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Interviews & Profiles

Site Owners Describe Changes for 2007

Site owners note their new things for the new year

Dan Wickwares, Buyer/Webmaster

WEBSITE: Wickswares.com
SELLS: Candle, bath, body and soap-making supplies
ANSWER: Our growth for the last four years has been by word-of-mouth. We will be implementing a monthly newsletter using oemPro software and following up on all web hits with a personal note using the same software. Also, we'll also be migrating to the MIVA shopping cart system. Last but not least, we will be placing new emphasis on search engine optimization.

Rhonda B. King, Owner/Operator

WEBSITE: Barefacedminerals.com
SELLS: Mineral makeup and essential oils
ANSWER: We plan three changes for 2007. First, we are developing new categories of sets for first-time shoppers who may be overwhelmed with making choices. Sets based on skin tone will ease that burden for clients. Secondly, our new affiliate program will offer solutions for clients who want to promote our product without carrying inventory. Thirdly, we're enhancing our wholesale categories to include PDFs of mineral makeup information our clients need to grow their own businesses. As we grow, our expectation is that our clients can meet their goals as well.

Robert Ludwig, Owner

WEBSITE: The-craft-barn.net
SELLS: Crafts and magnets
ANSWER: I didn't intend on doing much more with it, other than maybe taking it down. I'm finding eBay generates a lot more sales for me. I don't like the fees with eBay, but 90 percent of my sales are there. I do have a different site going up specifically for magnets (Kitchenaidmagnets.com) to see if that will rank better in the search engines. I'm also looking at selling on Ioffer.com — that looks promising. They don't have any fees.

Cymantha Stein, Operations Manager

WEBSITE: Fireproofchildren.com
PROVIDES: Information about fire safety
ANSWER: We're making small changes at our site. We don't have a lot of products to sell, but we have a couple of books we've written and produced. We wanted to have them for sale on our website. I just added PayPal to our site so we could sell the books. We're also looking at various ways to increase traffic to our site.

Jerry McGarvey, Owner

WEBSITE: Heresyourhat.com
SELLS: Custom embroidered dog gift items
ANSWER: I'm planning to upgrade my MIVA Merchant store to the latest version. This should allow me to add other improvements that will make my site more search engine friendly and allow a lot more flexibility in site design. The features I would like to add include breadcrumb trails to my site, basket contents displayed with subtotals and shipping, HTML invoices and HTML-formatted email responses.

Published on Monday, January 29, 2007

Comments:

Got a few good ideas. Very useful.

Posted by: Karen Gross
Thursday, February 01, 2007

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