charitable to us, helping us out when they can because my wife and I don't make much, and it allows me to continue study, researching, and developing new teachings.
