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.
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.
The Push for new Products
May 20, 2008 at 11:28 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: dog beds, new products, read in bed pillow
I’m really motivated to get some new products up on our site. The nice thing is that many of our drop shippers are in a transitions where there R & D departments are coming up with new products. So I don’t have to go out and find new companies and I already have an account set up. Last night we added a new Bedrest or Read in Bed Pillow product. What’s unique about this item is that its an arm pillow filled with a cushy shredded foam. Like many of our other floor pillows and bean bags, the foam filled items do pretty well and they’re quality products that last a long time. I personally love the shredded foam products because they are comfortable. My only criticism of them is that sometimes they can look chunky instead of smooth…but the bigger issue is comfort and they work well in that regard.
I’m also trying to bring more credibility to our dog bed line. So in addition to adding more dog beds this week and next, I created a dog bed information lens on Squidoo. I hope it helps get more traffic to our site for dog bed seekers. We are up against so much competition in that area that we need to find alternative ways to have people find us.
New Bean Bags
May 19, 2008 at 4:27 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bags, dog beds
A critical product line to the success of My Pillow Place is our Bean Bags. At one point, we had our product splash page on the 3rd page of Google and we were climbing. That was great and I thought that we would be on the first page in no time as long as I kept getting links and optimizing those pages. Well, for some reason, that page has dropped so far on the list of organic searches that I need to do something drastic to get that page back in the fold. I mean, the web pages that are coming in the search results ahead of me, at some point, are completely irrelevant to the search…web pages for bean bag toss games are showing up ahead of me….ridiculous.
So, I went ahead and redesigned our bean bags page. I’ve added some products and and redirected focus on some of our other products. I think this will help get some more exposure to a lot of our products that just never get seen. We’re also looking to add more products to our dog beds line because that is a tough market to crack and we need a more robust product selection.
May has started out like gang busters in terms of sales…but all of a sudden, over the last few days, things have slowed tremendously. Can’t figure out why.
New Niche
April 19, 2008 at 1:08 am | In online retailing | 1 CommentTags: dog beds
Since we added Dog Beds to My Pillow Place , I didn’t think that would see any traffic or sales for these items for a long, long time. But we’ve been getting a few dog bed searches. Mostly for longer tail keyword phrases. But the pages have been indexed quickly and showing up in some of the results. We sold our first dog bed recently. It was a medium sized flat dog bed and the customer was actually a repeat customer.
Its nice to get repeat customers because it means you did a good job the first time around. We are not found for Dog Beds on Google yet, so it makes sense that our first sale would be from a repeat customer who originally bought a different type of product. Pet products are an extremely competitive niche and it might be a long while before we get a decent foothold.
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