Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

It was right about this time last year that our new business saw a flurry of sales and we started to get excited about the possibility of what our online store could bring us.  When I say flurry, that is in comparison to what had been happening from October 2006 to about November 15th 2006 which was almost nothing.  I think during that month and a half period last year, we saw about 7 sales…frustration was setting in.

My Pillow Place was still relatively new.  We had just added a new supplier of oversized floor pillows and other soft furniture. Since these products were new to us, these product pages weren’t about to show up in the search engines that fast.  They weren’t even indexed yet and I did not have the knowledge then that I have now about how to quickly get pages indexed. 

Well, based on the fact that a year later, we have more products, better keyword positions and a better selection of quality products than we did just one short year ago, I expected us to see a lot more activity.  And don’t get me wrong, we’ve had more sales, more visitors and we seem to be on a good pace as we approach Cyber Monday.   But so far, this month feels like each of the last few months.  Our traffic has grown slightly.  I guess I expected more.  I can’t really judge the online shopping season until the holidays are offer, but every month you just strive to do better and when it seems sluggish, it can be frustrating.

Sometimes I think that maybe we picked the wrong market niche.  This business would be a great supplement if we had 2 or 3 online stores.  But as our only store currently, I want so much more out of it.   There are areas we can improve.  We have some keyword positions that could be better.  Google could be helping us a bit more.  And then there’s the fact that the economy, gas prices and housing market are making things sluggish for everyone.

We’re just doing our best as we can now.  We’ll see how things go as we move into next week.  I’m taking some days off new week from my day job and hope that I can research some new marketing methods to get more traffic to visit us.  The good thing is, we’ve had quite a few fabric sample requests…hopefully they come back to buy once they figure out which fabrics they like.