As the price of fuel climbs with every fill up, consumers are looking for ways to drive less and scale back their lifestyles in effort to squeeze the most value from every hard earned dollar. A leisurely Sunday afternoon drive is a thing of the past as cash-strapped commuters are forced to reach deeper into their wallets to cover necessary transportation expenses.

While the cost of travel has become exorbitant – and prohibitively so for many – online shopping has come to the forefront as an attractive and economical alternative to hitting up the mall or supermarket. With everything from clothing to pet supplies to groceries available on the internet, unique opportunities exist for savvy online businesses poised to serve the needs of consumers’ changing lifestyles.

“Decreased fuel consumption may make gas station owners frown, but it could bring a smile to the faces of online business owners, whose products all of a sudden may have greater appeal to consumers looking to eliminate unnecessary shopping trips during the current gas crunch.”
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-Pam Westbrook, Ecommerce Marketing/Copywriting

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Blair Rhodes had experience with websites as a web designer for Hollywood studios and software companies. That’s why when his online store, The Pashmina Store, went down during the Christmas season of 2004, he knew he could do better.”We knew we needed a more reliable company and a better website, but the final straw that made us switch was Christmas 2004 when the website was down more than it was up. Every hour it was down

would cost us several hundred dollars in sales and technical support was non-responsive. It was horribly frustrating,” said Blair.

After doing much research, Blair chose Volusion. “I’m happy to say that we made the right choice in going with Volusion. The Pashmina Store has had 3 very successful Christmas seasons with Volusion and I cannot remember a single case of downtime during even the heaviest of traffic. Plus, our average sales growth has been over 60% a year since we have moved to Volusion.”

Blair has also used Volusion’s admin features to help streamline his business operations. “A great backend feature is being able to manage inventory so easily. I always know how many items we have in stock and can easily calculate our total inventory value. The most important day-to-day improvement that Volusion has helped with is shipping. By quickly being able to import and export customer shipping files directly in UPS software, we have saved over a thousand manhours each year. We actually used to have to enter every shipment by hand! Another great day-to-day time saver is the batch order printing and processing. This also used to be done one-by-one. During the busiest times when hundreds of orders are coming in fast, this saves an enormous amount of time.”

The Pashmina Store has continued to experience phenomenal growth since starting with Volusion. “The Pashmina Store is expecting to continue to grow at 60% a year for the next several years. We plan to do this by expanding our product line to include more elaborate prints and designs on our pashmina scarves, wraps and shawls and also adding cashmere clothing items such as sweaters and robes. As we continue to grow and attract more traffic, we will most likely move to a semi-dedicated hosting plan at Volusion. Since Volusion has been a big part of our success, we plan to keep our business there as our traffic and hosting needs increase.”

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

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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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Gina Geraci knew she had something special to sell online being located in New York. “New York Bagels are famous for their one of a kind taste and texture. It is one of the many things people crave after leaving New York. I knew it would be a hit because New York bagels can not be found anywhere else but here.

It is a unique gift idea and a great alternative to flowers and candy. The name New York Bagel Box was the perfect name for our online business.”

Gina originally went with GoDaddy based on the price but soon found the cart too restrictive. “Volusion offers options not available from GoDaddy. I was able to customize the free Volusion template to make my site look as if it was created just for NY Bagel Box. The old saying is true…you get what you pay for!”

Volusion’s automated features have helped Gina handle busy holiday seasons with ease. “The gift certificate options are a great way for our customers to purchase gifts to fit any budget. It also allows the gift recipient to select product preferences to satisfy any flavor craving. During the holidays, this is our most used marketing feature. I also love the fact that my shipping labels can be created with the touch of a button right on the “process order” page. During our busy season, this feature is priceless.”

Gina’s ambitions do not stop at bagels. “In the future NY Bagel Box plans to continue satisfying New York Bagel cravings all over the USA with hopes of developing a new web site that will deliver more New York specialties …..any guesses on what they might be?”

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

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Tessa Luu owns the successful home fashion site www.insideavenue.com and was looking to start a spin off site selling interior fabrics. Tessa tried several options before choosing Volusion for www.insidefabric.com. In 2000, she paid a developer $35,000 to build a website from scratch. “The site ran ok but it was very difficult for us to upgrade/maintain it. We then migrated to the Yahoo platform. The main store we have there is doing ok, but everytime we tried to do something we have to pay our developer to do it. Not only did it cost money, it is also time consuming. Yahoo store is built using

RTML, a propriety language, which you really have to learn and who has time for that?”

“When we tried to develop our fabric site, the Yahoo store does not have the functions and features that we need. We spent a few thousands and a few months on it then finally have to give up. We find that as a small business company, our options are very limited. That is, we don’t have the big budget to develop a custom solution, so we end up with a platform like Yahoo that is very limited in scope.”

“I was beating my head against the wall trying to get Yahoo Store to work with my fabric store. It was taking 4 days to upload just 5000 items, plus the database editing process was just unbearable. Then I went on line, Googled ‘e-commerce solutions’ and found Volusion. I bought the plan and worked on it over the weekend, and in one weekend I was able to do what I couldn’t do with Yahoo store for four months, by myself, and I’m not that technical. Our site was up and running in two weeks (most of the time was spent working on our product database).”

Although Tessa’s site is new, the signs are encouraging. “I am so impressed with the performance on this site so far. We’ve been live only for 3-4 weeks, and already we got over 40 orders! While this is not enough to pay the bill yet, we never get this on our Yahoo Store! The most important thing is that 60% of our traffic comes from organic, which I contribute to your SEO features. Having that built in, and making it so easy to put in meta-title, meta-tag, meta-descriptions as well as having the product name on the URL is so critically important. I strongly feel that once we get our off-site SEO done, the performance will be tremendously improved.”

Tessa’s plans do not stop with www.insidefabric.com. “We plan to have about 4 more niche sites built, all of which complement our core business, which is home furnishings. We feel having a niche site devoted to one single category is the best way for us to get organic ranking. This is why I was so excited about Volusion. It is by far the most economical package, not to mention the most robust package around. I strongly recommend it for small businesses particularly. I prefer to do things myself rather than hire it out, and Volusion is the perfect package for that.”

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

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