New Technique
August 25, 2008 at 8:51 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentI’ve done an experiment to help me get a little traction for our bean bag products. This line of products is critical to the future success of My Pillow Place. Our website, www.my-pillow-place.com has the words pillow in it. I think that the keyword in the domain may play a part in how well our website is listed in the search engines. Pillow is prominently featured. Well, I’ve just purchased 2 URLs. One is www.mybeanbagplace.com and the other is www.my-bean-bag-place.com. After purchasing these domains, I put a redirect on them so that they point to our bean bag pages. I have 2 different pages listed with similar products and differing text. I made 2 because I thought the first one may have been having trouble getting listed. Our bean bag splash was at one time all the way on the 8th page of Google and the 2nd page of Yahoo for the keywords “bean bags”, on for some reason they’ve both fallen. This experiment will check if the URLs that have Keywords in them, have any bearings on the placement of our site in the SERPs. The links in this page will help the search engines find these new URLs quickly.
Eco Furniture
August 24, 2008 at 11:07 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: buckwheat bean bags, eco furniture
I’ve spent this weekend organizing the recently added Eco Products on our website. Beginning last week when I added some furniture that was made from recycled materials. This week, I’ve added buckwheat hull bean bags. I’ve also reorganized some of our other eco friendly products into an environmentally friendly furniture environmentally friendly furniture splash page so that can promote those items better. Before today, those products were just scattered throughout the website.
I’ve finally cut ties with one of our suppliers because their customer service was beyond awful. This is a company that found us online and asked us to sell their products. They promised that if we submitted an order before 1pm CST, the item would leave their facility the same day. That happened for about a month, then it was a struggle to get tracking numbers and we would have to chase them down to make sure the item shipped. They never followed up with us and it was totally frustration. This happened for the last time last week, and I finally took their products down. If you have an online business and one of your suppliers is difficult, its not worth using them.
Severe Slowdown
August 21, 2008 at 9:06 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bags, dog beds, new products
Over the last 4 days we’ve seen a severe drop in Sales…and a mild drop in visitors. It gets frustrating when, for seemingly no reason, everything just stops. When you’re a business and just trying to turn a profit, days like this can be mind-numbing. What’s worse is when it perpetuates itself for a few days…
We’ve used this time to get www.my-pillow-place.com caught up with the behind the scenes stuff that encompasses any business, such as invoicing and filing. The boring stuff, as I like to call it.
I’ve failed to add a new product this week, but today being Thursday, I plan on having a new product on the site before Sunday night…maybe 2 if I work quickly. I also really need to spend time optimizing for our dog bed line and our bean bag line…I’ve come up with some new methonds on how to improve our listings for these two niches which seem to have trouble getting listed high. The competition is tough, but always try to improve.
Going Green
August 13, 2008 at 12:05 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: Eco Friendly Furniture, My Pillow Place Coupon Codes
One of our drop shippers has created a new line of eco-friendly furniture products. So we’ve decided to create a new eco-friendly furniture section on our website. Since we only have these products, which ends up being 4 different items on one product page, I have the home page linked directly to the products. As I add more environmentally conscious products to our site, I will create a splash page with a variety of products; similar to our other sections.
What I’ve also found is that after 2 days of running our adwords campaigns for dorm furniture, we’ve gotten no sales out of it…My hope is that we make a few sales to pay for the week of ads and make a little bit more as profit. But I’ve committed to running ads for 5 days and that is what I will do.
We’ve also put out a coupon code for the month of August that we’ve given to our customers who have signed up to receive emails from us. Its always nice to send emails to people who are on your mailing list and let them know that you still exist and that you may have some new products that they may love and for your trouble, here is a discount code.
For the Month of August, the 8th Month of the year, you can receive an 8% discount on your order by typing:
Summer1314
into the appropriate box on the order form. This coupon code will be deactivated on August 31st. We usually email coupon codes to our mailing list 3-4times per year.
Back to the environmental furniture. What I like about these items is that they are made out of items such as recycled soda bottles and polystyrene which if thrown into landfills would never bio-degrade. So instead of polluting our environment, this stuff is turned into comfortable and attractive soft furniture pieces. Thumbs up!
Back to School
August 11, 2008 at 12:18 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: back to school, bean bags, Dorm Furniture
Its back to school time, so like we did a year ago, we’ve started to push the back to college, decorate your dorm room stuff to those who need it. We’ll be running a week long adwords campaign to target customers who need dorm room furnishings. On top of that, we’ll be offering a few products at a lower price point for a short time. I’ve also finally upated the fabrics on our Classic Bean Bag and Dorm Bean Bag items. We’ve also taken a few dollars off of our Big Joe Bean Bag Floor Pillow because we’ve noticed that there have been a lot of searches specifically for the Big Joe, however sales have been lower than hoped of that quality product.
I’ve noticed that gas prices have started to drop and I hope that helps the economy because we would like to see some growth in ours and other business as we make the push into the 4th quarter of the year. It would be nice to have a good sales holiday. My goal of adding a new product every week has slowed because it is a big commitment to work. On top of that, I want to make sure that the products we add are good quality products that we would want to use ourselves. So, if its a little less than one a week, then that is fine. But I would like to have many more products added before the end of 2008.
I see you checking out the Fav Button…Click it!
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
