New Years Day
January 2, 2008 at 10:37 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: big floor pillows, floor pillow, keywords, My Pillow Place
When I look back on 2007, as a whole, we exceeded a lot of our expectations for My Pillow Place. We finished the year really strong and I was pleased at our push at the end of December.
As we begin 2008, we anticipate an even better year. Having our top keywords for Big Floor Pillows appearing on the first page of Google in the last few days, we’ve already seen a difference in traffic and sales. This is great to start the new year knowing it will be a strong one. Well, at least I think I know it will be a strong one.
Bed Pillows
October 15, 2007 at 11:56 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bed pillow, bedlounge, floor pillow
I spent some time adding a new, luxury bed pillow to our site. Although I don’t want Bed Pillows to be the focus of our business, I don’t mind having a decent selection. After all, when I think of pillows, I think of bed pillows first.
We just got a new pillow supplier on board to drop ship for us. This will add to our meager decorative pillow selection. We’re getting a decent amount of decorative pillow searches, but I don’t think we’re providing what people are looking for. So, we will be expanding our selection over the next week. I will have to spend some time building these new pages, but I feel that it will add to our product line overall. The supplier says these items sell well, so I’m hoping that is true for us as well.
This month has been weird because we’ve been selling a lot of items that we normally don’t sell a lot of and we’re selling less of what we do sell a lot of. For instance, we’ve only sold a couple of BedLounge Read in Bed Pillows, and Comfort U body pillows , but this month, those products are moving. We’re selling less floor pillows which are usually our hottest item. Maybe some products are seasonal, even if you wouldn’t think they would be.
October is well below our average for the last 3 months, but we’re doing ok. I think of how poor last year was and it makes me feel that much better about how this October is going. I’ve been using a little more pay per click advertising in Google as I wait for some of our keywords to rise in the SERPs…it has been paying off.
Back to Pay Per Click
September 19, 2007 at 11:20 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bag, floor pillow, soft furniture
In the last post, I brought about the frustrating trust of inconsistency. Traffic has been down, even though keyword positions are generally good. I wanted to bring in new batch of potential customers, but I hate paying for traffic. I bit the bullet and turned on my Google Adwords ads anyway. I figure, I can spend a few dollars today. I turned on my old ads for Floor Pillows and Bean Bags.
Well, it paid off quickly. We got a floor pillow sale this morning. Its not always bad…my pay per click targets were misguided early on. I used to target really general words like bed pillow. There are many different types of bed pillows, so that was mostly a waste…I think, early on, I spent tons of money on bed pillow ads just to get 1 or 2 sales out of it. I had to narrow down the focus, because people who are ready to buy are looking for specific things, not general categories.
I also want to address the issue of abandoned shopping carts. For some reason, Wednesdays seem to be our abandoned shopping cart day. We had one today and last Wednesday. You never know why someone enters all their information into your website forms and then gets to the final page and decides to leave it. Sometimes people don’t see the submit button at the very bottom of the page. And I suspect that sometimes people learn the total cost after shipping gets included and say…”whoa, that’s too much!’
Whatever the reason, abandoned orders stink because you think of what could have been. Especially if the sale is large. My website doesn’t not allow the customer to view their shipping charges till you get to the very last page, and that really stinks. It may have saved some sales for us.
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