Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

We just received a nice kick in the crotch today.  Our most important vendor just absolutely changed a key product line on us to a different product altogether.  I am disappointed greatly and anticipate speaking with the owner this week to see if I can get them to keep the current line.

They’ve also reduced the fabric choices and discontinued some of my favorites.  I am a little worried right now that this will affect our business.  I’ve contacted one of my other drop shippers to see if we can’t develop a line of products to replace the ones I might lose.  This is just evidence that business can change on a dime and there’s nothing you can do.  The biggest issue is that when you rely on other people for your business, you can be let down.

On another note, we are going ahead with our plans to add many new products and a line of Dog Beds.  I’ve just added a read in bed wedge and body pillow set to our site.  We’ll see how that does.

I am going to be adding a new product that one of our drop shippers just introduced to us yesterday.  It was a new type of read in bed pillow that is essentially a memory foam wedge.  It seems like a very good product and one that I would even use myself.  So, I’ll put it up and see if it generates interest.  I’m going to use this new product as a testing ground for some changes I want to make to our site.  I would like to introduce a new wider format so there is less space between the website template and the border of the computer screen.

I’ve started widening some of the pages, including my updated home page at www.my-pillow-place.com.  I’ve removed many irrelevant and duplicate links and just provided a little more content on the home page as well…I think it makes the page less cluttered and more effective for conveying information.

I spent some time this week collecting images and product information for our new line of dog beds.  It seems, so far, that these companies will be very easy to work with and reliable.  I’ve had problems with other drop shippers and I fear that the more companies we work with, the more difficult our business will be to run.  That being said, I am excited to expand our product line and I can’t wait for our first dog bed sale.  We’ve actually started to get searches for the meager dog pillow page that I threw up last week…I put it there as a place holder so that it could get indexed.  This week, I will add product pages linked from the splash page and we can start selling.

Google is still doing weird things with our bean bags listing.  The keep going up and down, but never get closer than page 8.  I think there is a good market for these items, but there is so much competition.  I rely on people coming to our site and stumbling upon the bean bags rather than them finding us through the search engines.