Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

Just yesterday we hit a milestone in visitors to www.mypillowplace.com.  We went over 8000 visitors this month and we still have 2 days to go before July turns into August.  That’s great.  Seeing your daily traffic go from 1-5 people per day when we launched to between 250-350 now, it makes you feel like your hard work is paying off.  Sales are a little slow because of the economy, but its nice to know people are browsing and may bookmark us and return at a later time to make a purchase.

We go through weird phases where we’ll sell a bunch of bed pillows one week and the next week none…lately we’ve been selling latex pillows and last week it was bedlounge read in bed pillows.  Its also strange how we sell by region…like we’ll get a bunch of sales from California, and then the next week, we’ll get a few from Florida…its odd how it changes like that.  It must have something to do with the datacenters and where their located.

The weekend was brutal.  Traffic and sales were down a lot.  But as this week has gone along, its picked up a little. It was ok, but certainly didn’t make up for the poor weekend…We sold a few Bean Bags and a few floor pillows, nothing to write home about.  But, due to the time allowed us by this slowdown, we’re going to be adding a few new products this week and next including a padded seat cover and another type of foam filled chair.

Also, one good thing happened last weekend.  I finally got full control over the URL www.mypillowplace.com.  Now, I can tell people to go right to my pillow place dot com instead of explaining that you have to insert the hyphens.  Its a pain to always have to explain the hypens.  I purchased the domain and put a permanent 301 redirect on it and it makes my life much easier.

The oddest thing has happened…The first part of July 2008 felt pretty good…Sales and traffic were sailing along at a good pace.  All of a sudden, July 15th hits and its like were standing still.  Traffic is still up however…we’re now consistently receiving over 300 visitors every day.  This should break our personal best monthly traffic of 7950 from last December.  The odd thing is that sales have slowed…we haven’t made any major changes to price or structure, so its hard to tell if this is anything other than an economic force working against us.  We’re thinking of posting a coupon code this weekend in order to boost sales.

Recently, we’ve acquired the Domain URL www.mypillowplace.com. Our Website www.my-pillow-place.com has been good to us, but it becomes cumbersome to keep telling people, “we’re at my pillow place dot com, but put hyphens between the words.”  Someone has owned the non-hyphenated version for 2 years and that person did nothing with the domain…so I waited the long 2 years and just acquired it.  I also wanted to have in our possession because I want to protect our business name.

Aside from that, I’ve had to make adjustments to the website because we’re slowly changing the format of our site to streamline information to customers.  My theory is, the more information you can give is helpful, but don’t write paragraphs of information because people just don’t want to read all of that.  The internet is a “skimming and factoid driven entity.

One thing that is affecting everyone in the US is the price of gas.  As a business owner, and one that uses FedEx and UPS to get products to the customers, the cost of gas is killing everyone.  What we’re seeing is that people have less disposable income because of the necessity of gas to get where we need to go.  So, naturally businesses such as ours will see a decline in sales, even though the number of visitors is increasing every month.  The second thing is that when we ship products via FedEx and UPS, they are now adding in expensive gas surcharges which are eating away at our profits. 

Most of our products ship for free, so every order that ships across the country is getting fleeced with gas surcharges and hurting us.  If we were to decide to pass that cost on to the customers (which we haven’t) we would be looking at even slower sales.  I just keep hoping that somehow, there is some gas price relief and things go back to the way they were.  Unfortunately, its possible that we may never see $2.50 gas ever again.  And on top of that, where I live near Chicago, we now have the highest sales tax rate in the nation…over 10%…we have Todd Stroeger to thank for that who decides that increasing taxes as opposed to cutting spending on frivolous government programs is the better way to go…but I digress…I usually don’t get political, but I’m getting irritated. 

I will end with this note (my last political statement) Illinois has produced the most corrupt politicians I’ve ever seen…

On a lighter note, I’ve updated some of our floor pillow pages in terms of format and fabric selection…specifically our round floor pillows and rectangular floor pillows .