Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

As July comes to an end, My Pillow Place should see just over 4000 visitors for the month. Our personal best volume of traffic.  A year ago at this time, I think we got just under 400 visitors.  What a difference a year makes. 

I spent the weekend adding a new product to our line.  Its a higher quality foam filled bean bag chair.  Part of our new line of foam furniture.  I’ve noticed a little bit of fluctuation with some of our keywords in Yahoo and I am not sure of the reason.  But, luckily, it is not really affecting our traffic numbers at all.  We’re averaging about 130-140 visitors per day. 

I have been expecting a Google Page Rank Update over this past week, but I haven’t noticed a change at all, and I also haven’t really seen anyone talking about it on the SEO message boards.  Its usually a hot topic every three months or so…Perhaps in the next week or two we’ll get that page rank up to 3 or 4.

 July sales have slowed down a little bit.  Until today (Monday) We hadn’t received a sale since last Thursday.  The wierd thing is, our traffic was normal.  But no sales over the weekend.  I’ve been hearing how slow the month of July is for online retailers.  I am hoping that August blows July out of the water in terms of sales. 

I am writing this post to update my readers (though you are few) about what My Pillow Place is experiencing.  I am an architect by trade…My wife and I run My Pillow Place as a business venture that we started over a year and a half ago.  As an architect, I need to take 9 exams to be licensed.  And my 9th exam was today.  Because of the burden of having to study, I been a little lax in working on our website. 

We have a division of labor here.  I work on all of the technical and marketing items, while my wife takes care of orders and customer service.  We divide the accounting and financial aspect of our business as well. Because of my time spent studying for this exam, which I hoped I passed today, I have not updated/added  product to our site, or spent any time on SEO.  As a result, our Floor Pillow, page has dropped a little bit…not much, but I loved being in that top spot. 

Our Latex Pillow Page has also dropped to the second slot…again, not a lot, but I loved the number one position in Yahoo. Strangely, without any work on my part, our Bean Bag, splash page has jumped to 35 in Yahoo.  I’m hoping that same kind of jump will happen in Google.  Once we have Bean Bags on the first page of Yahoo or Google, I expect our traffic to quadruple overnight. 

 Our newest product, the BedLounge, which is essentially a read in bed pillow that transforms your bed into an easy chair, just got indexed.  We listed on the second page in both Yahoo and Google for the term BedLounge.  The problem is, our supplier is listed first and undercuts our MAP pricing.  It makes it hard to compete.  But, I digress.

 Anyways, I have stated, that I intend to add more product this weekend, now that my test is over.  So I will be busy tomorrow and over this next week adding about 15 products.  With the addition of these new items, we hope to capture a whole new alottment of visitors and potential customers, specifically for people looking for fun kids furniture, which we are adding a lot of.    

We got a sale late last night.  I was happy.  I love getting sales when the workday is generally over…I love getting sales while I’m sleeping even more….waking up and knowing you made money in your sleep is a great feeling…I went to bed last night with a sale of 2 floor pillows.

This morning that customer called to cancel the order…what happened?  Not our fault.  In my autoresponse letter, I warned the customer that if they had ordered any item from one of our vendors, it could take up to 3 weeks before the item ships…that is because of the custom nature of these products. (it also says in colored and bolded text on the product page that these items may take up to three weeks to ship- for some reason, people still don’t see the note.)  The customer needed these pillows by next week, and that just wasn’t going to happen…again, something that is our of our control.

This particular vendor charges us a cancellation fee, so we’ve recently have adopted that cancellation fee in order to absorb the cost.  Because we didn’t send the order to the drop shipper yet, we did not pass the cost on to the customer in this case.  Which is good for all.  Unfortunately, the credit card companies charge us an authorization fee, even if the order is cancelled…its a small amount, but it still stinks.

This month has still gone well…we’ve had no returns, one cancellation and more traffic and sales than we’ve seen in our website’s existence.  We’re most likely going to hit 4000 unique visitors for the month.  We’ve had sales every day this month except for 4 days.  And many of our sale days have been multi-sale days.  

Speaking of sales, we’ve had our Simmon’s Beautyrest Latex Pillow on sale for 2 weeks now and it has sold incredibly well.  I’ll probably remove it on Sunday and feature another items.  

I’ve set up an account on Technorati today.  Technorati has been described as the “Google search engine for Blogs.”  Its the engine that you want your blog to be a part of.  So, here it is. 

I’ve been busy this week, so I haven’t had a chance to update pages on www.my-pillow-place.com much.  I’ve watched a few of my keyword positions drop.  Some site took the top spot from me for the keyword “latex pillow”.  I’ll have to work hard and spend some time getting back to the top. 

My floor pillow splash page redesign just got updated in Yahoo.  This page also dropped in the serps.  It dropped to 5, but I’m used to being consistently in the top 3.  Starting this weekend, I’m going to be adding lots of new products, updating some old pages and adding squidoo lenses and other web 2.0 stuff.

 I say this now, but when I actually sit down to do the work, my list of items to do is a little more ambitious than I have time for.  I always make these long lists of to-do items and end up taking longer than I planned. 

July still has a few days left in it, and we’ve exceeded our June traffic number and sales numbers already.  It so nice to see good progress every month. I expect August to be even better than July.  Its a good thing I requested that credit processing increase from our gateway.  I have a feeling I’ll be asking for another increase before the year is up. 

The summer is winding down.  I was in my local Target the other day and I noticed that a big area was cleared and all of the back to school stuff was out on display.  This signals the end of the Summer and for us online retailers, it signifies the beginning of the shopping season. 

 June and July have been our best months to date in terms of sales and visitors.  This is the best time to have a budding online business.  Except for the fact that I read some financial story about how the poor housing market is ruining consumer confidence and is dragging down the rest of the economy.  I hope that is not what happens.

The end of July signals another event.  A predicted page rank update from Google’s algorithm.  If you have a website, about every 3 months people anticipate an Update from Google and hope to see their page rank increase.  The last update, which was End of March, early April, saw a lot of sites get a page rank demotion.  www.my-pillow-place.com saw a decrease from a page rank of 3 to a page rank of 2.  But I saw many of my interior pages get boosted from 0 to 1.  I’ve done a lot of work since the last algo change, and I would really like to see my PR increase from a 2 to a 3 or 4….