A Close Shave for The Gentleman’s Shop
The trials and tribulations of one company’s experience with three ecommerce approaches
Continued
Their troubles deepened when the web design company was bought out by a well-known ecommerce services and solutions company. “Initially we were excited as they had a reputation for making very successful ecommerce websites and we hoped they may have some ideas on how to improve our sales but they didn’t!” comments Robert. “In fact things went from bad to worse. Although we had at least 20,000 unique visitors a month and our sales reaching the levels of our Actinic days, our hosting alone was costing £700 per month. And every time we wanted a change to the site functionality, such as moving the payment provider, we had quotes of several thousands as the site was based on Polaris which required hiring a specialist programmer. All because the new company did not use the same platform.”
Finally in April 2005 the couple were told that the website would no longer be supported. Worse they could not find anyone willing to take on their hosting and support. “Most companies just wanted us to take out their own solution, which would have been jumping from the frying pan into the fire,” adds Robert.
“Luckily we were approached by Actinic who had heard of our plight and offered us their most recent solution, Business Multi User, so we gave them our wish list of features and design requirements. The completed site was handed over within one month and cost a fraction of our custom-made store -- both to create and operate. And even better hosting is now just £300 a year. Happy days are here again,” Robert says with relief.
Robert and Charlotte made the significant investment in the multi-user product because they wanted to be able to maintain the site and process orders from two separate, but networked machines. This way they now have more flexibility to work simultaneously on different tasks, or even, as orders grow, use the option to have two people processing orders.
The new site has the following features:
To help boost sales, existing customers were emailed a discount voucher the day after launch and straight away it brought in orders to the value of 20% of the new site costs. In fact the first two weeks’ online sales beat the previous performance by 40% – “It’s just like Christmas,” says Charlotte. “And although we can’t now alter our website from a beach in Miami, we do have complete control over the site and all its functionality from either one of two PCs. Instead we have our order details copied to an email address that we could access from a far flung place, or home.”
As for future marketing, Robert will be doing his own online marketing and Actinic’s search engine-friendly format of static HTML pages will certainly help in maximising organic rankings. As a trained barber, he is also a participant in many male grooming forums both here and in the USA which certainly attracts loyal new customers. The affiliate scheme, Affiliate Future, is a regular source of customers too, accounting for 35% of sales per month.
Having tried web-based, bespoke and boxed ecommerce solutions, Robert and Charlotte are now confident that their present approach has the right balance of cost, flexibility and functionality. So what lessons have they learnt? Here are Robert’s top tips: