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Our most popular product at the moment, by some considerable margin, is the teddy bear with the chocolates: a combination of a cuddly toy and a box of chocolate truffles.
At AFriendinNeed we specialise in sending gifts to people in hospital on behalf of friends and family who unfortunately are not able to visit in person. Having a teddy bear to cuddle and some delicious chocolates to eat is probably rather appealing for hospital patients who are beginning to feel just a little bit better. And the chocolates really are rather good – made with Belgian chocolate by an award-winning chef.
It’s made us wonder, though, what other combinations of gifts that we could sell on the website would be especially appropriate for hospital patients, or for that matter people convalescing back at home. If anyone has any good ideas, we would be very pleased to hear.
It looks as though the dispute between the Royal Mail and the postal union is coming to an end. The agreement they have negotiated will be balloted by union members, and let us hope that both sides reach an amicable deal.
As a company selling goods via the internet, we are very dependent on the postal service. We specialise in sending gifts to people in hospital on behalf of friends and family who unfortunately are not able to visit in person. Getting the gifts to the hospital at the right time, while the patient is still there, is therefore vital.
Fortunately, we at A Friend in Need haven’t been too badly affected by the postal difficulties, but we are looking forward to being able to reassure our customers that normal service has been restored.
It was interesting to see this week that some new figures are available on the relative popularity of different search engines around the world.
Google is by far the most popular, accounting in August for 37 billion searches around the world (out of a grand total of around 61 billion searches). Its nearest rival is Yahoo, but they were way behind with 8.5 billion searches. The Chinese search engine Baidu was in third place, and the MSN sites, in fourth place, clocked up 2.1 billion searches.
As website operators, the figures were especially interesting to us. At “A Friend in Need” we send gifts to people in hospital on behalf of friends and family (our customers) who are not able to visit in person. Our customers can thus be anywhere in the world.
Does anyone have any views on what makes Google so popular?
One of our most enjoyable jobs this week has been a cuddly toys photo-shoot. It arose because we needed some new pictures of teddy bears with chocolates for the A Friend in Need website!
We specialise in sending gifts to people in hospital on behalf of friends and family who unfortunately are not able to visit in person. One of the most popular gifts is the combination of a teddy bear and a box of chocolate truffles. (It’s not altogether surprising. The chocolates are specially produced for A Friend in Need by Indulgence Confectionery – Belgian milk chocolate blended with cream and then dipped in milk couverture and rolled in organic cocoa powder – absolutely delicious!)
So this week saw us photographing a lucky teddy with his chocolates. The good thing about using teddy bears, of course, is that – unlike real bears (or most other living things) – they don’t help themselves to the chocolates. And that left all the more for us!
We’re constantly on the lookout for new products and new ideas for our online business. We send gifts to people in hospital, or to people convalescing at home, on behalf of friends and family who unfortunately are not able to visit in person.
Our most popular lines are silk flower arrangements (partly because many wards don’t permit fresh flowers) and of course cuddly toys, though we do have a wide range of stock that includes puzzles, toiletries and even chocolates.
Most of the feedback we get, which generally is very positive, is about two things: how good the basic idea of a hospital gifts website is, and the standard of the service we provide.
But we’re also very interested in knowing our customers’ views on the types of gift we keep in stock. So if you have any good ideas about what people in hospital would like to receive from their loved ones, we’d be very pleased to hear from you.
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