Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Lessons Learned: Buddhist Search Inspires Lotus Sculpture

April 22, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

In the novel Siddhartha, author Hermann Hesse describes the spiritual journey of a man who meets Gautama Buddha in ancient India. Six years after reading Siddhartha in seventh grade, Greenwich, Conn.-born ...

Business > Merchant Voice

Anatomy of an online scam

March 26, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Have you ever been scammed in a business venture? I’ve become a victim of one. What happened to me is typical, I suspect, of online scams. 1. The Scammers Seem Legitimate Online ...

Business

Lessons Learned: Serial Entrepreneur Heels a Pain

March 6, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Like many serial entrepreneurs who build something from nothing, Jason Schultz was blessed with insight and good timing. Born and raised in California, Schultz began experimenting with Tandy and Commodore 64

Business > Merchant Voice

7 free ways to keep your customers happy and reassured

February 17, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

There are a number of things you can do that cost nothing but offer your customers satisfaction, reassurance, and acknowledgement. 1. Keep your customers informed This is such an obvious thing to ...

Business

Lessons Learned: Forced Time Off Sews a Passion

February 5, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Having multiple sclerosis-like symptoms became a blessing for Shelley Mitchell. Born in Taiwan, she relocated to Melbourne, Australia with her meteorologist father and music-teacher mother when she was 13. Her grandmother had ...

Business > Merchant Voice

The formula to online success, from ‘Lessons Learned’ merchants

January 29, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Since March 2012, I’ve been writing the monthly “Lessons Learned” column, which has profiled online merchants selling products ranging from remedies for intestinal problems (“Trusting your Gut to Online Success”)

Design & Development

Lessons Learned: Entrepreneurs Select Blinds

January 17, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Nate Kennedy grew up in Logan, Utah. The oldest of 10 children, Kennedy’s desire to earn money came from watching his grandparents, who owned a golf shop, go bankrupt. His business ...

Business

Lessons Learned: Fashionable Maternity Wear Sells

December 13, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Like most working women yet to become mothers, Tania Tan was blissfully unaware how unfashionable and expensive maternity clothing could be. Tan was raised in Sydney, Australia by her Chinese father ...

Business > Merchant Voice

7 tips to plan for Valentine’s Day gift orders

December 12, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Christmas is such a major sales period for many online retailers that it can make you overlook Valentine’s Day, which falls barely six weeks later. Here are seven tips to get ...

Business > Merchant Voice

8 ways to help customers with Christmas gift deliveries

October 30, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

When customers start placing holiday orders — and especially as deadlines loom — you need all the help you can get in ensuring their purchases arrive safely. There’s a few ways ...

Business

Lessons Learned: VacuumSpot Founder Comes Clean, Inspires

October 30, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Alec Nelson grew up in the wealthy semi-rural Sydney suburb of Dural in a home that his builder father built in the 1960s. At age 11, he moved to Wagga ...

Business > Merchant Voice

Adding a wedding category could produce extra sales — and headaches

September 23, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

You may think you can’t tap into the wedding market if you don’t sell venues, honeymoons, caterers, dresses, hair and make-up, invitations, flowers, cars, jewelry, cake, nor entertainment. However, there could ...

Business

Lessons Learned: Specialist ID Identifies a Niche

September 19, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Bartenders frequently ask young patrons to prove they’re over 21 to obtain liquor service. But there’s probably only one ex-bartender who has created a million-dollar business out of legitimate photo ...

Business

Lessons Learned: Entrepreneur not Resting on his Bed Linens

August 19, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Unlike many entrepreneurs, Gabriel Luis does not have parents who own a business. His mother is a bank manager and his father is a mail courier. But Luis was born ...

Business > Merchant Voice

7 ways to increase newsletter sign-ups before the holidays

August 2, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Less than five months to Christmas Day, now is the time you should be growing your newsletter database as fast and effectively as possible. I just signed up - or attempted to sign up - to 14 online gift retailers' newsletters and here is what I'd suggest. 1. Put your newsletter sign-u...

Business

Lessons Learned: Stardust Memorials Urns Its Success

July 25, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Jordan Lindberg must be the only online retailer who earned a bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in philosophy from, respectively, Albion College (1991), Michigan State University (1993), and University of Missouri-Columbia (1997). A professor at Central Michigan University from 1997 ...

Business > Merchant Voice

Book review: Custom Nation

July 21, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

If you sell online, you can customise online, and if you don't, you're leaving money on the table. So says Anthony Flynn, creator of the customised energy bar company, You Bar, and his co-writer sister Emily Flynn Vencat. Flynn writes a compelling case in his book Custom Nation (BenBe...

Business

Lessons Learned: Finding the Recipe for a Successful Cake Decorating Website

June 25, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

There’s no one recipe to becoming a successful online retailer. Julie Degnan began with a love of numbers, mixed in an entrepreneurial father, and added a “pinch” of a job ...

Business > Merchant Voice

How to increase conversions: two conversion specialists have very different ideas

May 24, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

How long do you let poor conversions hamper your sales? After the needle hadn't moved on my unit sales after the holiday period, and my conversion rate was sinking, I hired a conversion specialist from Odesk. (No, I didn't have much money to spend.) My conversion specialist 1, whom I'...

Business

Lessons Learned: Fall of Communism Leads to Cheap Sheds’ Success

May 21, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Citizens of Hungary were banned from owning and operating their own businesses from World War II until the communist regime fell in the early 1990s. With no exposure to entrepreneurialism for about 50 years, one Hungarian family, the Panczels, bravely opened a convenience store in Szol...

Business

Lessons Learned: Trusting your Gut to Ecommerce Success

May 3, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Imagine being told that you’ll never have a job or children and you’ll be on disability for the rest of your life. That’s what doctors told Kenyan-born Jini Patel Thompson when they diagnosed her, at age 17, with Crohn’s Disease. But the now-married mother of three proved them wrong. S...

Business > Merchant Voice

10 ways that launching a website is like planning a wedding

April 12, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

I'm getting married this year and one of the things I've noticed is how many parallels there are between the process of planning a wedding and planning a website launch as I've just relaunched my own website. Just like a wedding, it doesn't matter if it's your first, second or third (w...

Business

Lessons Learned: Making Online Bed Shopping a Dream

March 13, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

When Sara Shikhman was 10 years old, she left communist Ukraine with her parents on a one-way ticket across the Atlantic Ocean, and $5,000 hidden in a set of screwdrivers,

Business > Merchant Voice

Book review: The Insider’s Guide to Ecommerce: 440 Business Insights For The Ambitious Online Retailer

March 6, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

When was the last time you had a pencil and pad at the ready, stopping to take notes as you read a business-related book? When was the last time you kept interrupting yourself: thinking out-loud, researching the points raised, and logging in to check your statstics? When was the last ...

Business

Lessons Learned: Discount Cleaning Products Really Cleans Up

February 20, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

New Jersey-born Mike Kawula once bought a franchise that helped him know how to buy a franchise, which led him to create Discount Cleaning Products. Kawula graduated from Ramapo College in ...

Business > Merchant Voice

7 simple website improvements that can make a big difference

February 20, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

You've probably noticed many ways a website could be improved as you shop online. Here's a handful of ones which I encountered recently on other people's websites, as well as my own, which are so easy to fix. Allow customers time to use coupons I Googled for double basin bathroom van...

Business > Merchant Voice

How 100 retailers responded to a mystery shopper’s Contact Us query

January 23, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

How do you respond to the customer enquiries through your Contact Us page? Do you take them seriously? You may be leaving your customer's money and their goodwill on the table. A friend of mine has just launched a baby t-shirt product so out of curiosity and solidarity, we arranged th...

Business

Lessons Learned: From Police Officer to Wedding-products Retailer

January 16, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

If Erica Tevis had passed her firearms test as a rookie New York police officer 12 years ago, it’s highly unlikely the New Jersey girl would have become a wedding products online retailer. Tevis, who has a bachelor’s and master’s in criminal justice from St. John’s University and Iona ...

Business > Merchant Voice

Three small business customer service fails and one that works

December 13, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

In the lead-up to Christmas I realised how disproportionately annoyed customers can get with some of the businesses that are out there by experiencing unprofessional service first-hand - especially after comparing it to a first-rate one. Company A We're about to renovate our house so ...

Business

Lessons Learned: Licensing a Language Platform Is Ecommerce Success

December 11, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Dan Roitman founded his education-focused ecommerce company, Stroll, while he was a student at the University of Maryland, studying international business and German, in 2000. He financed his fledgling business on his credit card, leveraging $70,000 to take the company to profitability...