2008-04-10T21:49:15-07:00 Practical Ecommerce info@practicalecommerce.com http://www.practicalecommerce.com/ Copyright 2007 Confluence Publishing DBA Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/712/Lessons-Learned-Wetsuitwearhousecoms-Moleskie/#comment8769 2008-04-10T21:49:15-07:00

Great article. Regarding cheap website design: We've been tendering work through elance.com with great success. Just write up a spec and post it, and you'll get a number of bids from qualified designers. We've found the prices very affordable thus far. We're about to redo www.lumetro.com through elance so check back soon.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/712/Lessons-Learned-Wetsuitwearhousecoms-Moleskie/#comment8750 2008-04-10T12:18:25-07:00

I know that it is after the fact but did you realize that Miva can synch with QuickBooks?? (But not QuickBooks Enterprise - the next step up in the QB line up.) Our site is Miva (provided by our host company) and it is pretty awesome (albeit a bit quirky once you start adding modules etc). If your web developer was half way decent he could have become a Miva expert fairly quickly. We have been able to do our entire site (including the non-e commerce sections) in Miva and I (who programmed and maintain the site) was fairly new to web site development PERIOD. I am now a Miva goddess! Best of luck!

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/712/Lessons-Learned-Wetsuitwearhousecoms-Moleskie/#comment8754 2008-04-10T12:18:16-07:00

One think to keep in mind is you have to know where your "coversions" are coming from and not just your traffic. We experience great traffic at www.envirosafetyproducts.com and we attributed it our PPC, however these were mainly page jumpers. We turned off about our monthly PPC spend of $8k per month without any noticable drop in sales.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/712/Lessons-Learned-Wetsuitwearhousecoms-Moleskie/#comment8755 2008-04-10T12:18:08-07:00

Great advice on letting professionals handle SEO/SEM and PPC Marketing. Any chance you can let us know who these firms are who have done such a good job of helping grow your company?

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/712/Lessons-Learned-Wetsuitwearhousecoms-Moleskie/#comment8749 2008-04-10T08:52:15-07:00

One of the biggest obstacles for those starting out is finances/funding . . . . When starting out, where does one get the funding for hiring a quality web designer - be it a MIVA expert or otherwise?

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/712/Lessons-Learned-Wetsuitwearhousecoms-Moleskie/#comment8746 2008-04-10T08:34:54-07:00

Working for an SEO/SEM agency it is nice to see someone call out how much support an outside agency can bring. Currently there are many clients who we work with on Natural and Paid search, but the future is going to be Conversion Consulting. Because search traffic will not continue growing at the same rate, converting the visitors you already get will become extremely important. Improving your site conversion from 1.25% to 1.50% can result in thousands to hundred of thousands of dollars a year.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/712/Lessons-Learned-Wetsuitwearhousecoms-Moleskie/#comment8748 2008-04-10T08:34:24-07:00

We hired consultants to expand our keywords lists for www.CyberCucina.com and found out through hard experience they didn't have a clue (or didn't care) about how appropriate it was to bid certain keywords. We found many keywords being bid for things we didn't sell; I assume they were added because they were semantically related. Also, note compensation can be a percentage of ad spend, so they are motivated to see you spend a lot, but don't care about your bottom line. Our lesson learned was to maintain our own keyword lists and couple our PPC program with our site search vendor http://www.CyberSiteSearch.com to boost conversion rates on our campaigns. So far, we're getting good results.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/712/Lessons-Learned-Wetsuitwearhousecoms-Moleskie/#comment8745 2008-04-10T07:41:42-07:00

Great suggestions. Care to elaborate on how much these services cost and the ROI on them? SEO/SEM and PPC Marketing can be handled by professionals but the waters are so muddy these days its hard to tell if they're more dedicated than you are and actually doing a good job or not ;)