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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Imagine walking into an electronics or jewelry store with some of the most amazing products you’ve ever seen. Everything this store offers is unique. The people seem kind. The prices are right. But the store itself is very drab and almost looks like a warehouse, and you can’t find anything. It makes you wonder where these people came from and if their goods were stolen or not.

A template is like that brick-and-mortar storefront. If it doesn’t live up to your products, you could be selling your store short. What is a template exactly though? The template is the frame of your website. It contains the categories and navigation. You can see an example of how templates vary in structure here.

What are some things to consider when choosing how and where your categories will be displayed?

1.) Color scheme: Different colors solicit different emotional reactions. Understanding what emotions your site is conveying is key. Since you will probably choose more than one color, it can be very helpful to be familiar with different color schemes together first before putting together a design. This color schemer gallery is very helpful in making this choice.

2.) Navigation: Do you want your navigation to be on the top, the left, or the right? Do you want both top and left navigation? Laying out information in a clear manner is key. Since navigation is ultimately controlled by you and your shopping cart software, making this choice before choosing a template can help give your store a more deliberate, unified feel.

3.) Having an About Us page, a prominent return policy, and contact information will determine if people can trust you or not. We don’t buy from people we don’t know. Where can you display this information so that people can find it?

4.) Customers who use your search functionality to find products are much more likely to purchase than those who are simply browsing. Make sure it is prominent for your users somewhere in your template.

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

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After graduating from UC Berkeley, Adam Guthrie realized that he would not be happy with his career working for someone else. “Since I had some bartending experience (mostly as my fraternity’s social chair for a couple of semesters), I decided that retailing bar supplies for the at-home enthusiast was an underserved niche that I had the potential to take advantage of. After visiting a variety of discussion boards frequented by other storefront owners, and doing some research on my

own, I concluded that the Volusion platform would suit my needs best due to its professional appearance, flexibility, and automation features.”

Adam started off by listing his products on higher traffic sites while his search engine rankings were being built. “In the early stages of HomeBarSource.com’s launch, we relied solely upon price comparison sites such as Shopzilla, Froogle, and Shopping.com to provide leads to potential customers. Within a few months, the major search engines began to provide the website’s pages with higher page ranks in the search results due to the SEO capabilities of the Volusion platform. As revenue increased, we began to purchase ad-space and links to our store on high ranking websites, which within a few more months helped HomeBarSource.com reach top-10 (and in some cases, top-3) rankings for our major targeted keywords. We’ve also added a Drink Recipe informational section on our website, which has helped our site become indexed for even more related keywords and to increase our page rank due to an increase in the text:code ratio.”

Adam’s had so much success with homebarsource.com, he decided to open another store using Volusion’s platform, kitchenandrestaurant.com. Adam is optimistic about his new prospect. “While the sales and product line of HomeBarSource.com continue to increase, Kitchen and Restaurant appears to be gaining enough momentum to indicate the potential for an even greater success than our first venture.”

Michelle Greer
michelle_greer(at)volusion.com
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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Brooks Lambert didn’t come up with a great idea for a website by putting together a focus group or scouring through Google keyword searches. He didn’t pour through marketing documents for nights on end or pay to go to retail conference after conference. When Brooks came up with the concept for www.thebeerbelly.com, he and his buddy Ted were hanging in his backyard reminiscing about sneaking beer into ballgames and movies. “Both of us have been in the product development industry for years and one thing lead to another…

just like one beer leads to another, and before we knew it, we had cut up one of my $300+ wetsuits used for surfing and stuffed a CamelBAK bladder in the front and were cracking up at how funny it was, and called it ‘The Beerbelly’, of course.”

Developing a great product is one thing. Putting it on the web and marketing it is something else entirely. “Being a wanna be geek and knowing enough to be dangerous… I thought, how hard can it be? We designed a website, thinking it would be ‘easy’ to add the e-commerce/shopping cart capabilities… that was our first big lesson. It’s NOT easy… especially if you choose the wrong tools. After stumbling around a bit, we finally found Volusion… and things fell into place.”

Although Brooks and the Beerbelly gang do what they can to make the website as usable and search engine friendly as possible, they have gotten exposure in very serendipitous ways, including some press in Sports Illustrated. “This has been the most amazing ride for us as far as the press goes. We have done very little proactive press activity. We have sent a few press releases out… but mainly from the web, we have been “discovered” by a few key news sources which have led to others etc. The Sports Illustrated story was one of the few that we actually had a ‘hand in.’ My wife, Lisa is a HUGE Rick Reilly fan… I read that he was going to be speaking at our local bookshop about one of his new books and told her she should go… She said she didn’t feel like it, but I told her she should go and give Rick a Beerbelly… I guess that made it OK to leave me at home… She waited to get an autographed copy of his book and told him that she had a gift for him. He said that was a first… She gave him The Beerbelly and he said he had been wanting to get one. She told him she was the wife of the inventor and he told her to get my ‘a**’ on the phone and get me down there because he had to meet the guy that came up with such a crazy, great idea. Of course I jumped in the car, had a great time hanging out with the legendary Rick Reilly. We all know what happened after that…”

What are Brooks’s plans for his Beerbelly and his new product, the Wine Rack, for the future? “Great question… I ask myself that question almost daily. To be honest we are actually considering selling the product lines at this point. We have had multiple expressions of interest in the last couple of weeks that we are currently consulting with our attorneys as to the best way to explore this option… If there are any interested parties… please feel free to contact me directly.”

Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
michelle_greer(at)volusion.com
http:/www.volusion.com

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