Personal

Articles here tend to be more focused on my personal experience, history and stories relating to eCommerce.

Headaches, Stress & Competition

by Darren on April 22, 2012

It’s been a busy few weeks in my world of eCommerce and focus has been dragged from this blog on to more pressing matters I’m afraid, hence the lack of updates.

Sorry…

What follows is a ridiculously long winded account of my recent troubles.

2012: Progress So Far

After a great start to 2012 in terms of sales and revenues for my ecommerce site things began to quieten off a little in March. Nothing too major, but despite website traffic remaining at decent levels, there seemed a marked drop in enquiries.

My revenue / profit target for March was eventually met, however this was more due to a few bigger orders finally completing than anything else.

April started really quiet as well and half way through I was staring at the possibility of the single worst month since records began! (Well for the last 2 and a half years anyway.)

Having spent much time analysing performance, checking competitors and re-looking at my own pricing decisions led to some uncomfortable conclusions.

What’s Gone Wrong?

Anyone who has been in the eCommerce game for a while understands that there is a ton of stuff to look after, in no way can you simply upload products, set pricing and then sit back and relax, it just doesn’t work like that.

Well, I guess if I’m brutally honest I think I kind of took my eye off the ball with some pricing decisions I’d implemented at the end of last year.

Blog Updates Feb 2012

by Darren on February 6, 2012

Things have been a little quiet on the eCommerce blog for the last week or so and for that I apologise.

I have made some progress with the blog though, firstly we have a new design which I feel is far superior to the old look. Along with the design we have been able to incorporate some better styling elements in posts which will make them even better!

For anyone interested I use the excellent Thesis framework for the blog which is a really powerful wordpress implementation and leads to nice looking and coded sites.

Over the next few months I aim to expand on what I’m calling our foundation articles, these are more informative posts which explain a concept or procedure in more detail, all with an eCommerce angle of course.

Getting Your First Sale

by Darren on November 24, 2011

Are you planning your first ecommerce site? Maybe you’re bogged down in the day to day process of running your site and need a lift? Here’s a little post to give you some inspiration or a fond smile of remembrance…

It was winter 2008 and I was sat in front of my computer tinkering with my website for the hundredth time that week, loading products, rewriting descriptions, really important stuff.

Suddenly the phone rang, probably just the wife asking what we are doing for tea, how wrong I was.

A lady was on the other end of the line enquiring about some of our products, turns out she had found our website through Google, and was interested in one of our monitor arrays.

To be honest I can’t remember if this was the first sales enquiry I had taken or not, it seems like such a long time ago now.

Anyhow, after having a chat with her for a few minutes she said ‘Okay, I’d like to order one of those please.’

The sheer joy I felt was immense, I really didn’t know what to say to her, I couldn’t tell her she was my first ever sale, it might have changed her mind!

Anyway I stumbled through taking the order details and completed my first ever sale, woo hoo! A 19” Dual Monitor Array and a USB to VGA adapter for a grand total of £545.00.

It didn’t matter that I had not put any real thought into how I was going to get the thing packaged up and delivered, those were just small details to iron out…

If you’re contemplating starting an ecommerce website then take heart, it’s a long slog at times but with perseverance you get through it to times like that, and trust me, it’s well worth it.

If you currently have your nose to the grindstone wondering why on earth you bothered inflicting all this hassle on yourself then think back to your first sale. It was a pretty good day wasn’t it?

Why not share your memories in the comments.

My Ecommerce History

by Darren

Obviously if I’m writing and publishing articles on an ecommerce blog then I guess it would help if I knew something about ecommerce really… My first encounter with ecommerce came in 2005 although I had been developing websites in other fields for a few years before that. It was through my local SEO consultancy business [...]

Customers Don’t Always Know Best