Savvy Shopping 'n More Blog July Archive

Chockolot Chocolate

Your name?

Suzi Houchin

Your Location (city, etc)

Aurora

What inspired you to launch your own website?

My sister and deceided to start some online stores, for extra money for her full time business for me. We now have nine websites.

When did you launch your first website, and what was it?

Febuary of 2006 and it a lawn and garden site. My sister loves to garden so we went with one first. Our moto is Beauitfying back yards one at a time! Our first site is http://www.whirlygigsgardengadgets.com

How did you decide on a name for your website?

We wanted something catchy that kind of told what we sell so deceided on Whirlygigs Garden Gadgets.

Please give us a short summary of your website?

Well like our name says we offer items for lawn and gardens from Solar lights, Teak, Oak and Cedar patio furniture. Wind chimes, birdbaths, whirligigs and garden carts, garden pond equipment and supplies or yard and garden decor(statues, fountains, feeders, and wind spinners, hammocks, garden benches,patio torches, garden bridges, sun dials ) and more. We offer a sellection of each.

What makes it different from other, similar offerings?

Well we think we are a little unique. We wanted it to look professional, but also to let people know that they were dealing with a real person or persons also by giving a history of the products and good descriptions of items. And just having fun doing it!

What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)

We want to keep it for income. Unless someone comes along offers us a good profit on it. I use to be married to a use car dealer and I learned most everything for sell if the price is right.

How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?

It doesn't, but I am a success because I have learned.To build websites and do all that goes with having an online business. We have a way to go befor we are in the black with all of our sites, but oh what adventure it has been. If someone had tolded me a few years ago that I would being doing this, I would have told them they are nuts, all I new how to do was email. So I have come a long way!

If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?

All I would do is pay someone to make sure we were # One on all the top search engines.

If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?

I like to think we could but, if not then we would hire some help.

What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?

Not knowing everything we need to start up our business and being scam ed a couple of times.

What has been your biggest challenge?

Finding good quality products to resale at reasonable prices.

What method has been most successful for promoting your website?

Our ads and linking.

How has running your website differed from your expectations?

Oh like everyone else you think you are going to start out with tons of vistors and buyers the first time you go live.

How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?

Maybe a year or less, we have been thinging about combining a couple of our sites into one.

What is your website address?

Chockolot Chocolate

Urad/Leathermate - Award Winning Leather Care

Your name?

Sean

Your Location (city, etc)

Sydney

When did you start your website and why?

About 3 years ago. I had been using the Urad and Leather Mate products for about 15 years and absolutely loved them. I had an opportunity to get involved with the sales and marketing of the product in Canada. I realized there was enormous demand all over the world and used my knowledge of web design and marketing to get a comprehensive website established to answer product questions and supply Urad and Leather Mate to interested customers.

Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc

The model was quite simple. Attempt to duplicate the marketing methods we used in department stores, exhibitions and markets and fairs in the 2 dimensional world of the internet. All images, text, FAQs and other information is based on the exact methods and patters we use in live one-on-one sales presentations.

What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?

Keeping up with the continually changing search engine criteria. Something that works well for search engine ranking one day suddenly doesn't the next day. A close second is setting up cost-effective delivery internationally.

What has been the easist part of operating your website?

Receiving enough business to make all of our efforts worthwhile. This has occurred almost from day one. We are lucky that the website is centered around a very well known and popular leather care product line.

What was your biggest mistake?

Doing wholesale changes on the website and related marketing actions to "improve" the look of the site and its search engine rankings. Some of these backfired and resulted in a severe drop in business. We should have done a bit more research to find out how these changes might effect things. For example, paying for a service that suddenly increases your inbound links can actually depress your search engine rankings, not improve them! The search engines want to see steady regular increase, not an overnight jump of 2,000 inbound links.

Who maintains your website and why?

I maintain it. Mainly because I am the most familiar with the product and undestand what our consumers are looking for.

Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?

Apart from the obvious income generated from the website, there is the factor of increased customer confidence. Businesses that have an established website are more likely to be legitimate operations.

What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?

The internet will never completely replace actual stores and shops, but it will become a major income line for most retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers.

What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Do your research but don't just listen to what the "experts" have to say. Maintain your own detailed stat tracking programs (such as that offered by http://www.statcounter.com) and watch closely the effect certain optimization changes have on your stats. If things improve, reinforce what you did. If they get worse (that is to say less traffic to your site) then get the changes off the lines and revert back to what you had before. Make sure you keep backups of all live pages before you change them so you can easily change back if needed.

What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?

Probably a bit of both, but more in the direction of helping the website than not.

What method has been most successful for promoting your website?

Believe it or not, google adwords has been very successful. However, they have become a bit more costly and a bit more bureaucratic. Even so, they are still cost effective. The other has been locating and the top free classified ad sites in the world and getting product listings on them.

What method has been least successful for promoting your website?

"Guaranteed Traffic" services where they guarantee a large number of visitors to your site for very low cost. From all indications these have never produced anything.

What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?

An easy way to weed out sites that have no real value but dominate the search results for certain categories.

What is the best way to get your website designed?

Don't pay a lot of money to a professional company (unless you have plenty to spare), but at the same time don't try to do it yourself from scratch. Instead search the internet for companies selling website templates. Find one you like and buy it. From there it is quite easy to edit and modify to fit your needs. A good one should cost any more than a couple of hundred dollars at the most.

What is your website address?

Urad/Leathermate - Award Winning Leather Care

www.sonicgift.cn

Your name?

Amy

Your Location (city, etc)

Foshan

When did you start your website and why?

we started our website from 2005, it is our company's website

Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc

http://www.sonicgift.cn our website is regarding to promotion gift products including key rings, silicone wristbands, lapel pins, etc.

What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?

The most difficult part of creating and running our website at present is: to brining more visitoers to our website, and make them know what we can offer and help them for their business

What was your biggest mistake?

U.S.A., EURO

What is your website address?

www.sonicgift.cn

Suburban Sky Shopping

Your name?

LeRoy Azeltine

Your Location (city, etc)

Overland Park, KS

When did you start your website and why?

Started website 6 months ago I love to buy and sell sports collectables and 100,000 other item. The site name SuburbSkyShopping.com eludes to shopping in your own backyard in the comfort of your own home. I felt there was a need for a site that had almost everything a shopping mall would have without going out to mall setting. I am sure you have heard of some of the latest incidence that have happened in Malls. I have found that many people agree with me and are using my site well above my expectations. Thank you!

Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc

What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?

I really can't say, all of the components of putting togehter such a large website goes hand in hand and it has been an enjoyable eperience

Who maintains your website and why?

I maintain SuburbanSky shopping because I enjoy it.

What is your website address?

Suburban Sky Shopping

JoieShop

Your name?

Jason

Your Location (city, etc)

Montreal

Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc

Joie Shop it the ultimate shop that carries unique products designed for reliable function, great value and a flair for life,

Who maintains your website and why?

A team of highly trained professionals

What is your website address?

JoieShop

Live plants first and foremost act as air filters. Placed near you or near office machines like copiers, fax machines, printers, they can reduce some of the pollution in your office air. They are soothing and nice to look at. Make sure to keep the leaves clean since their ability to filter will be reduced if they are coated with a layer of dust!

Live plants will make you [404 Check: was link to http:/ / myvsa. org/ analisegaray/ 2007/ 07/ 16/ how -to -be -healthier -and -happier -at -work/ , anchor: happier and healthier] at work!

Christmas vacation came and the dorm staff handed out long lists of chores that needed to be done including that the mini fridges needed to be defrosted. So my friend and I split the list in half to get it done quicker. This is where the assumption that she had some decent common sense failed me. I left for our month of Christmas Vacation thinking that she completed her half of the list without any problems.

Well when we returned we opened the door to a smell that still haunts me to this day. Immediately we went to the mini fridge and opened it to find all of the food that was in it before break, exept most of it was an off green color and was seriously producing some sort of fumes. At this moment my friend said to me, "Well the list didn't say we had to take the food out, it just said to defrost it!" At that moment I was at a complete loss for words and from that moment on I could never trust my roomate to complete any of the before break cleaning tasks.

Moral of the story: Never leave your blonde friend alone with a mini fridge.

Sterling & Burke Ltd.

Your name?

Classic Luggage

Your Location (city, etc)

Washington

Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc

We at Sterling & Burke are purveyors of a large variety of luxury luggage and travegoods by some of the finest leather manufacturers in the world. Offering Swaine Adeney Brigg, Papworth, Mulholland Brothers, French Luggage, Schlesinger Leather Goods, Jack Georges Leather ...elegant leather luggage, hardsided trunk cases, executive gifts, custom corporate luggage and business cases, traditional British attache cases, suitcases and umbrellas.

What is your website address?

Sterling & Burke Ltd.

Quality Gemstones

Your name?

Trudy Mackenzie

Your Location (city, etc)

Sapphire

When did you start your website and why?

I built this website two weeks ago, I already have a website that sells gemstone rough(uncut) but wanted somewhere to list the higher quality cut gemstones and gemstone rings.

Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc

I really did above, but we have expanded our gemstone range so much, that having gemstones selling for $50 and $15000 on the same website wasn't working, this new website has already had two good sales, so it was worth the effort of building the site.

What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?

The most differicult part of creating the website is all the SEO work that must be done in order to get the website ranking well in search engines.

What has been the easist part of operating your website?

Making the site itself, since it's run by database, we just took a copy of the old site, removed all the cheaper gems, changed the look of the site, and the site was there. All up, the site took only about 24 hours to create. Full created to our webdesigners, I just mentioned it, and the next day it was done.

What was your biggest mistake?

Grouping out jewellery into price ranges, people like to choose what they want, and not think about the price.

Who maintains your website and why?

Our webdesigners CanzDesign will do things like making new webpages, and changes to the actual look to the website, simply because they know what they are doing, and they do a wonderful job, we'll update the gems and jewellery for sale, adding new products and making sure the site is up-to-date, Canz made sure we could do that easily.

Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?

Oh, there isn't enough room here to say how our websites have benefited our business, but generally we live near a very small mining town, and their's no way we could reach our clients that come from all over the world, at least half of our sales are to Americans, the only other way to sell to them is through ebay, but people buying on ebay only want cheap stuff, not the quality gems we sell.

What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?

For people like us, that live out the back of beyond e-commerse websites are the only way we could reach our clients, even the ones that live in Australia. Sure we could go to the Sydney Markets, but the expense of going there, and the limited market we would still have, when you think the website costs $10 a month for hosting, and it open 24/7 you just can't beat it.

What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Lynny from Canz Design does our SEO for us, I helped at the start with looking for link exchanges, but what she did worked much better,on our first website before meeting Lynny we'd get about 150-300 visitors a month, and had no sales at all, last month we had over 7500 unique visitors, and plenty of sales.

What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?

Oh, Search Engines have definately helped our website, we'd still only be making a little money at the local markets unless the search engines weren't listing our website so well.

What method has been most successful for promoting your website?

The SEO lynny did did has been the most effective for promoting our website. She even let's us use her email address to post to places like this so we don't have to worry about spam.

What method has been least successful for promoting your website?

Advertising in our local paper

What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?

Nothing, I'm quite happy the way the internet works for me, perhaps yes definately less spam would be good.

Where will this be posted?

I don't know, but I am going to find out, and see if I can find anything else to comment on, or at least read what other people have posted.

What is your website address?

Quality Gemstones

Baby Britain Boutique

Your name?

Elizabeth Stedman

Your Location (city, etc)

Palatine

When did you start your website and why?

I started it a couple months ago. I decided to sell stuff online because I always enjoyed making bath and body products that my friends and family like so I figured why not offer them to a wider audience

Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc

Well its built using Oscommerce, with a Mysql database and apache/php.

What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?

probably installing the SSL certifacte and of course optimizing it for search engines i.e. page titles, search engine friendly URL's, sitemap etc.

What has been the easist part of operating your website?

working with mediatemple (the hosting company) they are great

What was your biggest mistake?

Initially it was hosted by another company (infinology), they were terrible.

Who maintains your website and why?

Mysefl and My boyfriend. Because hes a nerd

Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?

well my products are now available to the entire country 24 hours a day 7 days a week. So now I make more money.

What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?

I think it is the future for just about every business and it cant be stopped

What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Its time consuming and a bit of a gamble as to how you want to approach it since nobody knows the algorithm

What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?

definitely helped but I wish spiders crawled more frequently and thoroughly .

What method has been most successful for promoting your website?

using apaches mod_rewrite to create page titles

What method has been least successful for promoting your website?

listening to other people that think they know what there talking about.

What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?

More relevant search results with less emphasis on pagerank

Did I answer all these questions truthfully ?

Yes

What is your website address?

Baby Britain Boutique