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:
Occasionally, when you're a very small business, you get the feeling that you don't stand a chance. You think only big businesses can make it. Suppliers, banks, and credit card companies are always there to meet big business' needs. These big businesses always have a lot of cash in the bank, or at least enough of it, to pave over the times when any kind of glitch might set them back. Lately, this is how I've been feeling -- very, very small.
We had two glitches come up this summer which have nearly wiped us out. At least, temporarily.
The first: the catalog crashed yet again. This seems to happen about every 2 years. This time, the issue has to do with Java script and password encryption. Our e-commerce system used a Java language script to encrypt passwords. These passwords are used by customers to place their orders and keep their credit card information secure. These passwords are also used by staff to get access to customer orders, and the other systems within the e-commerce package. Sun Microsystems sunset-ed this particular encryption script effective 7/27/05. They indicated that there was no new version of this script to evolve to. They indicated that they would not provide any technical assistance for this script after this date. A completely new encryption script had been developed to replace the old one. And on 7/27/05, our catalog came to a sudden, abrupt, unexpected, not desired halt.
Our e-commerce system was Version 1.1.1, and had not been updated in the 3 years we had been using it. The current system was at version 5.8.0, which was about 8 updates above ours. Version 1.1.1 could not run the current Java encryption script system. To upgrade to 5.8.0, which could run this script, we would have to upgrade from version "a" to "b", then "b" to "c", then "c" to "d" and on up to "f" to "g". You cannot go from "a" to "g". The company that developed the e-commerce package no longer had the upgrade software to go from "a" to "b". Moreover, in the 3 years we were using this system, this company had been taken over by Ebay, and we initially had some concerns that they no longer supported our e-commerce system.
Over 5 days, this company patch-worked the upgrades from "a" to "c", and tested the system out. Then they went all the way up to "g". The new system required some equipment changes, some additional operating system changes, and some spot-testing. And it worked. But we had lost a week's worth of orders, and dropped a 1,000 unique visitors a day. The changes made us somewhat invisible again because we had to change servers. Our search engine rankings dropped about 12% in just this short period of time.
As a small (really very small) business, we basically live day to day, like most people live paycheck to paycheck. The week the system crashed was the week our rent was due and the UPS shipment charges had to be payed for. Over the following three weeks, the system crashed twice more. The first crash related to the file-naming structure of the old system vs. what the new system was designed to recognize. The second crash related to updating the SSL certificate, and errors made in adapting it to what we had now.
The second glitch: Shortly after our crash, we had a busy week of on-line
sales. One of the sales was for a large order with a bill of around $1300.00.
Our credit card processor flagged this as a suspicious transaction.It wasn't,
but it was understandable how it could be flagged. They required that we provide
detailed billing information associated with this particular credit card. We
did. It was not correct, however. The credit card was a business card, and was
in the name of another employee. Our credit card processor decided to halt any
payments to us for any credit card transaction for an entire week.
I watched helplessly as our bank accounts diminished to $0.00, and then below that. We have a lot of automatic deductions on our accounts -- taxes, advertising, shipping, inventory. After two weeks, the credit card company released all our money all at once -- about $10,000 -- including payment for the transaction in question.
I'm not a big supporter of banks. I like the people who work in them. I just don't like the banking system. They have too much power and control over people's money, and they are allowed to charge unreasonable fees and penalties without consequence. Except there are a lot of consequences to those of us who aren't among the jet-yacht-mink set. Our politicians are afraid of regulating the banks, so they allow them to do things that not that long ago were deemed immoral, unethical, unjust and illegal.
In this case, a credit card processing company (a bank) was able to hold up all the money from all our sales for a week or so when they only had a question about 1 transaction. They did not prewarn us that this would happen, nor keep us abreast of what was happening.
I definitely can't cover that loss of cash flow. So we had late penalties on payroll taxes due, overdrawn bank accounts, late penalties on various vendor payments, and major worry about meeting staff payroll, and the like.
On-line e-commerce has a real adrenaline rush to it. You bring a lot of creative design and marketing and retail skills to bear, and you get a great response in the form of orders, the volume of orders, the size of orders, and the frequency of orders. But as your operations grow, the cost of any glitch grows with them.
Our on-line catalog is very successful. But there's a relentness push about it as well. It puts unpredictable demands on you every single day. It doesn't stop. You can't take a break. You can't easily anticipate what's going to come at you day to day. When things go wrong, you need to bring a wide-skill set to the situation. When our catalog crashed, we had to involve our staff in Nashville, TN, the hosting technical staff in Allentown, PA, the e-commerce system staff in southern California, and at one point the Sun Microsystems technical support in northern California. For one point in this process, we involved technical support at a firm in North Carolina. We had to coordinate quickly, get on the same page, learn to speak the same language, and test each iteration.
The crash resulted in a tremendous loss of ranking and visibility. Based on what happened 2 years ago, I was especially prepared to deal with this, and I did. But you're always confronted with the tenuousness of your on-line presence. It feels so real each day, but in an instant, you're gone.
| On April 29, 2003 | On May 3, 2003 | On June 29, 2003 | On Nov 3, 2003 | On Nov 3, 2004 | On 8/17/2005 | ||
| # of unique visitors per day | 1950 | 300 | 1250 | 2450 | 3800 | 5000 | |
| # of active links that come up on Google | 1550 | 40 | 2190 | 3290 | 7900 | 13200 | |
| % of visits that result in orders | .66 | .77 | .77 | .77 | .78 | .78 | |
| average time spend in catalog | 7 minutes | 10 minutes | 28 minutes | 28 minutes | 32 minutes | 32 minutes | |
| google ranking on the keyword "beading supplies" | 18 | indeterminate | 8 | 3 | 4 | 3 | |
| google ranking on the keyword "bead supplies" | 8 | 5 | |||||
| google ranking on the keyword "beads" | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | |
| google ranking on the keyword "clasps" | 4 | 2 | |||||
| google ranking on the keyword "jewelry findings" | 6 | 4 | |||||
| # 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 | |||||
| average order amount | $47.50 | no average computed | $67.00 | $71.00 | $75.00 | $75.00 | |
| orders per day | 12 | 0 | 8 | 12 | 12 | 14 | |
| average items per order | 15 | 0 | not determined | 10 | 10 | 10 | |
proportion of orders by returning customers
|
not collected | not collected | not collected | not collected | 24% | 28% |
Most of our attention in 2005-2006 will be on re-editing the catalog, and adding or updating many more images and color charts. We began this in 2004, but didn't get as far with this as we'd like.
We are focusing more on Glass Beads and on Jewelry Findings, and less on other product lines. These are our strongest areas, and ones where we can offer the best prices and selection.
Thanks for being there for us and with us,
Warren and James