Dennis Altman refused to spend $3000 and wait nine weeks to get the electronic air suspension on his Range Rover fixed at the dealership. “I hung up still laughing, when I settled down I hit Google and started learning. I’ve worked on cars since I was 14, my 7 years in the US Navy I trained and worked as a pneumatic and hydraulics mechanic on nuclear powered submarines so I knew I could tackle this problem.

Within a few days of serious digging I had found almost everything I needed to repair it for about $400. I had the suspension running in an afternoon,” said Dennis.

Dennis quickly realized that there was a market out there for Range Rover parts, since the dealers took so long and charged so much. ” I did a little brain-storming with my wife and friends, my wife made up a logo and I bought enough orings to put a 10 oring kits on eBay for $12. each in Jan ‘06. I figured if they sold by the end of the month I would be happy, and have some beer money. They sold out in less than a week and I’ve been growing since.”

Rover-Renovations started on eBay, but Dennis found that eBay was not scalable to his operations. “EBay was good for low volume, but more than 3-5 orders/day was killing me, it took 10 minutes to process an order and print shipping labels. I think recently eBay has gone downhill, kind of like a good antique market that has let in junk-sellers and the good dealers stop coming. I keep a few things listed there just to drive traffic to my store, I get maybe one order/month through eBay and I dread the email. I have few ‘problem’ customers and 90% of them purchase through eBay.”

After trying out a Yahoo store, Dennis used Volusion’s Yahoo Import tool to quickly switch his entire store to Volusion’s platform. “My Ystore import was almost 2 years ago, so I don’t remember much of the import other than I was amazed at how fast it was. I only had to setup my categories and payment settings (I already had my merchant account), do some smoothing and transfer my DNS settings.”

Since switching to Volusion, Dennis now gets 51% of his traffic from natural search results. “Volusion has helped my marketing immensely by saving me the time of worrying about SEO, it just happens automatically. I don’t have to constantly comb over my site for improvements,” said Dennis.

Dennis has big plans for www.rover-renovations.com. “I plan on leaving the day job in the next 6 months (several outside factors are going into the exact date) and going full time at running Rover Renovations. I am constantly adding to my product-line with a goal of being THE place to go for all things Range Rover. It is a small niche, and I want to own it.”

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

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Kyle Hungate at Hungate Business Services decided it was time to stop relying on the phone and purchase orders and time to bring his business online.Initially, Kyle just wanted to use the internet to take orders. He had no intention of pushing his business online. “Going online for us was more to capture receivables from our existing client base faster using Volusion’s shopping cart software in conjunction with accepting credit cards. When customers ordered supplies from us before using traditional methods i.e. check, it wasn’t uncommon for us to wait over 45 days to get paid. We chose

Volusion over other shopping carts on the market because of the simplicity to setup the store—none of our staff had any real web experience. We evaluated other carts but without question Volusion was the easiest to evaluate and the step by step ‘how to’ movies were invaluable,” said Kyle.

Kyle got some unexpected results from using Volusion to open his online store. “We never planned really to sell beyond our client base initially! We thought we would just tell our clients about the site and try to solve our problem with account receivables–we estimate that 60% of our sales so far have been clients outside our normal customer base.”

Kyle turned to Volusion’s design team to make his site, www.hbsx.com, look professional. “Communication and the experience with the design services was top notch, Yuri did a wonderful job. I sketched out what I thought would be a good storefront and he expanded it to make it functional and very appealing to the visitor,” said Kyle.

Hungate Business Services has big plans for the online space. “Our plans going forward are to grow and expand our online offerings to our clients as much as we can. We have seen the power of the online business and it’s definitely more of a focal point for us now. We hope in the very near future we can dedicate a team to serve our online community just as we have for our brick and mortar operations.”

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

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Although the two took their first scuba lesson by accident, Phil Ellis and his son Brad quickly fell in love with scuba diving. “As soon as I went underwater for the first time, I was hooked. Both Brad and I began immediately thinking how we might make a living doing that great sport,” said Phil. After becoming a more active diver, he decided to quit his job in industrial quality improvement and manufacturing process control to open a scuba shop in Decatur, Alabama. When the travel industry came near to a dead halt after

September 11th, their brick-and-mortar store ended up not fairing so well.

Rather than just close up shop, Phil decided to take his business online with Dive Sports. He and his son had some success with a website they had built from scratch in 2002. After experiencing some growth, they soon realized they needed something more robust to maintain a sustainable business model. A friend had recommended Volusion and they set up the live store in January 2008.

Since opening their Volusion store, Phil and the crew at Dive Sports has since reached out to the online community in scuba forums, chat boards, and blogs. Phil even started his own blog to discuss scuba products and tips. By reaching out to the community online, Phil developed an edge over his bigger, less personable competitors. “No matter how much our internet business grows, we are still just a bunch of scuba divers that love the sport and love sharing our knowledge and information with our customers. We like for our customers to think of us as their local scuba store, no matter where they live,” says Phil.

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