I received a request for an update on a blog from a few years ago on our catalog. We had designed and printed a catalog a few years ago and we circulated a fairly small amount of them.. no more than 1500, I think. We had also put a request for the catalog on our home page, and were swamped with requests, sending out stacks every day. It was really exciting.

Despite the response, we chose not to reprint. And that was a really frustrating reality for us. We were hoping that our audience of older.. senior women, would be more comfortable ordering from a catalog instead of online…figuring that they’d trust it more if they could send a check. And when the request for catalogs went through the roof, we were sure we were onto something fantastic.

However… I don’t think so. We still did 98% of our business online. It’s not often that we have an order come in by mail. And when they do come by mail, it was through a process we had already had put in motion BEFORE the catalog. We have a note on our checkout page that says “If you want to order by mail… stop, and print this page, and send your order to…..” That has been very well received by our customers and that printout screen accompanies more mail orders than catalog order forms .

The most frustrating part of a catalog for a small ecomm like ours was that our product line changed too fast. So if we did get an order, chances are that we’d be out of stock. And we’d  either lose the order, or try to sell them on something else.

I would say that the catalog barely paid for itself. But that’s a hard thing to quantify. Who’s to say that reprinting or not reprinting was the right decision. If we do ever reprint, I may not throw it up on the home page like I did before, and save the catalogs for those who call to request it. Anyone will take a free catalog, right? why not?

So that’s sort of the long and short of it. I know other companies provide their catalog in pdf form online. I’ve considered doing that too… actually, I’d forgotten about it. That allows you to update your content as it changes, and still gives a person something tangible to pass around at their Red Hat Meetings. I guess I’ll have to add that to my long list of TO DO’s. I just never personally download those things, so I get frustrated thinking about maintaining it…. another thing to worry about. But I guess it’s worth a shot if it turns out more business.

I appreciate your ideas here…

I finally did it! Out of complete frustration with my mailing lists, I decided to switch to MaxBulk Mailer. I really like it. It has simplified my life…. HUGE!

What I love about it is that I can preview my mail in a variety of different browsers, send both html/text emails, check my mail for spam content, and send my mail without attachments. Until now, I’ve been sending my mail as an inline html attachment, so that anyone not set up to view attachments, didn’t see my mail.
I can also take a large list and stagger it, and send out 100 every 2 minutes. Here’s the other thing that I think is very different from mailing lists… it sends an individual email to each address, instead of one blanket email to a list. It takes longer, but it runs in the background, and I believe I could schedule it if I wanted to. I have just begun using it, so I’m still learning.

I have to figure out how to handle subscribes and unsubscribes. I believe Brian from Practical Ecommerce blogged about this to me before, so I need to try to find that back in my archives.

I think that by changing to MaxBulk, more of my subscribers are seeing my mail. I would get emails daily saying that they can’t open my mail, or couldn’t see it. Lee Ann started asking her phone orders yesterday how they heard about us, and a number of them said they just saw our email for the first time today! I’d say that’s a huge success. I hope it continues. It’s a huge relief for me. Because when someones says they can’t see your mail, it’s hard to trouble shoot. And in many cases it’s user error. In most cases they just need to click a “view images” button, but that must not be obvious for all people.

ok, gotta go! The family is taking a trip to Tulsa in a few days and I have lots of errands to run to get ready. Both of my kids are in a wedding, and it should be fun!

I wish I could write and tell you my sales are booming, and I need to update order fulfullment software because I’m swamped and we just can’t keep up. We’re doing ok, nothing exciting to report…

Well, unless you consider finding a company that wholesales purple plus sized rhinestone studded fine dress suits exciting.. WHICH I’m embarrassed to tell you, I do find sort of cool. It’s hard to find plus sized purple clothes. Lee Ann is a whiz at finding products.

I also have a theory I’d like to pass on. Well, not so much a theory, as an observation I’ve made over time. It’s crucial to show them something new, even as small as a new pen… to peak interest. When I show them something REALLY expensive and beautiful, they probably won’t fly off of the shelves, but it will create interest, and make people click in off of my direct sales campaign. What it really comes down to is this… whatever you show them, on your home page or an email campaign should really take some thought. The photos should be colorful, and interesting.

I’m laughing at myself as I’m typing this.. I mean, duh, right? I’m a graphic designer! I’m always aware that strong visual can immediately move a consumer into my site. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but when you are your businesses web developer, direct marketing manager, mailing list manager. etc, etc, sometimes you want to just the the stinking email out! Or just get the product posted, I mean who cares if your supplier gave you a junky photo, it’s a photo right? NO!
This is one area that I think you can’t skimp. Web design and product photography is critical to sales on your site, just as critical as making sure the “checkout” button is  obvious. I have to think navigation through a bit more than the average consumer because my audience isn’t as web savvy as others.

What keeps customers “in” your store,  is design that is thought through carefully. Organize your product intuitively. I was on a website the other day shopping for swim suits. I left within a few minutes when I wasn’t shown complimentary items.. ie tops and bottoms. So the company goes to the trouble to show me a mix and match section, but doesn’t bother to show me which items go with each other. It isn’t simply about color with swimsuits, it’s about texture of fabric, too. I ended up buying from a site that put the exact mix and match items that work together… together! They made it REALLY simple for me.
Look at it this way… If I walked into a swim shop to buy a two piece suit, and they put the tops in the front of the store, and the bottoms in the back, you’d never think to put them together, right? You’d probably never even know there were bottoms and then you wouldn’t find what you were looking for, unless you asked. I hate asking.
It has to be easy to find your product, and find the complimentary product. I’m not claiming that I do this perfectly. I do a lot of redesigning on my store. I move things around quite a bit, and have always seen things move that haven’t when I’ve repositioned them in my store (ie showing them in a different department)

The other thing I’d encourage you to do if things aren’t moving is rethink your departments. Sometimes I worry that I have too many departments. If the average consumer spends two minutes on my site, my impulse is to show them as much product as possible in any department they click on. However, I’ve revised this thought process  to keeping my departments specific, and refining my navigation instead. I now offer my most popular sections in a navigation bar at the top of every page, that leads into a more detailed navigation from there, and a very prominent search button, and product rich in descriptions with keywords.

This is a hard one for me. And I have to set aside time to go in and work on this constantly. Product descriptions are important for a variety of reasons. Even if your navigation is lacking, good product descriptions will yield good search results for your customers. It’s also important for the search engines, and will most likely be the text that shows up under your product when it’s indexed on Google.

Another tip that I heard is that if your site offers Free Shipping, or another feature that sets you aside, put it in your product name… “Red Wool Hat FREE SHIPPING”, and here’s why: When the sites index your dynamic pages, and someone does a search for Red Wool Hat, guess what comes up for a result? “Red Wool Hat FREE SHIPPING”. If you saw that next to 10 others that didn’t, which one are you going to click on?

Now, I’m guilty of not doing that last one. I used to be good at it, but I have such an extensive product line, that I stopped doing it, simply because it was hard to put into everything. I think I need to take my own advice and refine that, because I think it helped us tremendously since we place high organically, and it’s such a competition to get the click off the engines, anything different I can do is probably a smart move.

So that’s my TO DO list this. It’s really a bunch of spring cleaning and updating. I hope some of that info is helpful. Have a good week.

Hi there. It’s Sunday morning at 7:30. Cold and overcast here in Michigan. But besides my trusty labrador the house is dead quiet and it’s just me and my coffee…. my favorite time of the day. I figure I’ve got an hour of this bliss.. tops.

Anyway, I’ve been referring to a site called Quantcast. They sent me an email, and that email has opened my eyes quite a bit. I knew our traffic was lower compared to our competitors, mostly because I don’t have the engines on. And many of them do, which, it goes without saying, drives more people into a site. I don’t like turning on the engines because even though it drives more people in, the conversions are high. I’ve blogged about this many times before.

Anyway. Quantcast gives you statistics on your site: demographics, unique visitors (in relation to your competition), it’s sort of interesting. It goes on to say that the figures are rough, get “quantified” if you want to know more. It’s similar to analytics, but analytics doesn’t tell you about your competition. It was an eye opener. And is making me rethink what my competitors are doing, and is it a better choice?

The other thing I like about Quantcast is that it gives me a similar audience section. ie. where else my demographic likes to shop. It also lets me look at all of these same statistics for any site I want. For instance, according to this, my audience likes to send ecards to each other. And I’m considering that this may be something I could do. A freebie off of our site, that would make people come in, and share our site with their friends. We’ve been aching for a way to build our mailing list, and this could be successful.
Oh, by the way… my bliss is over… one sleepy child is staring at me from the top of the stairs. : (

So, I sort of like this quantcast site. Most of it I already know due to analytics, but it’s still interesting, and worth a check for your own site. So now I’m off to figure out how difficult it would be to have ecards on our site. Any ideas on this, let me know!

Don’t you HATE it when customers call complaining they are having a problem and you can’t duplicate it? It doesn’t always happen, you may go a whole month without hearing about it. But trust me.. it’s like termites, if you actually have a customer who’s motivated enough to call, there are ten more who just abandoned their carts who didn’t bother.

So lately we’ve had customers calling and saying that when they are ready to checkout, they are getting a message saying “Your Shopping Cart is Empty”. However, Lee Ann has been running orders for those folks all week without experiencing any problems. I kept going in and couldn’t get the message myself. I couldn’t chalk it up to user error, since we got at least 5 calls inside of a week.

I called my technical support, and they said it was a Miva problem, contact them. So I was off to Miva, and checked their message board, and found some REALLY useful information about how to clean up my store, and more. I can’t believe in all the years I’ve been running my business that I’ve never done that. My shopping cart doesn’t have long wait times anymore. It was a simple fix, see My Miva store hangs periodically. Why? (This is a big problem that causes duplicate orders since people are not patient, so if you have Miva, read it!)

So back to my empty cart issue… I found nothing at Miva, however with all of my reading, it occurred to me that I had made some brilliant changes the weekend before. I had made my checkout button more obvious to my customers. I did this sort of on a whim in my massive store redesign, which I have yet to blog about, and is not yet complete. I had put a CHECKOUT option just above my RETURN TO SHOPPING button in my Shopping Cart. AND HERE IT IS…. I NEVER CHECKED IT! I’m an IDIOT.

I had pasted the wrong code into that link.
I was able to not only duplicate the problem once I realized this, but I found it in other places, too! And the reason we couldn’t duplicate it was because we use the original checkout button at the top of the page out of habit. My biggest mistake was that I didn’t test it, and I lost a lot of business because of it. I was so impressed with myself last weekend when I made what I thought were insightful changes to my store, and shopping cart. I tried to make it more user friendly. Miva 5 allows you to go in and manually changed your dynamic pages. The problem was that I made so many changes, and spent so much time making it look pretty, that I didn’t think to make sure it was put to use, that it worked.

This has happened to me before, and I didn’t learn my lesson. Test, test, test! Take my advice, and don’t lose a whole week of business because you were too busy to try the pudding, or you’ll be like me, and have to sample the crow instead!

ok, I’m officially shopping gateways. I realize from blogging here that I need more features to my gateway. My gateway (Rodopi) is free to me. But it doesn’t allow me to refund a customer by credit card. This seems ridiculous to me.

Aside from changing my gateway, I am considering offering Google Checkout. If I understand this correctly, it’s a additional way to checkout instead of using my gateway. Google Checkout users have their own account that they’ve set up with Google. They just enter their user and password at my site at checkout, and then once the sale is complete, I go into my Google account and process orders.

I rely pretty heavily on Google for many parts of my business, and it’s the one engine that I get most of my business from. I think advertising that I use it would be a selling point. I also like the idea that I get the benefit of more visibility on their engines by using it. They are also offering a benefit right now if you use Adwords… “For every $1 you spend on AdWords each month, you can process $10 in sales the following month for free through Google Checkout.” Not bad I guess. I am not currently using Adwords, but have been reconsidering it.

I am trying to figure out what the drawbacks of adding this to my current checkout would be, if any.  I am always concerned about confusing my customers. Since they are women over 50, I wonder if my demographic is using Google Checkout? Is it going to turn off my ladies to see two checkout options? Or is it going to add a level of confidence to the purchase? Does it lend credibility?
So I’m curious what you people are using out there? Can you give me some insight? I also need to switch my regular gateway. Google Checkout to me is only an addon. I don’t want people to HAVE to have a Google Account. I have to be able to have a gateway with more flexibility. I’m hoping this is an easy transition. I get really stressed out when I make moves like this! So, please give me your feedback and tell me what you use and why! I’ve already heard about Authorize.net from a previous response to my blog. I guess I’d like to hear the goods and bads from other Gateways too.

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

I received a few responses to my entry regarding my blog a few weeks ago. I’m going to address them separately here to bring attention to the matter. If you recall, I addressed the fact that my competitor was going into my blog and putting entries in there. Those entries not only gave her a backlink to her site, but was clearly an underhanded way of moving people out of my blog, and into hers.
I received a few critical responses because I deleted the questionable entries. Fair enough, you have your right to your opinion. But I’d like to explore that a little…. which is my polite way of saying… REALLY? What, if any, is a justifiable entry to moderate? Where are the official blogging rules that say I can’t or shouldn’t delete a message? Where are they posted? I’ve never been enlightened by any such list.

In my opinion, it all comes down to this:

1. I am not posting the blog for the fun of it, or because it’s a great place to go chat… although it is. Let’s be honest here.. A blog to an ecomm biz, among other things, is a great tool to meat up a site for search engine optimization. I post that blog to provide a place rich in keywords and content to benefit my site, thus improving my organic placement in the engines.

2. I monitor the content for spam. Why not for a competitor trying to directly steal business from me? If anything, my competitor going in and deviously placing a post, is a much more qualified offense, correct? To elaborate, a casino posting in my blog is looking to take my traffic, just as my competitor does. I have the power to intercept both, and rightly so.
3. Now, I am, and always have been, open to opinions in the blog that differ from mine. For instance, in an old blog, we had a few customers that didn’t like a rhinestone pin we were carrying at the time. The pin said “Bitch” on it. And it evoked quite a response. Each of those negative entries stayed. And to my critics regarding this most recent issue, the competitor who posted wasn’t really posting an honest opinion, although she made it look like she was, she was lying and stealing. What I did was the equivalent of locking my door.

I feel I’ve been unjustly accused of censorship. If my competitor had come in and entered the same entry, without the backlink, I don’t think I could find the objection. I am a business! A business who values her customers, and works hard to get them in to shop. I am doing this to make money. I expect she’d do the same. And finally, if I had the audacity to go into her site and try to pull off what she did, I’d be doing it with a very guilty conscience. There’s a very big difference between editing content for ill-intent and truly censoring an opinion. So, c’mon, and give me a break!

I’ve been in a pickle.. trying to get my new server set up correctly. I have blogged previously about the fact that we have a dedicated server just for our direct mail campaign. Recently, we were urged by our host to upgrade this server, and we took their advice, as they cut us such a nice deal to do so. Sounds good so far, right?

Well, in the last three weeks, our customers just faded away. Lee Ann and I were in a panic. How could this be? Did they really not like our stuff THAT MUCH! We’d have days with only one or two sales, and that just isn’t normal for us.

Back to the server…. I had asked that the old mail server be pointed to the new server quite a while ago. I got a confirmation that it was done within a week.  I was satisfied. But then business started dropping off.

My host also offered what they called a “migration”. This was to automatically take all data on my old server and migrate it to my new server. Well, that was a nightmare! Because when that happened, and when they re-initiated my mailing lists on the new server, they dropped half of the names along with all preferences set in the lists (ie emergency moderation so my lists can’t be hit with SPAM), and then each member got an email welcoming them to the list, and asking them to manage their membership. I was really angry because this was very confusing to my over 50, suspicious of the internet, members. But we survived it. I send out a damage control email apologizing for the confusion.. They forgave me. I did, however, lose some members…

Here’s my confusion, and where I believe I didn’t get an honest answer from the dedicated server support staff…. Until the new email was initiated, and even after, I was able to access the mailing lists on the old server. I was forced to since their migrations weren’t working out. This went on for 3 weeks that I know of. I never suspected that the mailing lists weren’t working, because the test email, my own, that is on each list was getting the direct mail campaign. I truly figured that my customers were upset, and didn’t like what they were seeing. When I asked my host if something was going wrong, they insisted no. They insisted that the lists on my old server were working, and it was just a breakdown on our end (no surprises there!)
The final chapter.

I rebuilt all lists with new list names on my new server. I now know for sure the mail has been moved. I am sending mail out to the new lists, and, hmmm, I’m pleasantly busy again. Interesting huh? I’m making the assumption my host is just covering up their error. They must be trained to do so. I’m curious if anyone has dealt with this before? And what do you think about it?

Thanks!

You tell me…

Over the last week one of our competitors has come into our blog, and added some entries. It’s really one thing to go ahead and add entries under her own name, but she added her business name in, which of course linked back to her blog, which in turn, links to her site! She actually put a link to her red hat website in my red hat website.
Did she think we were born yesterday? I deleted it immediately. She reposted in a different section, with a different little something to say in support of the topic at hand. Is she kidding? Did she not get the message the first time I deleted her entry. Did she think I wasn’t going to notice the second attempt. UNREAL!

Now typically I love these opportunities. I love to craft the finely tuned letter to my opponent… it gets my blood flowing, to be honest. I love a good written duel. But I haven’t yet. I’m waiting for her next move. I think it’s going to get more interesting.
I’ve also blogged about another competitor who stole our imagery off of the site, and didn’t think we’d notice. I was able to handle that swiftly with an email to her, cc’d to our lawyer, and it hasn’t happened since.

We watch what our competitors are doing. We should be! Sometimes I get calls from Lee Ann saying “Do you know what they are doing now!! They stole our idea….“, to which I reply “They always do!” Somehow it’s like a war and not a business. Lee Ann almost takes it personally, especially when one of them finds the one thing she’s been looking for. I’ve even known her to buy three times what we would normally buy, wiping out our manufacturers inventory, just so our competition couldn’t have it. She also almost always asks for exclusivity with our suppliers. Some say yes, and it’s a great move for us! I have to give her credit for thinking like that. It would never occur to me to even ask.

So, back to the friend or foe issue. Competitor A goes into our blog and makes an entry like she’s our best girlfriend. Her entry appears to be genuine and real. What does she have to gain? What’s her angle? Reciprocal linking? Pushing shoppers into her blog? Getting my blood to boil? What am I missing? Let me know, thanks!

I have spent the day moving my mailing lists to my new server. It’s not how I wanted to spend my entire day of New Year freedom (kids went back to school today.) I had intended to send some targeted emails to my list… meaning offers to different areas of the world since I’ve downloaded my new coupon code extention from miva’s website. I’ll update you on how that goes, when I indeed do it.
We are trying to boost interest right now in subscriptions. Our list isn’t as profitable as it used to be. It’s a constant struggle to get people to sign up, and share us with their chapter. I think it’s the single most important thing we can do. And right now, I believe it’s the reason our sales are in a slump… that and who wants to spend money after Christmas anyway? I tried to generate some interest with our Breast Cancer
“Name the Team” thing.. calling it “Give Us Your Breast Shot”, but we haven’t had a lot of success with it yet. Maybe it was a bad time of year to do it? Not sure.

Now earlier in the month, I was bragging about how well we were doing. Karma stinks, huh? Right now I’m actually trying to figure out where our customers are! Analytics says we dropped dramatically the week before Christmas, which I coulda toldya from my sales. So where does that leave me tonight?

Panicked? Stressed? NO! Enthusiastic and challenged! Just kidding. Somewhere in between. I’m sort of out of ideas, and hoping it’s just that what I’ve been showing them for product lately isn’t really exciting. I mean.. who doesn’t love flashing blinking sunglasses? We all should have a pair, right?

That’s it for now. I need to chill out for a bit and have a glass of wine away from the laptop! And… play with our new Wii… but not for long.. my sore Boxing shoulder would prefer that I work on the site…