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:
Catalog sales in 2005 increased 30% over 2004. In the first quarter of 2006, catalog sales were 44% over those in 2005. We hit a few more "memory-limits" issues again, and hope that our shopping cart system can continue to service our volume.
Keeping up with technology improvements to e-commerce and web-site design is one of the major challenges today. As new bead and craft websites come on-line with the current state of the art designs, we need to keep ours looking fresh.
The major issue for us, and one that has to be solved very quickly, is that there are not enough images for all the products. When we began 11 years ago, if you put more than two small images on a web-page, the viewer's computers ran the risk of locking up. So we began with few images. Also, the scanners way back when didn't always take very clear pictures. Some images were OK, but many were grainy.
As the computer systems improved, we added images, but usually placed these in special COLOR CHARTS. Today, people expect to see clear images alongside each product description. While we have almost 75,000 images associated with our website, many are not side-by-side with the product descriptions at the point where the ORDER button is. Several product lines -- for example, virtually all the gemstone bead offerings -- do not have any images.
During the past year, we've added a considerable number of images. Of course, this has the effect of slowing the catalog, and overwhelming sections of memory storage. But customers expect these images at point of sale, and expect a certain quality of image.
Mostly due to the failed economic, social and military strategies of the Bush administration, most of the items we sell have undergone extreme price increases. Virtually everything we sell comes from abroad. The value of the US dollar relative to the currency in other countries has deteriorated. This is especially true for anything that comes from Europe, like Czech glass (about 25-30% a year for the past 3 years). Things from Japan have increased in price (about 30% overall).There haven't been much increases from items made in China or India.
The price of precious metals have increased tremendously. Usually rich people put their money in metals when they think we're on the verge of World War III. Sterling has increased about 65% in the past year. Gold is skirting $600/ounce. In general, anything made with sterling has increased in price about 20%. Anything made with gold -- including the costume findings that are gold-plated -- have increased between 25-45%.
Shipping costs are going through the roof. Since 1/1/06, UPS has raised rates at least once a week, adjusting them for increases in fuel costs. Both UPS and the US Postal Service have been tightening their rate structures. They've tightened how soon a change in weight triggers the next price rate step. They've tightened how soon a change in the size of the box triggers the next price rate step. They've increased the cost of insurance, and the costs of various add-on services.
We've raised our prices on-line. Since the customers will be presented with some major, noticeable increases, we're not sure how this will affect orders. Not all businesses will be updating their prices at the same time. People have expectations for how expensive things should be, and the price increases are so large, that there can't help but be a lot of cognitive dissonance -- hence customer resistance and frustration.
We continue to run ads in bead-related magazines, and these seem to have the greatest impact in the number of customers we are getting. Our customer registrations are increasing by about 100 every 4-5 days. The Ugly Necklace Contest also continues to have a big impact, and the 2006 contest has been are most successful ever.
One of our next big projects is to turn the educational program at Be Dazzled into streaming videos for sale. We want to sell each class as a series of lessons. If a customer purchased the full series of lessons for any one class, the cost to them would be competitive with buying a book. In addition, they could buy kits, books and instructions associated with any class. We hope to be operational by the beginning of 2008.
| 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 | |
| # of unique visitors per day | 1950 | 300 | 1250 | 2450 | 3800 | 5000 | 5000 |
| # of active links that come up on Google | 1550 | 40 | 2190 | 3290 | 7900 | 13200 | 53,200 |
| % of visits that result in orders | .66 | .77 | .77 | .77 | .78 | .78 | 1.42 |
| average time spend in catalog | 7 minutes | 10 minutes | 28 minutes | 28 minutes | 32 minutes | 32 minutes | 32 minutes |
| google ranking on the keyword "beading supplies" | 18 | indeterminate | 8 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
| google ranking on the keyword "bead supplies" | 8 | 5 | 3 | ||||
| google ranking on the keyword "beads" | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | 48 |
| google ranking on the keyword "clasps" | 4 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| google ranking on the keyword "jewelry findings" | 6 | 4 | 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 | 48.9 million | ||||
| average order amount | $47.50 | no average computed | $67.00 | $71.00 | $75.00 | $75.00 | $55.72 |
| orders per day | 12 | 0 | 8 | 12 | 12 | 14 | 18 |
| average items per order | 15 | 0 | not determined | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
proportion of orders by returning customers
|
not collected | not collected | not collected | not collected | 24% | 28% | 33% |
| Ranking.com Rank among all beading sites |
8 | 12 | |||||
| Ranking.com Rank among all web sites |
283,121 | 361,205 | |||||
| Trustgauge.com Level of Trust |
4 out of 10 | 6 out of 10 | |||||
| Linkstoyou.com Links pointing to us |
1,500 | 4,784 | |||||
| Linkstoyou.com Link Popularity |
47,367 |
Our priorities for 2006:
1. Images, images, images
2. Round off our
selection of glass beads
3. Re-do and expand our selection of gemstone and pearl beads
4. Create
educational streaming videos
Thanks for being there for us and with us,
Warren and James