How to Launch a Successful eCommerce Web Site From Home
Jennifer Fallon
jennifer@myweddingfavors.com
In January 2004, my husband Brad and I launched our first online store using a $50 per month Yahoo Store. After we built the store and I entered our initial products, we sold over $10,000 our first month. But by April we had over $80,000 in monthly sales and had to find a warehouse to hold our inventory. By May, our sales had reached $132,000.
By June, we were bringing in over $150,000 per month and had to upgrade our warehouse, and now we have a full-time staff of six #150; but I still work at home. Our gross sales have already reached $1 million.
One thing I know for sure is that despite the setbacks of the 1990s, you can still open an eCommerce business and have it be a huge success. But there are some factors to consider when you are getting started.
Step 1: Find a High Demand Niche MarketBrad and I were married in May of 2003. I wanted to be able to have children and stay at home, but without giving up my income. I had a corporate software sales job with a lot of travel. The initial idea for my new business came to me when I was planning my own wedding and was looking for place card holders for our reception. As I surfed the web looking for wedding favors and place card holders, I thought to myself . . . what a great internet business #150; wedding favors. People are looking to purchase large quantities for the entire guest list, and you can#146;t exactly walk into a store and buy 150 personalized candles. Plus there are so many items on your wedding planning checklist and it#146;s ideal to be able to go to the internet on a Sunday night in your pajamas and knock an item off the list.
We decided to do more research on this online market and, using the free #147;Search Term Suggestion Tool#148; at
www.overture.com
, we found that over 100,000 people per month are searching for the term #147;wedding favors#148;. That#146;s high demand! Of course when I typed that in myself, I was a bit concerned about the amount of competition but I knew the concept was good; I knew it had potential. My husband has experience in helping web site owners get their web site to the top of the search engines. That#146;s called Search Engine Optimization, so it seemed that an online business selling wedding products was going to be a great fit.
Having a great idea is a lot different from making that idea happen. I knew very little about retail and certainly had a lot to learn about the wedding favor market. Our first step was getting our retail tax ID and seeing if I could find products. The most challenging part of this was going to be product pricing. Since brides are purchasing for an entire guest list, the price point is extremely important; most people are not going to pay more than a few dollars per favor. So I headed off to the wholesale Atlanta Mart, looked around and took home over 40 catalogs from different gift wholesalers.
That was the fun part! Every night after work I would go through the catalogs and mark which products I thought would work as a wedding favor. The next step was to build the website, which was a Yahoo store. Templates are provided, software is provided, and the shopping cart is provided. The majority of work was going to be taking pictures of the products and writing the website content and the descriptions. We wrote all the descriptions for the products and then had a sample of each product that we photographed on tablecloths just as they might appear on reception tables. So after a lot of long nights and weekends, we had a website! Now what?
Step 2: When you have what people want...make sure they know about it.100,000 people a month may be searching for what we were selling but how were we going to be found. That is where my husband and I began to strategize with this new business. Brad had been experimenting with different techniques to get a web site a higher ranking in the search engines. Brad put into practice some theories he had developed as one of the leading experts in the search engine field. We started moving up in the search results almost immediately. We first noticed we were coming up on page 3 on Google, kept working at it and the next thing we knew, our web site, myweddingfavors.com, was coming up in the #1 slot on Yahoo! and #2 on Google when somebody was searching for #147;wedding favors#148;.
Very shortly thereafter our profits started to soar. We went from 6-10 orders a day to 50-60 orders a day selling over $160,000 per month! Our little side business was now a million dollar business with 6 employees. It was quite comical #150; we went from having a few products in our basement with my retired father helping with shipping to a large warehouse with 6 employees. There were many growing pains, but I still work from home.
I think that our success is mostly due to search engine marketing. Think about it#151;people perform a web search for a product when they are ready to buy it. It#146;s the best form of targeted marketing there is. In our case the word #147;wedding#148; is the fifth most commonly searched phrase on the Internet. It is searched for more than 3,000 times a month on Google alone. And out of more than 822,000 listed web sites that sell wedding favors, our site comes up well ahead of our competition. The power of advertising using search engine marketing has proven to be so powerful to us that it is now our primary form of marketing and advertising. And Brad has gone on to start his own company devoted to creating high search engine rankings for web sites, SEO Research.
Step 3: Know when to outsource
I originally started this business as a sideline endeavor. It quickly started to take over my life. One of the first lessons I had to learn was that if my business was to remain a success, I couldn#146;t do it all by myself. Orders were piling up (which was a good thing). But there was no way I could handle order processing, shipping, bookkeeping, and still maintain a high level of customer service. And I believe quality customer service makes the real difference in this kind of business.
In an Internet environment, a customer will have a certain anxiety level dealing with a business they have never seen with their own eyes. This is why you must go the extra step when it comes to keeping your customers happy. I realized that in order to do this, I had to outsource the daily operational details of my business. I hired a full time staff of six people (including 2 of my relatives) to handle order processing, packing, shipping, customer service, etc. This freed my time to focus on searching for new and unique products. This also gave me the ability to keep a close watch on my manufacturing vendors to make sure product quality met my specifications. Even though this is an online company, certain basic components of good business practice still apply: quality products, attentive service and the ability to respond to customer requests with a personal touch.
Now that I have a #147;staff#148; to handle the more labor-intensive details, this is quickly becoming the work-at-home opportunity I dreamed of. I have the freedom to do the things I want in life, and the satisfaction of owning my own business. While I would never say that running this type of company is easy (because it isn#146;t), I do know that it can be intensely rewarding and personally satisfying. If you#146;re looking for a home-based business with a high-yield potential, then I highly recommend eCommerce as the way to build your path to success.
Jennifer Fallon runs her own home-based business, My Wedding Favors,
www.myweddingfavors.com
. Jennifer works from home 4 days a week using the internet and phone to manage her 6 employees.
Brad Fallon founded SEO Research, the scientific search engine authority with proven strategies to deliver top rankings. Brad used his knowledge of search engine marketing to help Jennifer propel www.myweddingfavors.com into a million dollar a year enterprise #150; in the first nine months. More information about Brad and SEO Research can be found at
www.seoresearch.com
and Brad#146;s blog at
www.bradfallon.com
. To see the story of My Wedding Favors and learn how you can get your web site to the top of the search engines, visit
www.instantseoexpert.com
. Permission granted for use on DrLaura.com.
