The Work At Home Diet

This isn’t a recipe, nor is it specifically eCommerce related. This is personal advice from one work at homer to another… take advantage of your situation and take care of yourself.

You no longer have that half hour commute in the morning – sleep longer or do some exercising. Don’t wake up, head straight for your email, then park yourself for the rest of the day. That’s not good for you. Make yourself a healthy breakfast AND lunch. You have access to your kitchen now, no need for a daily peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I know a lot of people who work from home and many of them have the same habits as they did while working at an office. Part of the joy of working from your home is being able to do things you couldn’t when you were on someone else’s time schedule. It’s very easy to get wrapped up in your business (because it is YOUR business) and it can easily take over your life in ways most regular jobs won’t.

Don’t let it.

I’m not suggesting your shirk your responsibilities or take a cavalier attitude toward your business, far from it, I work everyday and not just for a couple of hours. I know what it’s like to be consumed by it, when I first started I would spend as much time in front of the computer as my poor, tired eyes would allow. I didn’t even like to stop to eat, I would make a quick sandwich or microwave meal and eat while I worked.

That is not healthy.

Even if you can’t stand to be away while your’e eating, at least take the time to make something good for yourself. Of course there are still days when I get lost in what I’m doing or I’m busy with a project and a hurried meal while working is the best option, but that is rare. If you’re constantly tied to your computer, your home business won’t be fun and rewarding as it should be. And if you let it, it will take over.

Enjoy the benefits of working for yourself otherwise running your home business will be just as bad as working for someone else. Own your business, don’t let it own you.

Cross Sells, Upsells, Upgrades!

Everyone wants to make more profit per sale. That’s the best way to increase your income without having to increase your traffic, advertising, or product offerings. There are many ways to do this – generally limited only by your imagination and your programmer’s skills. But there is one very common and easy way to get more out of each conversion…

Cross Selling

Actually I like to break it down further into cross selling, upselling, and upgrading. Most store platforms have at least some form of cross selling function available. Take advantage of it. Whether it is on your product pages or in your shopping cart you want to use it for everything you sell, it works. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me first explain exactly what I’m talking about.

Products featured as “other items you might be interested in” or “other customers also bought” are commonly known as cross sells. They are on every product page in your store and/or your cart page. Cross sells are basically related items.

Products that are add-ons for another product are referred to as upsells. An example would be headphones for an MP3 player. A lot of people lump these in as cross sells, I’m not a big fan of that, I like to use both if applicable and keep them separated.

Upgrades may or may not apply to your products. It doesn’t have to be for electronics only, I sell swords that can be sharpened for an additional amount, I consider that an upgrade. Anything that is part of the product that can be customized or changed is an upgrade.

If you have the functionality in your store you should take the extra few seconds to set it up for each product. By making it simple for your customers to add other products they might want to their cart you’re increasing your chances of making a higher profit. These functions are helpful and shoppers like them – done right they can make shopping at your store more convenient which is something shoppers will remember and come back for.

Here are some examples of how I use cross selling, upselling, and upgrades in my stores.

Some platforms allow you to discount items that are offered as cross sells. For example, in the Armory I sell a cloth arming cap for medieval helmets. It sells for $17 if purchased alone but if a customer adds a helmet to the cart they have the opportunity to buy it for $15. This sort of incentive based cross selling is not only a great idea, it also works very well.

That cross sell takes place on the cart page but I like to have upsells on my product pages too. For instance on every one of my tapestry product pages I offer an option to add a rod to the order. I put it in a drop down box right next the order button, all the customer has to do is select from the box. It’s easy; the customer doesn’t have to even look around the page. You can go one step further and discount those add-on items to entice the customer into placing a bigger order.

I use this tactic with great success in the Armory. The pictures I use for my medieval clothing are mostly of a model in a full knight costume. So someone interested in the tunic being featured might also want the belt, crown, sword, or any of the other accessories that are pictured. So I offer these in a drop down just like I offer the rods on my tapestry site. When I started doing this my “average products per order” increased. Yours can too with very little effort.

Get cross selling going for your store, it is simple and incredibly important for your business. If your store platform doesn’t have a cross sell function see about getting a developer to create one for you. You can increase your profits without more traffic or more ads – just show your current customers what you have to offer and make it easy for them to buy it.

Drop Ship Versus Wholesale

I’m partial to drop shipping, I always try to find a company that will drop ship a particular product. Drop shipping usually fits my business model better than wholesale stocking, for a few key reasons;

1. I have several eCommerce stores that, in total, carry thousands of different products. If I purchased those products wholesale, I’d need a very large and expensive warehouse for all of those boxes to live.

2. With that vast of a product line, inventory management would become a fulltime position along with shipping and receiving.

Keep in mind that the above situation is not true for all eCommerce storeowners. I happen to own many stores with many products per store – not everyone does.

Also, many eCommerce storeowners don’t sell products that occupy the same amount of space as a suit of armor, medieval shield, or wall-sized tapestry – I do. The products you sell may not take up a huge volume of floor space.

The bottom line is, your decision to warehouse inventory or find a drop shipper to do it for you must be based on factors specific to your business situation, like:

1. Do you have the room in your home to store goods?
2. If you don’t, do you have the means to rent a small public storage facility or share warehouse space with a local business?
3. Do you have the operating capital to purchase a quantity or products in bulk from a wholesaler?
4. Are you prepared to deal with yourself or hire someone to do your shipping and handling?

Those are pretty obvious. But what might be surprising to you is that when you purchase bulk wholesale from a company, you may be able to do so at a substantial savings over drop shipping. In fact, when I do purchase goods in volume, I often realize a savings between 10% and 40% over a drop shipped product.

If you’re in a very competitively priced market, having those extra margins may mean the difference between competing effectively, or not competing at all.

However, I want to share with you a concept that I believe can make a huge difference in your ability to grow your business. That concept is called “Effective Time Management”. What I’m talking about is not being able to schedule your business work time effectively – even though that’s important, it’s not what this is about.

I’m talking about being able to make a judgment between low value work and high value work. Here is what I mean…

The most effective use of your time online, or in any business environment for that matter, is growing your business’s sales volume. That means getting more traffic, turning that traffic into customers, and turning those customers into repeat buyers.

You turn your traffic into customers by having an effective sales presentation on your site, offering incentives to buy, and merchandising products in a unique way. You turn customers into repeat buyers by following up with them, communicating information that they are interested in, and offering a pleasant buying experience. And you spend time refining and enhancing all of the above by testing different methods.

I’d like to think that I have some experience in these areas, and it’s been that experience that all other considerations for your business, other than the above, are secondary. Sure, you need to manage your books, your Internet connection, your vendors, your credit card merchant, and your cash flow, etc. But what makes a business successful is the amount of sales volume that it generates.

And that’s what I’m talking about. low value work is the sort of work that doesn’t do anything to increase your sales volume. While it might be necessary in order to operate your business, it doesn’t do anything to grow it.

High value work, by my definition in eCommerce, consists of the following procedures:

1) Site Conversion testing and tweaking
2) Search Engine Optimization
3) Paid Advertising
4) Customer Follow-Up
5) Unique Product Offerings in the form of packages or special value purchases.

Hey, I’m a business owner. I realize that you have to do both. But your priority should always be growing your sales volume. That’s why I drop ship.

I know that is a long-winded explanation for the reason I drop ship. But consider this – when I get an order from one of the stores, all I have to do to fill that order is take the incoming email that I got from my shopping cart, and turn that into an order for our drop shipper.

That means having 2 windows open and copying information from my email into the order form on my vendor’s website. Total time to complete? 60 seconds.

Sure, as a drop shipper, I make less money per sale than I would if I were an inventory stocking eCommerce storeowner, but I spend far less time completing the transaction of the sale. No picking, sorting, packing, labeling, or shipping. In a sense, all I’m really doing it turning around an email. And that’s why I try to drop ship whenever I can.

Having said that, there are times when I can’t find a drop shipper for a product that I want to sell. When that happens, I here’s what I do:

I find a source for that product and ask the wholesaler for some samples. I then create the product listing, drive some traffic to it with some paid ads, and measure the results. I figure out exactly how much money it cost me to generate a sale for that product, then figure out if I can make a profit selling it like that.

If I can, I’ll purchase a minimum quantity from the wholesaler, ship it all to a fulfillment center or ask the manufacturer to warehouse it for me (they will sometimes do this), and start optimizing those product pages for the free search engines while I’m driving traffic to that page with paid ads.

See what I’m doing here? I’m taking a very small financial risk to determine if that product sells at a profit for my company. I’m using paid traffic to determine if I can sell that product. Testing the water before I dive in. Only after I’m able to judge that product’s effectiveness by testing will I make a financial commitment to it and buy a quantity of it from the wholesaler. Then, in order to keep the sales fulfillment cycle short and easy, I send that inventory to a fulfillment center that picks it, packs it, and ships it for me.

The best of both worlds. The key to this method is testing testing testing!

I need to find out if I can make a profit selling that product by using the most expensive method of online advertising available (at least when you compare it to free search engine Traffic) – paid ads. If I can generate a profit from a sale from this traffic, then I’m pretty confident that my profit margins can only improve once I start to optimize that product page for the natural search.

In my opinion, this is the lowest risk method of determining a product’s potential for your store, short of finding a drop shipper right off the bat.

Take Advantage of Holidays

Not just the big ones… all holidays.

I get a lot of sales newsletters around the major holidays – Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc – but not nearly as many around the smaller holidays like Father’s Day, Labor Day, and others of that sort. Why? I honestly don’t know.

Perhaps some storeowners forget about these holidays until they’re upon them. Maybe they don’t think they are big enough to warrant a sale. Or maybe they don’t think their products apply to what’s being celebrated.

Whatever the reason, it’s a bad call. If BestBuy can have a Valentine’s Day sale (and they do) you can too, no matter what you sell. Your products DO NOT have to be related to the season for you to celebrate it with a sale.

Some stores will do better than others during different holidays, that’s just logic, and my Swords For Your Sweetheart sale newsletter might not make me a million dollars but I guarantee I will make me more than if I didn’t send it out.

Then again your subscribers might love the idea. I had a couple emails about my Valentine’s Day sale last year saying the idea never would have occurred to them but the sword was a big hit.

Many people have a tendency to forget the smaller holidays which is another good reason to promote these sales. You remind them with a newsletter geared toward the upcoming holiday and pack it with discounts and you give them an easy solution to the problem of finding a gift. Offer your customers the path of least resistance and your sales will be successful.

So keep on top of your calendar. Know what holiday is coming and start promoting sales ahead of time. Be sure to send out your newsletters early enough so your customers won’t have to worry about their products arriving late. Be creative in what you offer and try to tie into the season as much as possible. Your customers will thank you with orders.

The Customer is NOT Always Right

“The customer is always right.”

Yes yes, we storeowners already know that is rarely the case but we pretend they are anyway because it’s what we’ve always been taught. Businesses are supposed to meet all their customers’ demands… no matter how ridiculous.

Well I say no!

I rely on my customers to make my business possible. I care about their gripes and listen to their requests but when a customer mistreats my employees or starts to cost my business money, I draw the line.

Most issues are perfectly legitimate and most customers are fair about them; ie. if a product arrives damaged they don’t automatically assume you shipped it that way and fly off the handle.

There are going to be problems from time to time, that’s just the natural order of the universe. You’re even going to screw up a few times, no one is perfect. You just apologize, fix it, and maybe throw in a little something extra for the customer if it was a big error. Everyone ends up happy, or at least satisfied.

But there are times when you NEED TO FIRE A CUSTOMER.

If you have your policies spelled out on your site (which you should!) it is the customer’s responsibility to read, understand, and accept them before making a purchase. You need to have pages like your return policy, FAQ, terms and conditions, etc clearly defined and available for your customers. You should link to them from your site pages, your cart pages, and include links to them in your customer follow-up emails.

This is imperative for regular issues as well as major problems.

By making your policies clear and readily available you’re doing everything you can to make sure the customer knows and accepts the rules. I do this on every one of my sites without exception.

So when a customer balks about a restocking fee or tries to return something months after the return period has expired I can point them to the pages on the site and explain, very nicely, that they are wrong. Most of the issues end right there.

But every now and again you’ll get one that just won’t see reason. Here’s where you need to be judicious. If they are giving you a huge problem over a couple bucks, let them have it. It doesn’t matter if they’re wrong, they’re wasting your time and by letting them go early you’re probably saving yourself the hassle of a chargeback.

If it’s a large amount or they’re harassing your customer service reps, give em a pink slip. You should not have to waste your time and lose a chunk of money because they couldn’t be bothered to read your return policy. As long as your policies are clearly displayed and the customer got everything they ordered you are not in the wrong.

Make sure you always keep all customer information and correspondence because in situations like this you’ll need it to win the chargeback that’s most likely coming. I have only ever lost one chargeback in a case like this, the credit card companies are usually pretty fair and you give yourself a lot of leverage by presenting all the evidence you can to support your case.

Here is an example from my own experience.

I have no control how my customer’s monitors are set, what shows up as pink on my screen could look more like red on someone else’s; so in a store where I’m selling something very dependent on color, like my tapestry store, I have a note on my return policy page that says: Due to the variations in monitors, colors of the actual tapestries may vary from the pictures shown. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email us at info@european-wall-tapestries.com.

So when a customer wants to return a tapestry that isn’t quite same color they expected and are trying to force us to forgo the restocking fee I don’t bow down. First I offer them a free exchange – no restocking fee on the return if they want something else and if they choose a more expensive item I’ll give them a little discount to make up for the inconvenience.

If they refuse that and continue demanding, I simply let them know that those are our terms, they are clearly posted on the website, and I give them the information they need should they decide to return the tapestry. Then I end the communication. I am never rude or condescending – stick to the facts and be professional in your correspondence.

In cases like that, most of my customers accept the restocking fee and return the product and the others submit chargebacks. Let me just reiterate that this happens very rarely, I’m talking maybe 3 or 4 times a year.

These people will just keep arguing with you, you will not win.

Don’t be afraid to fire a demanding customer. By taking up your time or your employees’ time they are weakening your business and that is the opposite of what customers are supposed to do.

The Social Marketing Time Suck

Social Marketing your eCommerce store can be fun, it can be tedious, or somewhere in the middle. There is also so much of it to be done and so many different avenues to take that you can become so engrossed in it that you ignore other areas of your business.

I’ve had days where something fun or cool was happening on Twitter and I had to use all my will to stop hitting the refresh button and go get some actual work done. It’s bound to happen sometimes but if it becomes a habit you’ll end up wasting time that could and should be spent doing things that make you money.

I’m not suggesting that you avoid social networks, they can do great things for your business, you just have to watch that you stay focused while using them.

You should regularly post and respond to your followers and friends but it should be a get-in-and-get-out sort of thing. If you hang around too long you can easily spend hours clicking through pages, comments, and pictures; or worse get caught up with silly distractions like quizzes and games.

I try to spend no more than a half hour or so a day working on my social networking. I go in, spend a few minutes on one, and then move onto the next. I do the rotation a few times a day and am able to stay caught up with what’s going on and communicate with my networks without it taking away from my work time.

If you do it right, it’s a great way to take a break from whatever main project you’re working on while still doing something positive for your business.

Twitter: Audrey Kerwood

Facebook: Audrey Kerwood

Working with Product Images

Depending on how you operate your eCommerce store, you may or may not have physical access to the products you sell. If you’re one of the many (like me) who use drop shippers the whole point of your business model to NOT to handle the products. So we’re left with the images provided to us by our drop shippers.

If you’ve spent any time shopping online you’ve probably seen several websites that have all or mostly the same product images. As a shopper what did that make you think? That all those websites are basically the same?

If nothing about your site stands out to the visitor they’re going to base their purchase on price. Now, it’s very true there are a lot of ways to make your site stand out from your competitors – Unique Selling Propositions, Discount Offers, Higher Search Positions, etc. Well product images are another that I think is very important but many eCommerce storeowners overlook it in the effort to build their store quickly.

It’s understandable from a store building perspective but what about from a customer perspective?

Let’s talk practically.

You have an image from your drop shipper of jewelry box. It’s sitting on top of a green blanket. Everyone using that drop shipper is also using that image. How do you think taking the green blanket out of the picture so the jewelry box is on a white background will effect the look of your product page? Do you think seeing yours will catch a visitors eye because it looks different than all the others she has seen during her search?

Yes it will!

Anything you can do to make your product stand out from the rest is a good thing. What’s nice about the images is it’s not that difficult. You need an image editor like PhotoShop and, as with all new techniques, it’ll take a bit of practice but spending a minute or two altering a product image is time well spent.

Even if all you do it flip the image horizontally, that’s enough to change your visitors perception of the image.

I take the backgrounds out of every product image I put on my stores. If I’m adding products quickly I sometimes add them as they are and then go back and alter them later… but I ALWAYS alter them.

Drop Shipper Image:

My Image:

This is something that can be outsourced as well. I have an employee who does most of our image work and since I like using PhotoShop I do some myself if I’m just sitting around watching TV.

This is one of the small steps not taken by the vast majority of online store owners. You should, every little change helps.

Take Control of Your Navigation

Many eCommerce store platforms use loops to create elements of your website. Two of the most common are product loops and navigation loops. They make it nice and easy to build your store as they populate your category pages when you add products and add links to your nav bar when you add categories. Great way to get started but ultimately you need precision control over your navigation and loops won’t give it to you.

Often the navigation link is whatever you name your category and unless you assign a specific file name your URL is that category name too. Sounds fine but what happens when your top keyword phrase for that category changes? You change the category name in the backend of your store so the anchor text in your nav bar is the phrase you’re going after. Still sounds fine, right? Well, if you aren’t using specific file names or your store platform doesn’t offer that functionality then your URL is going to change too. Uh oh. No external links, no page rank, no search positions. You have to start from scratch.

Let’s say you are using file names so you don’t have to worry about losing the URLs you’ve put so much effort into getting ranked. If you have more than a couple of categories in your store you’re going to want to create sections within the nav bar to help your customers find what they are looking for by grouping like categories under those headings. This is impossible using your store platform’s built in loop.

You need to go static. The only way to have complete dominance over your nav is to create it by hand. That may sound strange in this era of automation, but it’s the truth. You nav bar will still be automatically added to all the pages in your site (or at least the same ones the loop nav was on) and it will still be just one file. You’re going to replace the loop with HTML code.

This is easy to do whether you’ve coded before or not. You only need one thing, your published home page. Simply go to your site, view the page source, locate your nav bar, and copy the code. Paste this code over the code for the loop, publish, and… it should look exactly the same as it did before. Voila, static nav.

Now when you want to update anchor text, all you need to do to is change it in the code and publish, easy peasy. You now also have the ability to add section headings for related groups of categories – a big bonus in the conversion department. To do this, create a new table or copy an existing one from the nav. Change the anchor text to whatever you want your heading to be and remove the hyperlink.

You can get as fancy as you want now. Change the background color of the section heading to separate it from the nav links. Add image icons to grab customer attention. Add other static pages wherever you want them. The length of your page is the limit!

Diversifying Your eCommerce Business

“Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket!”

This is more of a long term success key than anything else, but it is very important. I would rather have 5 niche businesses that make me $1,000 each every month than one business that makes me $5,000 every month. Why?

Consider this:  It’s easier, and for some people more realistic, to create a business that only makes $1,000 a month.  I mean, if you sell 20 things through one store each month that make you $50.00 profit – you’re there! That’s less than one sale per day. If we sell one item every other day that makes us a profit of $60.00, how much time are we spending filling orders with our drop shippers? 10 minutes every other day?

It’s simply easier to create little businesses that generate modest profits than it is to create a mega-monster business that you and your family will live and / or starve by. Think about it!  You only need to do this one business at a time.

The real genius of this business model is that you will always have one of your businesses generating money in the marketplace.  Yeah, maybe one of them takes a downturn and your sales get cut to shreds. So what?! It happens, even to the masters! They simply get back up after the impact and create another revenue stream.  If you have 4 other little business plugging along, you’re less likely to get hurt by a server outage, a market correction, a drop shipper flub, a merchant account error or any one of a hundred things that could crop up.

Diversify!

I own and operate 4 online stores. They have their slow and busy months. Sometimes they coincide, but most of the time one or two of the stores are in their “busy season” while the others are just bringing in regular sales. This way I’m making consistent profit all year long and I don’t have to worry as much about a market change because the chances that all four of my markets will change at the same time are extremely low.

Diversification is smart for business and your personal mental state.

Need Versus Want – Product Perception

As an ecommerce storeowner, heck as anyone who sells anything online, how can you shield yourself from the nimble hands of Internet price shoppers?

If I asked you to tell me how much a low priced color scanner goes for online, could you? If you couldn’t, how many searches would it take for you to get that price? Two? Yep. If you spelled “Scanner” wrong on the first try.

Now, if I asked you to tell me how much a Battle Ready Shirt Of Chain Mail would cost…

How about a Replica Tiffany Lamp? A Novelty Pool Cue? A Life-Size Cardboard Movie Standee From Lord Of The Rings? A Mutual Fund Investment System? A Hello Kitty EZ-Bake Oven?

My point is, the products mentioned above have “I Want It” value. Their price is not restricted or encumbered by a model number.  They can’t be easily compared in the marketplace because they are not staple products. They are passion buys.

You want a Life-Size cardboard Darth Vader to greet your house guests? How much is that worth to the person who’s license plate says Jedi?

NASCAR Fan? Oh wait – Are you a Pool Shootin’ NASCAR Fan? How much is that Rusty Wallace Billiard cue with the Mother of Pearl Inlay worth? The answer? Whatever your willing to pay for it.

Let’s face it, everything computer, Internet, electronic, and anything else with a plug or a model number already has a manufacturer screaming it’s value to the marketplace. If you sell these types of products, you’re saddled with shoppers who are going to compare “Apples to Apples” and the reach of the Internet makes it easy for them to do that.

That’s not to say that a shopper who is dying to get their hands on a Battle Ready Chain Mail Shirt will not already have done their research. They absolutely will, but because Sony has not yet released a Chain Mail Shirt Model, you can use carefully crafted product listings to build a high perception of value for that product.

Your success in ecommerce depends on your ability to market and sell a product that has a high perceived value to your customer, not a value that is determined by the marketplace. Isn’t it amazing how much an avid sport fisher will spend on a lure that measures 2 inches by 3 inches? Yet, they will never buy a microwave oven unless it’s on sale at BestBuy.

Need vs. Want. That is your key to ecommerce success. We already know that the best chance for a 1 or 2 person ecommerce shop to succeed is to specialize, to stay in the niche markets. Now, take that a step further. Instead of selling a product that you think a customer needs, sell them a product that they “WANT”.

Your customers buy based on emotion, and then back up their purchase decisions with logic. Yes, you should sell them something that they are crazy about, but then keep the sale alive by offering good customer service, a great guarantee, an easy way to contact you, and a fair price for a product that satisfies their passion.

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