1/2 Year Goal
June 30, 2008 at 11:18 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: foam chair, ottoman, search engines
We had a goal to match our sale from last year, but the end of June this year. With this being the last day of June, I am proud to say that even in this horrible economy, we’ve exceeded our sales from all of last year, in 6 months by about 10%. I think the reason for that is by removing products that didn’t sell, adding new products that sell better and have a higher profit margin.
I also think that part of that is from our increased exposure. We’re getting closer to 300 visitors per day when last year in June, we hovered around 150 per day. Much of that is due to the work I put in optimizing the site to get better listings. I can’t stress enough the importance of optimizing your site for natural search listings. It saves so much money over pay per clicks. Pay per clicks do have their place, and I sometimes use them myself….but I’d much rather have free listings.
Last week, I also added a new product, the wedge chair and ottoman which fits perfectly into our soft chair and ottoman line. Foam filled and comfortable. More new products to come in the second half of the year.
Relaunch of My Pillow Place
June 23, 2008 at 11:44 pm | In online retailing | 1 CommentTags: soft chairs, website
Not really a relaunch, but www.my-pillow-place.com has made a major change, in my opinion, that makes it feel like a whole new site. I mentioned many posts ago, that I wanted to change the background image and I didn’t know how to do it. Well, I figured it out over the weekend and we uploaded a new background image and removed the old cloud pattern that I came to hate over the last 2 years. This new image a more of a light brown woven fiber type of pattern. I am a big fan of shades of browns complimenting shades of blue. My Pillow Place has a lot of blue on it and I think the new light brown background works well…its on a trial basis, so if I get negative feedback, or grow tired of it after awhile, we’ll try something new. But, I like it so far.
Also, over the weekend, I added a new soft lounge chair product to our Soft Chairs and Ottomans pages. I’ve found another product that no one else yet sells. We’re on a mission to keeps adding products and I’ve added about 8 new products in the last 6 weeks…so we’re on a good pace.
Ottomans
June 17, 2008 at 11:40 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: dog beds, Ottomans
Aside from the ottoman and soft chair splash page that I recently added, I’ve started to populate it with products. Last night I built our expandable ottomans page. I’ll probably add 1 new product a week to that category until the page is filled with new items. I’m actually not sure how well searched these types of items are, but it will definately expand our furniture line.
I’ve had a good experience of one of our dog bed drop shippers. They keep us up to date on all of their dog bed products. Some of our vendors don’t keep us in the loop. Products change, prices change and fabrics change and sometimes we’re not notified until we get a sale and that can cause problems. But one of our dog bed vendors is on top of things and even though we haven’t yet sold a lot of their quality dog beds, (basically because people don’t find us for dog beds yet) it makes me want to do everything I can to increase the exposure of their products. They are a pleasure to do business with.
Catering to new markets
June 16, 2008 at 11:39 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: floor pillows for schools and libraries, square floor pillows
We love our individual customers because they are helping our business grow. But recently we’ve been trying to cater to clients that may have the need to make bulk purchases in order to increase our average sale per customer. We could take our popular floor pillow products and market them as floor pillows for schools , or floor pillows for libraries …we actually had a school library purchase a few from us and it got us thinking that maybe that is a well we should tap.
The quandry is how do you even target that specific market? If a school is going to look for floor pillows for example, are they going to do a search for Floor Pillows in general, or floor pillows for schools? I imagine kids sitting on our square floor pillows and reading books at the library. How do we get those kids sitting on those pillows? Maybe I should take a marketing class and get educated on it.
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