Father’s Day
June 16, 2008 at 7:40 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: ottoman, soft furniture
It always amazes me when we get sales on days that I think people won’t be near a computer like today…Fathers Day 2008…It is the middle of the month and May has proven to be just an average month. Not too great, but not horrific either (in terms of sales).
I had an epiphany recently and I decided that our decorative pillow section was a pointless niche for us. And it could be for a number of reasons. The most important being that our selection was poor. We just couldn’t find a good supplier of quality decorative throw pillows. So, I nixed that from our site and I turned the decorative pillow section into a soft chair and ottomans page. This works perfectly for us because we’re desperately trying to advance into the soft furniture market. And when adding foam furniture and bean bag chairs, we’re slowly growing that collection. I haven’t really even added any product to those pages except for placeholder pages as I create the new product web pages. But it will help to get the ottoman splash page indexed faster if I put it up now.
Leap Year
February 29, 2008 at 12:52 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: casual seating, leap day sale, soft furniture
February being the shortest month of the year, it is nice to have an extra day to get as many sales as possible. We’ve had a decent month this past February. We’re starting to become a little more consistent in getting sales. We’ve had about 3 days this month where we had no sales at all. Our casual seating seems to be the area that is getting us the most traffic and sales at this time.
I’ve decided to turn on our pay per click ads for the day to see if I can’t generate a higher volume of people who need/want bean bags and other soft furniture products. February has been good, but it certainly wasn’t as good as our January or December. I think the economy is hurting us. But it’s hurting everyone.
I haven’t decided yet, but we might run a Leap Day Sale tomorrow which will allow customers to get an automatic 5% off by entering a code in our order form. It might be a good way to finish the month strong.
Christmas Eve
December 25, 2007 at 3:42 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bags, childrens floor pillows, Christma, oversized pillows, soft furniture
Well, my prediction that our sales would slow dramatically after the reasonable shipping time passed came true. We’ve had one sale since the 20th…and I’m guessing it wasn’t meant to be a gift. Still…we’ve had our best month so far…and we still have some time left. I think we still could get some sales after Christmas Day.
One great gift that Google gave us today was that our oversized floor pillow page now rests on the first page in Google for the keywords Floor Pillow and Floor Pillows. This is exciting because if we can have it stay there for awhile, January 2008 might be very good for My Pillow Place….
On a sad note, Bean Bags continue to fall in Yahoo…and I will dedicate the rest of this week to get Yahoo to love us again….Merry Christmas!
Switching to Overdrive
November 17, 2007 at 12:46 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: cyber monday, floor pillows, online holiday shopping, soft furniture
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.
Since Last Year…
October 12, 2007 at 1:05 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bed pillows, october sales., soft furniture
Last Year in October, we literally only had 2 sales. We made so little that month that we didn’t even cover our meager operating costs. Then we added an 800 number to My Pillow Place and the very next day things started advancing. We think people started to feel more secure about buying from us because they could now call if they had any questions or problems.
11 days into October 2007, we’re doing a lot better than the October of last year. Again, more exposure, trust and products have allowed us to get more traffic and sales.
We’ve been contacting new companies to try and get some new products on our site before the holidays hit. We’ve added a new line of washable and long lasting bed pillows. The company sent us some samples and these pillows are nice. They are guaranteed to never flatten.
As it has come to pass, we have limited the exposure of bed pillows on our site and concentrated more on pillows that can function as furniture and decoration. We watched a competitor of ours go out of business because all he sold was different kinds of bed pillows. There just wasn’t a sustainable market for that line of products. We want to be able to sell a few bed pillows here and there while we become a successful business moving in the direction of soft furniture.
I read an article in Yahoo today about how retailers saw poor sales in September. High energy prices and the poor housing market have lead to people being more cautious as to where their disposable income is going.
I don’t blame them. I’ve watched as my Chicago area political leaders are proposing sales tax increases and property tax increases…increases on bottled water and alchohol…soon Chicagoland will be the most expensive place to live and its ridiculous. But I digress.
I am still watching my keyword positions go wacky in Yahoo and Google….up and down….I’m always trying to get the top spot…my bean bag page has been listed as high as 13 and as low as 20 in the last 2 weeks…just move up to the first page, will ya? And stay there.
All in all, our goal is to get more product on the site and maybe branch out into other soft furniture areas. We’re looking at new companies to supply us with various products. We’re also looking to change the background of our site because I’m sick of looking that those clouds. I think it would give our site a more comtemporary look if we ditched the clouds. What do you think?
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