Your store history

[Guest garysmith]

I think it would be interesting (possibly inspiring) to hear from successful store owners about how thier store got up and running.

Did you get orders from the beginning, or was it an up hill slog to wait for the search engines to crawl your site?

How did you promote your site?

How long has it taken to get 'established'?

Any funny stories that happened along the way?

Any tips on the 'do's and don'ts of owning a store?

Hearing from some of the established stores might help us n00bs to know what we are letting ourselves in for and would make for an interesting read.

[Guest SaraW]

I think it would be interesting (possibly inspiring) to hear from successful store owners about how thier store got up and running.

Did you get orders from the beginning, or was it an up hill slog to wait for the search engines to crawl your site?

How did you promote your site?

How long has it taken to get 'established'?

Any funny stories that happened along the way?

Any tips on the 'do's and don'ts of owning a store?

Hearing from some of the established stores might help us n00bs to know what we are letting ourselves in for and would make for an interesting read.

bumpin'

[Guest bglefty]

I'd like to hear some experiences as well... our store has been online for about a year now with minimal sales...or course that can be traced back to minimal promotion!

The store only serves a local market and we have found it tough to coax that first online order out of people. We decided we should be marketing to people already online but our problem there is our town really isn't that big and there's not much opportunity to advertise. Our most successful effort was an ad on a local online classifieds site we ran for two weeks...we ended up with 45 people signing up for our mailing list and we have converted a few sales out of that list...

I'd like to hear from some more successful people that also market to a small, local market...what promotions work and what promotions don't work?

Sincerely,

BGLefty

[Guest Brivtech]

A few years back, I used to run a greetings card shop, that extended to balloon decorating and party goods.

I set up an e-commerce website using Cossax Webshop (I used to know one of the investors very well, and actually set up the shop to help them out in their trials), where I entered in a substantial amount of products from my shop (800+ items).

Generally, the Me-To-You Tatty Teddy items sold best, followed by the party goods. My mean turnover was around £600 a month in internet sales, which was certainly a boost to the takings. One month I achieved about £2500 thanks to the additional giant 36@ Tatty Teddy bears that I obtained (With special thanks to the sales agent who did me the deal on the bears ). These bears normally sold for £125 each, I dropped the price to £99, and was flooded with orders within 2 weeks! I completely sold out my stock of 20 bears!

I can't say that is was without its problems. I had a couple of orders where stolen credit cards were used, and because the e-commerce system was set up so I would get an email with the order and credit card details that I would run through the terminal in the shop, there wasn't much I could do about chargebacks. In total, I lost around £450. Not lonly did I lose the tranaction amount, but also the cost of the goods. Unfortunately, the credit card companies don't tell you these things until some time later. (If you've experienced scams, check out my topic in this section). Foreign countries (especially Thailand, and Indonesia) were the worst culprits for dodgy card sales, however, Saudi Arabia was by mest customer for Me To You products!

But overall, the internet sales were very encouraging, and if it wasn't for the fact that I wanted to concentrate on a larger business that I actually set up initially as a hobby, I probably would have developed the website more and created a proper web-marketing strategy. Not bad considering that all I did was register the site with the major search engines, and that was it! I suppose 4 years ago, there were that many less sites to browse, and the balance of power between the search engines was different to how it is now.

Since then, Cossax has been bought out by an Israel-based company called Starwebz. They charge an absolute fortune for their system, and considering that I was one of their primary testers can assure everyone here that their system, although innovative in their help features, and very easy to set up with templated site documents, and good selection of shop templates, desperately lacks many of the features that CubeCart includes as standard. If I had CubeCart back then, and having been a graphics designer for 8 years before I got diverted into my shop venture, my website would have been truly awesome!

One of these days, I'll be adapting and updating some of the templates I designed so they can be used with CuibeCart. The added functionality CubeCart delivers will be great! It's on our to do list here, after some other projects.

DOs and DON"Ts::

- Register with search engines

- Market your website (do a proper marketing strategy - if you haven't done one and you are running a business already, God help you! Go straight to the library and start reading up on it and do one!)

- Let customers feel like they're getting a really good deal. There's many other sites that sell products similar to yours, and you need a competitive advantage. Having a nice store won't be enough to make an order. You don't need to slash your prices and cut your margins, just make clever use of promotions. Having a shop on the internet is a great opportunity for getting rid of dead stock that would otherwise be written off. People are always after a bargain.

- Are the products you're selling in demand?

- Are you describing your products well enough?

- At every instance possible, use GOOD QUALITY photography, whether it's for categories, or products. The internet is very visual, and a nice image can make all the difference.

- When creating a website, try to construct a brand image. For many years I have dealt with style guides from the likes of 20th Century fox, Nickleodeon studios, Disney, etc., and one thing I have learned is that creating a defined image (and under no circumstances deviating from this definition) is important in building the customer's recognition with you. Although a fantastic looking site won't necessarily get you the order, it will help.

- Promote security - If you don't have a SSL certificate, get one now (They're not that expensive), and promote the fact that you have one!

- Finally, when describing your products, try to use alternative wording to the title - Not everyone types in the same name into a search engine, so the results may differ - not in your favour. A customer's site features a product that is a labybird. So, in the title, they put Ladybird, and in the describtion, they put Ladybug - Covering international and US markets in one go.

Oops, long post again - I get a bit carried away sometimes. That's probably why I'm a consultant.