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Financially speaking probably one of the bigger ouches I felt was that first initial website. We were new, we were right on the leading gleaming edge of the internet and that first site cost over $30,000.00 and that you know hurt. It took a few years to recover from that but you know I just kept going with it because I knew it was right.
Your website has to communicate the brand and that is in it is all about Red Ox when you look at what you see online is what you get. It is what it is. We have lots of pictures from all around the world, our customers tend to travel a lot and even if they do not travel a lot they live very active life styles.
Having that willingness to let your companies true nature to come through it just speaks to a kind of authenticity and integrity that web shopper’s grave. Let us talk about a ten second acid test that you can put your e-commerce website through. Pull up the homepage; take ten seconds to imagine what kinds of customers shop at this website. Can you recognize yourself on those customers? The combination of security, programming expertise and focused on the shopping and customer experience are all things that e-commerce firms ought to bring to the table on the way that a web design firm did all kinds of websites may not have that focus.
You need to be involved with your website directly and that is one of the things that I really like about my site. I am in the back into my site everyday. I need to change the price, I need to change the description, I need to turn it off when it sells out. If you can not do those things to yourself these days forget it?
One of the things that if you are trying to evaluate your web master or trying to find a web partner to work with, an important criteria is do they have that attitude of test? Test again, test again and succeed, test again and succeed widely. So that opportunity to learn from your mistakes and learn from what did not work as well and do it better the next time I think is integral to the web because it does have that on going nature to it.
The web is the ultimate nitch tool, I mean it allows you to position your nitch and then because the connectivity of it all your friend or your customer who lives in Minneapolis e-mails a page to Holland to his somebody there in from grad school. All of a sudden your shipping packages to Holland and then the guy in Holland e-mails a gentleman in London and it just starts to move. It is a web it is all connected.
A business owner wants to make friends with search engines. You look at it as an opportunity to introduce your company to hundreds of would be shopper’s everyday. So then just focused again on a page not just a site, people say how is your site ranked? Now it is how is this page ranked? We have tapped into a data base that shows to what kind of words people use to search out products that relevant to the Red Ox company. Red Ox came back and put together an informative page how you can get the maximum amount in your bag, how to pack to carry on, to fit within the size requirements of airlines and within a matter of five days after releasing that article they ranked number three on Google.
The difference from most business owners is they put in a page search or a paper click ad and they are right there on the top and the link is there but every click through debits their credit card and it becomes this case of trying to figure out how much it cost for every click coming through.
Red Ox is an example of a company that is put in place a system where every click through that article is bringing dollars in the door. So we did an analysis of that maximum size carry-on luggage article and on a per visit basis people coming through discovering the company, there is a dollar sales that translates to $5 for every visit in sales.
Obviously you know we look like we are a lot bigger than we are on the internet that is another plus that the internet will give you is you can project an image that looks like you are a 20 million dollar a year business and still be riding you know the million dollar a year business.
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