Running a biz from your home, that is.
About a month ago, I got a request in this blog to write about how I got started doing this, and what’s it’s like to run a business as a stay at home mom. It seemed like a pretty overwhelming request, so I tabled it, and have had it in the back of my mind ever since.
The answer is this: I love it AND I hate it.
I am a stay at home mom of two kids. Except that’s sort of funny, because my kids have been full-time in school for the last few years now (my son since he was 3, my daughter since 5) I have them there so I can get my work done.. yeah, well. Like I said, I stay at home.. and work and thus, need to send them away, because otherwise they’ll drive me insane.
Kids don’t really buy into the “stay at home and work” thing. They don’t care that their screaming is too loud for you to talk to a customer on the phone. They don’t get why you are always working, even though you’ve explain it daily… like this… “Daddy goes away for the day and works, but Mommy does the same thing, only from home, so she can be with you”
To which they say… “but you can never play with us”..
This is a weekly conversation.
Running this business is a job that never ends. I am working during the day and at night, and on weekends, and actually spend about half of my day doing the things I like to do to keep me sane.. ie. Gym, shopping, errands… etc. You know, that stuff you hate to do with your kids in tow. I do them alone, in peace, and love every second of it. For this reason… I love my job.
I love my job because if I have a field trip, I can get up at 5AM, and work for a few hours and accomplish what needs to be done and leave with a clear head.  I hate my job because every time the site goes down.. I’m definitely on a field trip. If I had a dime for every time I had to call tech support from the bathroom so as to not annoy the teachers who plead with us parents to NOT USE CELL PHONES ON FIELD TRIPS. It’s my job. It’s my business. If I don’t fix my site, I don’t make money…. and thus, can’t afford to send them to the wonderful school. Simple as that. So I hide in the stall… make my calls… thank God for iPhones.
I love my job because I get to sit at Panera most mornings and smell the bread that I don’t eat because I’m always on a diet. I drink my coffee, and work for a few hours in peace. I love that no one is my boss.
I hate that no one is my boss when I can’t figure out how to sell more merchandise, or deal with cash flow. I wish I had a boss on that day to point the finger at and say… ‘so now what?? How are we going to turn this around Mrs Smartypants??’
Can’t do that. I’m Mrs. Smartypants, but so often, I am at the mercy of my own learning curve. When I’m clueless, I’m to blame.
I never feel like I know enough. There’s always more to learn. I never have enough time to research what’s new in shopping carts and how to improve mine. I actually have to schedule that if I want it done.
I get great ideas, but don’t seem to ever have the time to implement those fanatastic ideas, and I need to write them down so as to not forget them.

However, and this is a biggie.. I’m really going to fess up and tell you that I actually love it more because it’s mine, and I’m pretty proud of what I know. I’ve come so far. I used to be in advertising and would design a look for a website, and have to hire out a webmaster to code it.
I do it all now. I run the shopping cart, had to set up the gateway, manage product, and so, SO much more.
I love knowing all that. I have a really large site, and it’s really crazy that I did that. For that reason, I’m proud of it. So clearly I love it and hate it. Some days I’m so jealous of my girlfriends who dress up and go to an office that is in no way tied to their home. When they leave, they leave.

They watch me run into school in my workout clothes because I work from home. They wish they had that! Ultimately, I want what I have, it’s just no cakewalk. If you are a mom thinking of doing this from home, think about if you like the social part of going somewhere everyday… think about what it means to have an identity outside of your home and kids. A business of home is an extension of home. You just can’t put it away. I’m an extremely social person, but hate being told what to do. Staying home all the time is lonely for me, which is why I’m a coffee shop queen.  But no one tells me what to do, and I really enjoy that!!

Next week I intend to talk about getting our biz off of the ground, and what it took to do it.

Have a good week!

The last few weeks has been crazy for us here at RHBY. Lots of new little goodies coming into stock, which as I’ve always said, creates a lot of action. Posting the little stuff that launches them into lots of different departments gets my shoppers to peak around a bit more. And then I start moving some of the obscure stuff that never moves.

Yesterday we had an 87 dollar order of bizarre things, and then a few hours later a smaller order of the same things. All located on a page that some new product was on.

I like to experiment that way, and as I’ve said before, I love to move stuff around that isn’t moving where it is. It keeps the site looking fresh, and since a lot of my traffic is returning customers, this is crucial for us.

Because of my new little goodies, I’ve been putting tons of stuff out of stock. It’s sort of driving me nuts, and it’s tedious. But taking things out of stock instead of replenishing, is a good idea. And I usually don’t just take it away. I like to mark it ‘temporarily out of stock’ if it’s a hot item.

Here’s why, and this may be obvious to some: If you mark it temporarily out of stock, immediately they NEED to have it. I am the same way, which is why I am so confident about this. I enjoy shopping at the Gap online. If I go, and can’t get the color I want I will actually shop for something else in that color that I CAN get, or I’ll go to the Gap at the mall, and pick it up there.

I have a nice returning customers rate. They watch the site and when new things come into stock, they snatch them up. But they also like like the “back in stock items”. I throw them into the what’s new section, and suddenly, I have a new product to highlight.

It’s a little game that seems to work. And I love these little games, because it keeps things interesting. On a different note, Lee Ann and I have decided that we need to start spending more time working together again. It’s really easy to get into an unproductive zone when you work independently from home. She’s at her office, and I’m at mine (and since I get lonely.. mine is most often at Panera, or Caribou Coffee.)

When we work together, even if it’s just a few hours twice a week, we get great ideas. Whether we are together or not, we still talk 10 times a day on the phone. Sometimes we talk on the phone so much, that we’ll both be on together (bluetooths on) and go 10 minutes NOT TALKING because we are both typing something. Then we’ll realize that we need to hang up. : )

Lee Ann and I are really close, like sisters, and so being together is just more fun, and we compliment each other very well. (We are polar opposites. She’s very Type A, I’m NOT.)  So we are setting out to get back together and working for 4 hours a week to get some new ideas going. I’m excited about it. Especially since eating breakfast together usually figures into our little workdays, and she makes a great omelet!

Ok folks, that’s all for now. I’m curious if anyone out there has some blogging requests. I am open to some topics. I typically just sort of put out there what’s going on. But new ideas are always welcome…

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!