LAND OF
ODDS - The South's Most Unusual
Shop
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:
The last several months have been an adventure, to say the least!
April 29th, 2003, was the last day the old version of the catalog was on-line. On May 1st, we implemented a completely new catalog, new shopping cart system, new server and new website address. Things did not go smoothly. In fact, by May 3, it became clear, almost in a funny-hysterical way, just how much the on-line catalog was merely an illusion, something very real in our minds, but technically could disappear -- POOF!
Some stats:
| On April 29, 2003 | On May 3, 2003 | On June 29, 2003 | On Nov 3, 2003 | |
| # of unique visitors per day | 1950 | 300 | 1250 | 2450 |
| # of active links that come up on Google | 1550 | 40 | 2190 | 3290 |
| % of visits that result in orders | .66 | .77 | .77 | .77 |
| average time spend in catalog | 7 minutes | 10 minutes | 28 minutes | 28 minutes |
| google ranking on the keyword "beading supplies" | 18 | indeterminate | 8 | 3 |
| average order amount | $47.50 | no average computed | $67.00 | $71.00 |
| orders per day | 12 | 0 | 8 | 12 |
| average items per order | 15 | 0 | not determined | 10 |
On May 1:
People could not find us. This lasted a week for some people, and up to two weeks
for AOL customers. The change in our actual web address (not the "www.landofodds.com"
name given to that address), and our renaming of our HTML pages to fit the new
system, made us lost in space.
As people using Google and other search engines clicked on links to our old site that came up in their searches, and got page-not-found-errors, the search engines dropped these links from their databases. In directories and on various web-sites, people were linking to old catalog pages that didn't exist and got page-not-found errors. On people's computers, their cache memory, automatically brought up copies of our old web-pages. When people clicked on links on these pages, it took them nowhere. Internet Service Providers also rely on cache memory to direct people to pages, and this takes awhile -- particularly on AOL -- to get updated. We were invisible.
It became clear pretty fast that, in many respects, we would be starting from scratch. With our listings on search engines disappearing rapidly, and very prominent search engine keyword rankings based on 7 years of catalog operations going by the wayside -- we needed to do something. Those rankings are obviously very key to our visibility and success.
First, we linked up with almost 400 web-rings to bring customers back to the web-site. Besides the obvious bead, jewelry and craft rings, we linked up to fishing rings which used beads to make lures; wedding planner rings which used glass pearls; new age rings which liked our Meditation Center; odd and weird rings which enjoyed our Ugly Necklace Contest; sports rings which needed our sterling silver sports charms and our ceramic sports ball beads; anything we could interrelate. This strategy proved phenomenally successful.
Then I reloaded our old catalog and made the address structure conform to the old catalog structure, so that search engines and directories and personal websites that maintained links to the old pages could find them again. Each of the 2000+ old pages were redesigned to mirror our new front door page. All the links bring people into the new catalog. Our first sentence of text, and the link-text for 12-20 URL links to other old catalog pages, were changed on each of these 2000+ old pages. This gave us a huge amount of indexable keywords, and made each of these old pages appear sufficiently different from each other, that they wouldn't be dropped by the search engines. This proved successful. A few of these old pages are in our current most visited list. And the search engines picked up on all this additional indexing. We were getting re-ranked very quickly.
Approaching June and July:
In May we were announcing the 10 semi-finalists of The
Ugly Necklace Contest, and inviting people to vote on-line for the winner. We
very broadly sent press
releases to newsgroups, forums, jewelry artists, magazines, newspapers, press
wires. This brought many visitors. We picked the winner in July, and also broadly
sent press releases.
We were beginning a new contest -- All Dolled Up: Beaded Art Doll Competition to start in September. We moved up the marketing for that to June and July. We broadly sent press releases out. We also sent notices to individual bead artists, doll artists, and mixed media artists. Many doll, bead and craft magazines picked up the announcements, and this also brought a lot of traffic.
We expanded our Google ad words campaign. Very effective.
We didn't have too many design issues pop up. In the new catalog, the customer has to pre-register in order to shop, and it takes hitting one additional submit button in order to send your order to us. Many of our old customers got confused here. In the new catalog, the customer needs to do one set of steps as a New Customer, and a different set of steps as a Returning Customer. People were confused here. In our new catalog, it's use of Cookies is very sophisticated, and for people to successfully shop, they have to have Cookies enabled and have to use one of the new versions of the various browsers. Some people were having problems putting items in their shopping baskets, and it took us a long time to figure out the these were the problems, because we couldn't duplicate their problems on our own machines. But we figured it out. In response, we added more instructions to form pages, strategically located them on each screen, and this seems to have worked.
We had had to rebuild our product database from scratch, and there were the inevitable typos -- wrong code numbers, wrong manufacturer codes, wrong descriptions. Most errors came up quickly, and with our new system, were very easy to correct.
Now in November, 2003:
The new catalog is generating an additional
$500-600 of sales per week. The system allows us to more easily update prices.
This has been very critical because the costs of glass beads in particular
have been rising dramatically this year. Under the old catalog, it was so cumbersome
to raise prices, that we rarely did. So with this new catalog, our profit margins
are much improved as well.
The new catalog system, because of its design and ease of use, made it easier for us to provide a much deeper, more expanded, and more sincere level of customer service. Under the old catalogy system, getting at information needed to respond to customer inquiries was so difficult, that we provided little extra service, and didn't even bother to create an illusion that we would provide customer service. With the new system, we set broad goals for customer service, and instituted many procedures.
Since the changeover, there is still a lot of variance in the numbers of orders each day. Before the change, this number was very consistent. Consistency makes it easier to plan and acquire the neccessary inventory with which to fill orders.
Our suppliers, as usual, continue to disappoint. The level of errors they make in sending us the wrong merchandise has increased dramatically. I think our education system, no matter where you are, turns out functionally illiterate students, and even in a warehouse type job where they have to read a code and find the merchandise with that code, this is a task they cannot complete. They were never taught the skills in how to do this.
Our email volume is now running 500+ a day. Most is spam, but we still have to go through it.
We've spent a lot of time improving how we warehouse our inventory, with better labeling, and greater distinctions made between items. This has improved our productivity alot, and helped reduce our error levels.
With the new catalog, we added a lot more items. One negative result is that our turn-around time has slowed down again, because we have more items we have to secure from the distributors after we receive the order. As our in-house inventory increases again, this problem should work itself out.
We implemented many more restrictions on returns, and instituted a 25% restocking fee. We had too many customers ordering hundreds of dollars and returning everything, or customers who had us special order things for them, only to return them. It takes just as long to reverse an order as it does to process it originally. Also, when something is sold, it gets re-ordered, so when things are returned, the inventory stock for those items exceeds the budgeting for it. Most of our own suppliers charge restocking fees, and we felt too many customers abused their shopping privilege with us, so we followed suit with a restocking fee of our own.
Most of our attention in 2004 will be on re-editing the catalog, and adding or updating many more images and color charts.
Thanks for being there for us and with us,
Warren and James