LAND OF
ODDS - Jewelry Design Center
Beads, Beading Supplies, Books
-- For the Bead and Jewelry Making Artist and Craftsperson
From time to time, we have decided to relate and share some of our e-commerce experiences with our customers and friends. Doing business on the Internet is a new thing, a wonderful thing and something not quite the same as running a regular store, and not quite the same as operating a mail-order print catalog business. The Internet is very democratic, and we feel our on-line store should mirror some of the aspects of Internet culture. The Internet is very "information-centered" as well, and our store should also be. We want to chronicle our successes, trials and tribulations.
Some of our goals have changed, since we became a primarily-on-line enterprise, and closed our main store.
Our goals for our catalog include:
This period has seen the first sustained slow-down in the on-line catalog, as economy slowed. The slowdown begun very gradually around September 2006, and very precipitously after January 2008. It doesn't feel like we hit the bottom yet. Our national rankings have consistently stayed very high, however. This leads me to believe that what we're experiencing is a national phenomenon, not something specific to our catalog.
Some of the drop has to do with economics, the price of gas and food, increased unemployment and the like. Some of it has to do with the general ups and downs of the bead business. We're definitely in a down cycle. Some of it has to do with the cost of all the parts people use to make jewelry.
During this timeframe, sterling silver has nearly tripled; gold shot up to over $1,000.00 at one point; copper, nickel, and brass have skyrocketed; everything that comes from Europe has almost doubled, because the drop in the value of the dollar relative to the euro. Tough times. We now devote an inordinate amount of staff time increasing prices. This is moreso an issue of the physical store - Be Dazzled Beads - where we have to update thousands and thousands of tray labels.
Shopper volume and average sale have dropped considerably.
The mix of what people want to buy has changed. It seems that the core hobbiest
-- the bead weaver -- is driving the business. They want seed beads, needles,
threads and other stringing materials, books, simple clasps. For about a year
and a half, there was a great interest in wire working, but as the cost of sterling
and gold filled wire shot up, this trend seems to have come to an abrupt halt.
Bead stringers seem to be overloaded with inventory, and have fewer opportunities
to sell their pieces, so we see less and less of them.
I had to reduce our advertising. Could no longer afford it all.
Shipping rates, both UPS and USPS, have gone through the roof. We seem to be upping the rates, a few pennies at a time, at least once a week. We've had to rely more on the US Postal Service, because UPS rates for rural and suburban areas, are unreal. The Postal Service is more unreliable than UPS, however, so we've also had an increase of missing packages -- particularly in the fall of 2007.
I've been reducing the number of items available on-line, and very cautiously adding any new items. I've made a concerted effort to add plated findings and beads with antique copper, gunmetal, and brass oxidized finishes, as well as more low-end Chinese lampwork, dichroic and hand-blown glass beads. I've had to take a major step backwards in my plans to add more gemstone offerings. I've begun updating all our seed bead and delicas offerings.
On a sad note, Rosie and Dottie both died. They both were 17 years old, and had been strongly associated with our shops and operations all their lives. We have two new shop dogs -- Lily and Daisy.
Technical Issues
Product data bases in ProStores online shopping cart system
The integrity of our product databases survived the conversions from Version
2 to 3 and 3 to 4 and 4 to 5 and 5 to 6 and 6 to 7. But not quite 7 to 8. When
Prostores updated from Ver 7 to Ver 8, the databases written for the older version
didn't quite transfer correctly to the newer version. The newer version took
some miscellaneous variables and put them into new columns. These new columns
locked in "choice" data, which can only be deleted one product at
a time. Each deletion requires 5 separate key strokes, done one at a time.
What the customer sees when they order:
In the old version, the ADD TO CART button immediately put the item into the
customer's shopping cart.
In the new version, because our old variables were placed in unfortunate new columns in the product database, with converted product data, when the customer clicks the ADD TO CART button, this pulls up a detailed product description. The customer then has to click on the ADD TO CART button on this second screen, for the product to be added to the shopping cart.
We had to go product by product and re-locate the now-misplaced data variables to the appropriate columns in the database. Since we have over 30,000 products, correcting each one took 1 1/2 years.
[We use a fancy calculator for a cash register in our store. There are 3 brands always available with these "cash registers" -- Royal, Casio and Sony. All these are designed in Japan. For the 20 so years we've been using them, they are only partially usable. Many functions don't approximate the real world. Take the VOID button. If you sell something for $10.00 that is taxable, the sales tax is added, say $0.90. If you void the sale, the register negates the $10.00 merchandise amount, but not the $0.90 sales tax. That amount remains. The on-line shopping cart system seems right out of retail central casting -- technicians make things, but don't test them out in the real world. Hence, .......]
Images, images, images. We continue to add images. It's a slow process, not much fun. Still get lots of complaints when an image is not available at the point where the product description and ADD TO CART button is. Doesn't matter if there's a separate color chart. Customers want to see it with the description.
Prostores, which is the shopping cart system we use, has upgraded their checkout process. We haven't switched, but I'm thinking about it. It simplifies the check-out experience for the customer.
| On April 29, 2003 | On May 3, 2003 | On June 29, 2003 | On Nov 3, 2003 | On Nov 3, 2004 | On 8/17/2005 | On 3/2/2006 | On 7/31/2008 | ||
| # of unique visitors per day | 1950 | 300 | 1250 | 2450 | 3800 | 5000 | 5000 | 4,434 | |
| # of active links that come up on Google | 1550 | 40 | 2190 | 3290 | 7900 | 13200 | 53,200 | 54,200 | |
| % of visits that result in orders | .66 | .77 | .77 | .77 | .78 | .78 | 1.42 | 1.411 | |
| average time spend in catalog | 7 minutes | 10 minutes | 28 minutes | 28 minutes | 32 minutes | 32 minutes | 32 minutes | 16 minutes | |
| google ranking on the keyword "beading supplies" | 18 | indeterminate | 8 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 29 | |
| google ranking on the keyword "bead supplies" | 8 | 5 | 3 | 41 | |||||
| google ranking on the keyword "beads" | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | 48 | not ranked | |
| google ranking on the keyword "clasps" | 4 | 2 | 3 | 5 | |||||
| google ranking on the keyword "jewelry findings" | 6 | 4 | 4 | 16 | |||||
| #
of sites on google search engine that come up with keyword "beads" (was only 250,000 when we began the catalog in 1996) |
9.2 million | 5.4 million | 48.9 million | 56.9 million | |||||
| average order amount | $47.50 | no average computed | $67.00 | $71.00 | $75.00 | $75.00 | $55.72 | $45.19 | |
| orders per day | 12 | 0 | 8 | 12 | 12 | 14 | 18 | 12 | |
| average items per order | 15 | 0 | not determined | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 6 | |
proportion of orders by returning customers
|
not collected | not collected | not collected | not collected | 24% | 28% | 33% | 34% | |
| Ranking.com Rank among all beading sites |
8 | 12 | 3 | ||||||
| Ranking.com Rank among all web sites |
283,121 | 361,205 | 58,979 | ||||||
| Trustgauge.com Level of Trust |
4 out of 10 | 6 out of 10 | 7 out of 10 | ||||||
| Linkstoyou.com Links pointing to us |
1,500 | 4,784 | 2,297 | ||||||
| Linkstoyou.com Link Popularity |
47,367 | 53,606 |
Thanks for being there for us and with us,
Warren and James