Although Anne-Marie Kovacs started the concept for The Succulent Wife 17 years ago, she was getting into something completely new by opening an online version with Volusion’s online storefront in 2005.Kovacs saw the increase in number of online shoppers as an opportunity to expand her business of promoting the work of women artists. When she started thesucculentwife.com, Kovacs featured the works of two artists on her site. Since then, she has featured the works of over 80 different women. The Succulent Wife features an array of unique gifts such as hand-crafted jewelry, beauty and spa items, home accents, stationery, and even men’s and children’s gifts.

Kovacs sought to improve her business by focusing on bringing legitimacy to her site. “You can’t get away with the ‘mom and pop’ look anymore. Sleek is the order of the day”, she says. Rather than trying to improve the style of her site by herself, Kovacs hired Debi McKerchie of www.webtillerdesigns.com to improve the design and usability. “Debi was there from day one and helped adapt all my fancy custom design. I could not have gotten anywhere without her.” McKerchie also implemented Kovacs’s site redesign that was launched just this past month.

How did Kovacs decide on her improved look this season? “I have listened to many webinars and read much on the subject of etailing. From these lessons, the usability of my store has improved bit by bit. The hardest part was letting go of some design elements because they contributed nothing to functionality, or even hindered it. That was the case with my latest homepage redesign.” Kovacs’s store now runs on Volusion’s Version 5.

The Succulent Wife’s latest homepage redesign includes “Shop by” buttons to make finding the perfect gift even easier.

How does Anne-Marie Kovacs prepare each new artist to sell online? “I always preface any discussion with any new artist with ‘the web is not a place where the “build it and they will come” thing happens.’ You’ve got to work at it from all angles, traditional ones included!”

You can see Kovacs’s improved design and holiday gifts at www.thesucculentwife.com.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: E Commerce Designer, Improving Usability, Increase Site Conversions, Online Store Designer, The Succulent Wife, volusion

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Although the holidays are the most lucrative times to own an online store, they can also be the most stressful. Being prepared can mean the difference between making the most of a busy season or deciding to quit the holidays all together.

What can you do to make sure your holiday business plans go well? Take a look at the following checklist:

1.) Plan holiday sales around shipping. Consumers look for free shipping and other shipping promotions. Given the geographic locations you sell to, when must you stop offering these promotions? Will you have to post updates on your site for how many shipping days are left? Coming in with a plan will guarantee that all of your customers get their packages on time.

2.) Make sure your inventory is full, and update your inventory for your online store as well. If you are a Volusion customer, you can actually save time on updating your online inventory by importing stock status via CSV.

3.) Take advantage of the tools that can make your job easier. If you are a Volusion customer, you can integrate your store with StoneEdge Order Manager. You can also print shipping labels from the backend of our software.

4.) Hire outside help to take care of the details. Do you need help gift wrapping or shipping? Perhaps you could go through a temp agency or hire young people in your area.

5.) Take care of your personal Christmas errands sooner than later. This will give you time to dedicate to your business ventures.

Do you have any funny stories about your hectic holidays? Amuse other merchants by posting them in the comments section.

–Michelle Greer
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Christmas Online Store, Ecommerce Holiday, Holiday Business, Plan Holiday Sales, volusion

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By early 2007, Mike Anderson at partycheap.com realized his online store had a problem. His custom built ecommerce solution was not scalable. It was good for about 10-30 orders a day, but could not handle the volume of orders he received at that time.

Mike decided to go with Volusion’s online shopping cart with a very serendipitous result: partycheap.com’s internal product pages were being indexed by Google and other search engines. Customers began to find his holiday-themed party supplies, costumes, and decorations directly on search engine result pages.

As soon as Mike and the staff at PartyCheap realized that Volusion’s shopping cart was improving their search engine results, they decided to capitalize by improving the site’s content. “We had top ten search rankings for some of our key theme party terms on our old site, but only on a couple of category pages. With Volusion, each single product page has the opportunity to get ranked. Once we realized the advantage the Volusion software gave us, we spent a lot of manpower filling out the meta tags and writing unique content for not only categories, but for individual products as well. It’s hard work, but over a three month period our organic search traffic has doubled,” said Anderson.

The term “hard work” is an understatement from Mike Anderson. Mike and the PartyCheap staff used two people full time for two months to fill out metatags and keyword rich product descriptions and category pages for over 6,000 theme party and holiday themed supplies, decorations, and costumes. They also used Volusion’s internal search reports to figure out what customers were searching for and created searchable categories for those as well.

What does Mike think about Volusion’s more css-driven, SEO friendly Version 5? “The upgrade was straightforward and our customers didn’t even notice the difference.”

Currently, Mike and the PartyCheap staff are getting ready for the holidays by increasing their line of holiday and New Years decorations.

Although Volusion’s tools have made their business more scalable, they vow to continue putting in the work it takes to bring in traffic and close sales. What advice does Mike have to offer other merchants? “Running an eCommerce storefront is a never-ending job. Anyone who thinks they can just open up an online store and expect money to pour in is going to be disappointed. Focus on small fundamentals, product selection, vendor costs, marketing ROI, and transaction costs. The advantage that Volusion gives us is that they take care of the technology and we can focus on our specific industry.”

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

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Volusion Customer Care Representative Kate Polito did know that her company offered the best all-in-one shopping cart solution on the market. What she didn’t know is that it could burst with so much cheddar cheese flavor.

“I noticed that all of my Cheetos that day were broken into smaller pieces. I was a bit disappointed, but not really surprised as it was the last snack bag from the box. But I noticed that there was one perfectly intact one right in the middle. I pulled it out and instantly knew I was working in a great place,” said Polito.

Polito decided to preserve the Cheeto on a Post-It note on her desk. “I would have liked to have eaten it, but that just wouldn’t be right. It’s one thing to get an unbroken Cheeto. It’s another thing when that Cheeto represents your company and the people that work for it. It’s a source of pride.”

Other online companies have attempted to duplicate the snack-as-branding phenomenon with little success. eBay CEO Meg Whitman tried to muster support around the eBay Gardetto Pack, which was ultimately thwarted by the online community due to high listing fees. Yahoo’s Jerry Yang gained some traction with the Yahoo Funion complete with ad space for potential bidders, but the Funion’s shape and limited size ultimately left it too vulnerable to Sergey Brin’s widely popular Google Pringle pack. Steve Jobs offered Polito $50,000 to rebrand the Cheeto before it was released to the public, but Polito decided she had other plans.

“In the end, when you find a Cheeto that looks exactly like your logo, you just have to hold on to it. There are just some things money can’t buy.”

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Cheeto, Ecommerce, Kate Polito, online shopping cart, sell online, volusion

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Selling an item in person is a lot easier than selling an item online. If a customer walks into your store, he or she can gauge the size and usefulness of your product in person. That customer can also weigh how much they trust you by getting to know you and your store.

If you are selling online, you must create pages that allow your customers to “see, feel and use” your products while sitting at their computer. What information does a customer not have because they cannot see your product in person? You can’t guarantee that your customer will contact you with questions, so it is important to use your product descriptions to answer anything he or she would need to know when viewing your products.

Here are just some of the questions you can effectively answer with product descriptions:

1.) What are the exact dimensions of this product? You might assume your customer knows how big your items are, but unless you have pictures that put them into proportion (like a picture next to a coin or another item that people are familiar with), you are leaving them in the dark. Take the time to take measurements of your products and include these dimensions in your descriptions.

2.) How is your product different or better than those of the competition? Does it have more features? What are these features? Is it the same product for less money?

3.) How and when can your product be used?

4.) What is your product made of? How does this differ from other similar products?

5.) Are there any specific user instructions?

6.) Is there a warranty or guarantee on this product?

The questions your customers ask obviously varies according to your industry. Keeping track of the questions that people call and ask you is good practice. If two people call you with the same question, chances are there are many more who asked the same question while looking at that item but chose to go to another site for answers. Rather than squander these sales, use your product descriptions to keep these customers on your site.

Not sure how to change your product descriptions? Learn how by watching this video on writing product descriptions, and allow this text to be searchable by following this knowledge base article on including your ecommerce writing in your internal search. You can also learn to improve your website conversion by taking effective product photos.
–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Ecommerce Writing, Improve Conversion, volusion, Website Conversion, Writing Product Descriptions

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