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HOME · Monday, May 12, 2008
Accounting, Management & Legal
Daddiesboardshop.com Wins Site Review
Site wins site critique from five ecommerce pros
Melanie Loveland and her son Dan built a business together around a mutual passion — snowboarding. What started as a small, brick-and-mortar store in Portland, Ore., has evolved into a full-fledged multichannel merchant. It was a process the owners didn't foresee when the business started in 1995.
Their business has seen dynamic change in the seven years since it launched a website. Daddies Board Shop now generates 80 percent of its sales through online channels and only 20 percent at the Portland store.
Dan was the driving force to get the business online. However, as is the case with most small operations, the endeavor required the owner to roll up his sleeves and do it himself.
"I bought [web design software] FrontPage and took a shot at it," Dan said.
The original incarnation of the site was thin — about 25 pages of HTML that displayed snowboarding and skateboarding content. Once Dan put products online, however, orders began to roll in.
"About two years later we added Cart32 shopping cart software to the website, and in the first hour after we integrated it, we had orders for skateboard products," he said. Cart32 did the job for Daddies Board Shop for three years before its limitations began to show.
"We had gained about 500 products, and my HTML site was getting to be a bear to update and maintain," Dan said. "I then found MonsterCommerce. From that point, our online business really took off."
The Critique Team
Five firms reviewed Daddiesboardshop.com and offered a critique. The firms participating in the complimentary review were:
• Search Engine Optimization: Netconcepts, Stephan Spencer, President
• General Internet Presence: Red Door Interactive, Reid Carr, President
• Site Search: SLI Systems, Shaun Ryan, CEO
• Pay-per-click Advertising: Key Relevance, Christine Churchill, President
• Customer Experience/Usability: Optimal Usability, Richard Kerr, Usability Consultant
After seven years of "reading ASP, CSS and HTML books, I would love to get some professorial insight as to what I am actually doing on the site — what is good or bad and how I can improve on the design," Dan wrote in his petition. "I am super-busy managing the site and advertising it on Google, Yahoo!, etc. When you are this busy, you can overlook some really important stuff."
As part of the critique, five firms took an intensive look at Daddiesboardshop.com to analyze its problems, the opportunities for search engine optimization, its general Internet presence, site search, pay-per-click advertising and customer experience/usability.
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Published on Wednesday, May 30, 2007
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Cart32 was slightly misrepresented in this article. It's not fair to say they out grew Cart32 based on the static HTML pages they had to update. Cart32 does offer a dynamic store builder solution seperate from the cart software that could have helped with the maintence of all the products, similar to the offerings of MC.
Posted by: Michael
Friday, June 01, 2007