Adam McFarland

Several months back I built an email follow-up system for Detailed Image that sends an email to our customers two weeks after their purchase.  In addition to checking in with them to see if they received their products in a timely manner, it also asks them to write a product review for each product they ordered.  The email provides direct links to the product review pages for the specific products.

However, the reviews were intentionally buried a bit on the site.  We wanted to have a substantial amount before making them part of the buying process, as so many successful e-commerce sites do these days.  In addition to the reviews, we also needed a way to convey any detailing packages we sell that included the item the customer was looking at.  For example, if you’re buying a wax it’s helpful to know the various packages we offer that include that wax and other supplementary items.  It makes the customer more aware of what we have available in relation to the product they’re looking for, which hopefully leads to them making a better purchasing decision.

So we mimicked the “tab” format that sites like CircuitCity.com and Newegg use so well:

We’re hoping that changes like this improve the buying process for the customer and in turn increase our conversion rate.  I’ll be implementing the same feature - with a few modifications - tomorrow on Tastefully Driven.

Certainly not a major overhaul, but just another example of micro-innovating, constantly improving our sites and our business.   It also helps lay the groundwork for the complete shopping cart overhaul that we’re looking to do at some point in ‘09.

One of our Tastefully Driven vendors recently contacted us to see if we were ready to re-order their products yet.  We’ve placed one other re-order since the launch of the site, but overall their products haven’t sold very well compared to other brands.  We don’t have a ton in stock, but they’re moving so slow that we’re certainly not inclined to re-order at this point.  So, we bluntly told them as much.

Their response?  Push the product more.  Give out samples, hold contests, give some away to bloggers in the industry.  Not bad ideas, but the premise is that WE need to push THEIR products.   Thing is, their product is very up-and-coming and does not have the name brand recognition that our other lines do. We rank multiple times in the top 10 in Google for all of their products.  Our main disappointment in sales isn’t because we haven’t pushed their product enough (hell, we’ve hardly pushed any of the products on TD), it’s that their isn’t more of an existing demand for their products.

Don’t get me wrong - it was our choice to carry the line and the responsibility lies with us to research the demand for a product before selling it. We’re just disappointed that the existing demand for it isn’t stronger.  Who knows, maybe it will pick up and we’ll capitalize on our solid rankings.

Which got me to thinking - there are really two types of products that we can pick up:  push products or pull products.  Push products, like the one described above, are products that we have to push on to our customers through newsletters, mailings,  announcements in the blog, on-site cross-product upsells, or other promotions.  Customers have never heard of the product, so we’re relying on ourselves to sell them on it.  Pull products are products that have such an existing demand that by adding them to our shopping cart we automatically generate sales due to their auto-inclusion in our product feeds and on our extremely SEO-friendly site (a large portion of TD products already rank top 10 in Google without us really doing anything).  Any pushing we do is just an added bonus.

Why would anyone want to carry a push product?  IF you have a built in audience that listens to you, push products give you the power to push the products you want to sell.  Maybe it’s your own brand with a higher margin, or a brand new product that you have exclusive rights to.  A site like Detailed Image for example, has 3+ years of forum presence in the (relatively) small auto-detailing community.  Everyone knows “George and Greg from Detailed Image” and therefore they have the ability to push products.  If they tell people that a new polish or wax is better, people will listen…at least initially.  If there are two comparable products and they decide to support one over another for any number of reasons, customers will likely listen and buy the brand they recommend.

Tastefully Driven is only a few months old.  It’s not in a niche like auto detailing.  Maybe someday we’ll have that kind of loyal audience, maybe we won’t.  It’s two different types of businesses and that’s fine. One thing is clear:  for new sites or sites built to generate sales via search like TD, you had better do your research and pick up only pull products.  Taking advantage of existing demand is far easier than creating the demand.  Otherwise it’ll just remain sitting on your shelves collecting dust while you’re wishing you had that money available to pick up a more popular line of products.

Earlier this year we were getting crushed with customer service contacts.  Particularly with Detailed Image, but also to a lesser extent with SportsLizard.  It became apparent that emails and phone calls were becoming a full time job and that we either needed to A) find a way to reduce contacts, or B) hire someone to handle customer service.  In my previous life I actually tackled a similar project as an engineer on a much larger scale and was able to significantly reduce customer contacts without impacting sales or satisfaction.  So naturally, we gave option A a shot.

Before getting into exactly what we did and how, I want to preface everything with:  I do not recommend implementing this for a brand new site/business.  In the beginning it is important - especially as an owner - to have contact with as many potential customers as possible.  Your initial customers will likely give you important feedback about important adjustments you need to make to your business.  If you make it hard for them to contact you, I think you’re impeding your chances for success.

But after years and years of customer service, as is the case with both Detailed Image and SportsLizard, the same questions keep coming up and you just end up wasting your time copying and pasting the same response over and over.  For both your sake and the customers sake, making those answers readily available is a smart decision.

The Problems

We had three types of customer service contacts that were repetitive and time consuming:

1. Detailed Image emails - questions about what products to buy, where we ship to, shipping quotes, technical site questions, etc
2. Detailed Image phone calls - very time consuming.  The same questions as above, but dragged out over the course of 30 minutes or more many times, especially when discussing their cars and specifically how to detail them.  Now, these longer calls also generally resulted in large sales, so there was some risk involved.  However, in addition to the time spent on the phone we would also have to manually put the order through the website, which added an extra 5 - 15 minutes.  We knew it was worth it to take a stab at significantly reducing these.
3. SportsLizard emails - mostly about the Price Guide:  how to sign up, how to cancel, and how to get better prices.  Also, people emailing in customs for the gallery was very time consuming for me to post.

Our Solutions

There are more complex solutions to these problems than what we came up with.  We were trying to get the most bang for our buck.  No sense in spending a week programming a solution when you can spend an hour and get the same results.  If the results fell short, we probably would’ve gone back to the old contact pages and spent time developing a more complex question/answer system.

Detailed Image:

Greg put together a FAQ of the most common questions.  I turned it into a “drill down tree” FAQ to replace the contact page.  So instead of a contact form that included our email address and phone number, customers are presented with the following:

Which drills down like so:

At the end of certain “branches” we give our phone number and/or email address, only when necessary.

SportsLizard:

Replacing the contact form with a page that has the top 5 most common FAQs, a link to a regular FAQ page for the rest, and the text “I checked the Frequently Asked Questions and they did not answer my question.”, which then reveals the contact form.

To minimize the time it takes to post a custom, I created a custom submissions form.

The Results

Detailed Image:

For the email side of things, Greg reports a huge drop off in basic questions like “how do I log in to the site?” or “how do I get a shipping quote?”  We are attempting to quantify the improvement, but the data set is incomplete at this time (it’s hard to determine what exactly constitutes a “contact” via email so it takes quite a bit of work to comb back through emails and only count specific instances).   That said, contacts are definitely down.

The phone is where we’ve seen a HUGE improvement.  I went back and studied our bills for the past few months. In March we had 36 incoming calls and we checked our voicemail 16 voicemail times.  In June we had 2 incoming calls and checked our voicemail 15 times.  That’s a 94% reduction in incoming calls.  We went from handling almost two per business day to handling none.  That’s a lot of time saved.

It should be noted that an incoming call only happens when the phone is left on, and we’ve been turning our phone off with the exception of turning it on to check for voicemail occasionally.  Keeping the phone off has the added dual benefit of allowing us to stay focused without distractions, similar to keeping your inbox closed or IM off (for another post).  So the combination of  adding a FAQ section, making it harder to find our phone number, keeping the phone turned off, and steering customers to email via our voicemail message has essentially eliminating incoming calls.  On the rare occasion that we do get a voicemail, I’d say half of them have already been resolved by email or by the customer themself and don’t require a call back.

SportsLizard:

I haven’t tallied the data, but I’d estimate I went from about 5 customer service emails/day to about 2 emails/week, a huge improvement.  I really love making people click the link that says “I checked the Frequently Asked Questions and they did not answer my question.”  That extra step of forcing people to click the link makes them spend a minute really thinking about their problem and checking the FAQs before jumping in and contacting us.  I really like this solution and will definitely use it in the future on other sites.

On the customs side of things, I probably went from spending 2-3 hours a week posting in the gallery, to spending about 10 minutes a week approving submissions in the database.

Financially:

Detailed Image is continuing to exceed our expectations, with 100%+ growth each month compared to the same month in 2007. SportsLizard - despite my minimal effort - has seen an increase in paid subscribers to the Price Guide and an increase in ad revenue.

Customer Satisfaction:

No, we haven’t done a customer satisfaction survey, but here’s my opinion:  most customers don’t notice a difference, some customers are more satisfied because they get their answer immediately via FAQs or our detailing guides or other info on the sites, and a small minority are mildly inconvenienced because they want a person on the phone right now.  For some businesses that aren’t e-commerce, that minority would be a majority and a system like this wouldn’t make sense.

In our case, we’ve made a commitment to minimize unnecessary contacts and funnel the necessary ones to email.  We have received a few emails from people who complain that they can’t find a phone number.  In these cases, we either apologize and answer via email or pick up the phone and call if the situation warrants it.  The difference of course being that we’re the ones deciding whether or not a phone call is necessary.

While I’m sure we’ve lost a sale or two because it’s harder to find our contact information, we’ve more than made up for that in revenue generated from the time saved.   It’s OK not to appease everyone - we know that the majority of our customers are happy and praise our sites for having exceptional customer service.  We’re now able to get to the important customer service emails faster.   I personally will sacrifice the profit from one pain-in-the-ass, hold-my-hand customer for the free time to pursue customers that value our time and won’t bother us with unecessary emails/calls without first checking the site.

The bottom line:  it seems as if my hypothesis - that putting a customer service system in place would save time without sacrificing revenue or customer satisfaction - was a correct one.   

Last month we struck a deal for Detailed Image to sponsor Autopia.org, definitively the largest online community of auto detailers.  Clearly our target market for DI - a community that can exponentially increase our foothold in the detailing community.  The potential is very large.

Part of the sponsorship agreement included a 120 x 600 banner ad thrown into the rotation on the homepage.   George came up with the idea of having the banner show our automated Daily Special.  Autopia (like most sites) will pull your ad from an image or from Javascript.  So he approached me and asked me if it was possible for me to create said banner that updated daily as our specials updated.  I said yes, but I hadn’t done it before so I’d have to do some research.

In my research I basically found nothing.  No examples of anyone with a similar issue.  I’ve seen the end result before, but couldn’t find a tutorial to help me or even point me in the right direction.  It’s been a few weeks, but I wanted to make sure I came back to this and posted about it because sometime, somewhere, someone will have the exact same problem and hopefully this post will help.  I’m sure there are other (possibly better) ways to do this, but the technique below was what I came up with.  Since it’s gone live we’ve yet to have any issues.

Step 1 - Create the static portion of the banner

I had George and Mike create a PNG graphic of the portion of the banner that would remain unchanged.  You can layer any type of image with PHP, but our product pics are PNGs so I kept uniformity by using only PNGs for this process.

Step 2 - Create a PHP script to overlay Daily Special Image

I take the 500 x 500 image of the Daily Special product, re-size it to 100 x 100 using PHP function imagecreatetruecolor, and then overlay it using the PHP function imagecopymerge.

Step 3 - Create a PHP script to write the HTML and CSS using Javascript

This might be a bit confusing.  I created a PHP script that retrieves the information for the current special.  Once I have that information, I can write the product title and price with Javascript using the document.write function.

Even though this is a PHP page, it needs to be viewed by a browser as a Javascript page so you should to declare the page as a Javascript application using the PHP header function prior to outputting any text:

header(’Content-type: application/javascript’);

Now within the document.write function you can write the HTML/CSS for the banner like you normally would.  I created a div with a size of 120 x 600 and the background image being the image above.  From there I wrote and styled the text using CSS/HTML in the div.  I put a link around the div so the entire thing links back to Detailed Image. The end result is the text overlayed on top of the banner.

Step 4 - URL rewrite Step 3 as a Javascript file

The file above creates the Javascript, but can’t be called remotely as a Javascript file since it has a .php extension.  Thankfully, URL rewriting allows you to “change” a file named autopia_banner_javascript.php to autopia_banner.js.

Step 5 - Set up a Cron Job for the image generation

We’re almost done.  The Javascript file updates the title and the price each time it’s called, but the picture remains the same unless the script from Step 2 is executed.  We have our Daily Special change at midnight EST each night with a cron job.  I set up a cron job to run immediately after, which executes the PHP script from Step 2 and updates the image with the current special.

Step 6 - Include Javascript on a page to display the banner ad

Assuming the location of the javascript is http://www.detailedimage.com/banners/autopia_scripts.js, you can give anyone the following code to include it on their site:

 <script src=”http://www.detailedimage.com/banners/autopia_scripts.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Which produces:

And finally, the banner on Autopia:

Wohoo - success!

One of the great things about having partners in a fast-growing young start-up is that you get to see them grow as the company grows.  In the last two years Mike has really stepped up his game and become an A+ web designer.  Not only are his design and Photoshop skills great, but he has all of the other skills that differentiate a designer from a web designer:  his knowledge of HTML, CSS, SEO, browser requirements, email newsletter HTML/CSS requirements, etc are absolutely remarkable.

The growth can be seen by just comparing the aesthetics of Tastefully Driven vs. Detailed Image from the launch of our cart about a year ago.  Back then we also used too much of a collaborative design process instead of letting Mike “own” the design and utilize our input.  I think that gives him - or any designer - the creative freedom to come up with their best work.

Unfortunately the existing Detailed Image design - modified in January - leaves a lot to be desiered in the modern web world.  We have plans for a major overhaul (probably by early ‘09, although it might take longer because we also want to launch concurrently with some user-friendly AJAXy cart features), but in the meantime Mike has made a huge improvement to the homepage.  He plans on going through the entire site and modernizing the graphics and layout in similar fashion, which should be enough to not turn away customers for the time being (you can never be certain if design turns away customers, but it can certainly help add to your professional image).

Great job Mike - can’t wait to work on the next version of the cart!

As I mentioned last week, weekends have been our busiest time (which does seem counter-intuitive, but whatever, we’ll take it).  Friday afternoon Mike sent out a newsletter with a code for 10% off and free shipping for orders over $75 on Detailed Image.  Combined with some killer daily specials and the DI busy season, the flood gates opened and the sales came pouring on in.

George took this photo mid-day of all of the domestic FedEx Ground orders for DI and TD.  This doesn’t include a handful of international orders (we ship those via USPS) or FedEx Express orders.  It also doesn’t include about 30 orders that we couldn’t ship because products are on back order.

Damn that’s a lot of boxes!

On top of that, Tastefully Driven orders have picked up in the past week or so.  I’ve also been having quite a bit of success finding talented authors to write for us for what we’ve now decided is going to be a re-launch of the blog portion of the site.  Overall, just a great day (well - except I got an email from someone who was upset that the Premium Price Guide Account on SportsLizard costs $4.99/month.  He used the phrase “fuck you” every other sentence, and also ended with “P.S. Fuck You”.  Gotta love people’s manners.  The Price Guide isn’t perfect and definitely has it’s flaws, but it still is a useful tool that makes us good money with no work, so I’ve learned to just ignore any pissy emails that don’t have substance.  I just wrote him back with a link to an article I wrote about various methods of pricing collectibles and wished him luck.  No sense in letting someone like that ruin a great day).

It’s funny - when sales are down or there’s other financial stress, everyone gets a bit down and starts to question everything we do and everything we’ve done.  Admittedly we all take it too far at times (myself included).  Then, when sales are great, we look/act/feel like rock stars who can’t make a mistake. The reality is that we’re somewhere in between.  So is the life of a business owner.

Earlier this week we launched a feature called the Detailed Image Daily Special. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds - each day one of our products is on sale for 24 hours. The Daily Special is featured on the homepage with a nifty little countdown clock:

A special message and countdown clock are also on the product page in case someone reaches the product from somewhere other than the home page:

Here’s how we do it: each night at midnight Eastern time our system automatically selects an item and places it on sale. The sale prices is determined from a formula that factors in our profit and cost of goods sold and reduces the price by a set percentage of profit. We did it this way - instead of a flat discount like 25% - because some products we make 200% on and others we make 10% on and we didn’t ever want to be selling an item for less than our cost. We have the option to exclude certain items from the formula. The formula also makes sure we have plenty in stock and that the item hasn’t been on sale recently before selecting it.

Once selected, all other discounts applying to that item are temporarily disabled. An email is then kicked out to anyone on our newsletter list who has opted in for these daily emails (by default current subscribers are opted out since we felt a daily email was too much unless you specifically asked for it). The script obviously also takes the previous days sale item off of sale.

I’ve stayed up the last two nights until after midnight to ensure everything works well and so far it’s worked flawlessly. The best part is that there’s no work involved, it’s 100% automated - my favorite type of feature.

How this feature came about is a really random story, and a testament to how flexible a small business owner can be. About a week ago George and I got into a discussion about updating the content on our home page a bit more frequently to try to get it indexed more often. Other pages on the site get crawled more frequently because they are updated more frequently. One thing led to another, and we remembered this idea George had about a year ago to run one item on special every day. The benefits are obvious (discussed below) so I said I’d program it. I figured it would take me a month or so to get it done around the rest of my work. Turns out I only needed about 10 hours in full to complete it, and here we are with it live a week later.

As I said, the benefits seem obvious but I’ll list them anyway. George wrote a great post yesterday that covered the main ones:

• Customers are more likely to visit the site daily.
• Getting daily emails keeps Detailed Image in your mind EVERY DAY - not just a few times a year when you make large detailing purchases.
• It gives George and Greg extra content to post about daily in the forums we sponsor. Initial feedback has been great - look at what some of the people over on E90Post had to say.
• It creates a gap between our competitors and us. They all run off-the-shelf shopping carts, so this feature that cost me 10 hours of work might cost a competitor thousands of dollars and take months to implement.
• For that day, we’ll get a ton of Google Product Search traffic/sales because we’ll have the lowest price…by far.
• It enables us to cycle through inventory faster.
• Customers initially attracted to the site to buy the Daily Special will be subjected to our upsells. We’ve already seen several orders that came from forum posts about the Daily Special but resulted in large sales.

Like everything else, this is one more micro-innovation that makes us just a little bit better as a company. I expect that at some point in the near future we will roll this out on Tastefully Driven as well. TD has been getting a good amount of sales considering it’s been getting almost no attention lately. The busy season (Spring/Summer) for DI has really locked up all four of us - we want to capitalize on it as best we can. I want to do more for TD, but I realize that come Fall and Winter we’ll flip our attention to TD marketing and spend the majority of our time growing the site. For now, it’s just good to have it up and slowly but surely growing. There’s no doubt in my mind that the best business move is to capitalize as much as possible on DI while we can.

It’s easy to become jaded and begin to dislike your customers for asking you the same questions over and over again. In a way, who can blame you: 99% of the interactions with customers that most businesses have are repetitive and don’t do much to make you a better business owner. Then - every once in a while - someone comes along and gives you a simple idea that’s so obvious you kick yourself and say “duh, why wasn’t that already on our to-do list?”

The other day in the comments field of a Tastefully Driven order someone said: “please include a card saying ‘Happy Birthday - Love Patty and John’”. My first thought was we don’t do that. Then we had a conversation and realized that not only should we do it, we should make it a policy to allow our customers to do it for free with any order.

See, Detailed Image’s holiday season is the summer, when people obsessively care for their cars. In the past it hasn’t really been a traditional holiday-driven e-commerce site like most. As volume has picked up we’ve become increasingly aware of holiday-specific marketing. We also quickly realized that many of the products on Tastefully Driven are great gifts and that TD needs to capitalize on holiday orders to be successful. We were planning on starting with Father’s Day next month but hadn’t really talked strategy yet.

This order sparked that discussion, and it became pretty obvious that allowing people to include a custom card at no charge was a no-brainer decision. We figure that as long as we do a good job making our customers aware of this service they will take advantage of it on holidays/birthdays. I think we’ll also probably give them the option of having it shipped without the receipt in case they don’t want the recipient to know the price.

Yesterday morning I ran to CVS and picked up 10 blank cards for ~$6. We decided that was too expensive to pay for a card if we were going to offer this for free. After looking around online at blank cards, we decided it would be far cheaper to use our wholesale printing account where we can get 1,000 custom tent cards (3.5″ X 4″ with a fold in the middle) for $54.99, or ~5 cents a card. Below are the designs that we’re having printed up. We will then hand-write the message on the inside of the card…check that, Mike will hand-write the message because the rest of us write like a five year old.

Last week for the first time we listed our products for sale on Amazon.com. I put up about half of the Tastefully Driven catalog because products must have a US UPC code to be on Amazon and some of our detailing products and supplements do not have UPC codes. The entire process was a complete pain in the ass (at least compared to Google Product Search and Yahoo Shopping) and the whole time I was saying to myself “this is a waste of time and money”. Amazon charges $39.99/month and 15% of the purchase price, which eats into profit quite a bit. On top of that, Amazon is a price-driven marketplace so you really need to have the lowest price if you want to get any sales. For that reason, let’s just say it’s $39.99/month and 20% of the purchase price.

Is it worth it? My first thought was hell no. George convinced me to try it for a month or two and then go from there. Before I even finished uploading all of the products, we had our first sale. Since then we’ve had steady sales via Amazon and have even run out of a few products due to volume from Amazon.

But what about our profits? Well, here’s the thing: you don’t have any marketing cost associated with putting your stuff on Amazon. The products literally sell themselves just because of the shear mass of people buying stuff everyday. There’s no sales process or customer service questions to deal with. The sale just comes through and we ship it with an Amazon invoice in it (and of course some coupons to entice them to shop on TD). I’d say our average product is $30 - 20% of which is $6, meaning we end up selling a $30 product for $24. Most of the time, I’d say we spend more than $6 of marketing expenses (including sales related customer service) on that same product when we sell it through the site. When I look at it that way, I feel a lot better about it.

The more intriguing question to ask - how important is profitability? Consider two online web businesses who both sell blue widgets…nah, blue widgets is played out, let’s say they sell the same high-demand DVD player, which is the only product they sell. Their cost on the DVD player is $50. Suggested retail price is $100. Company 1 sells it for $99, while Company 2 sells it for $80…becoming the low-cost leader for the product.

Assuming all else is equal, Company 1 will profit more (24% more) per unit. I know a lot of people who would rather be Company 1. They want to profit as much as they can per unit. But if the product is in high demand, it’s already being sought out thousands of times each day via product searches like on Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and a slew of other ones. Those searchers are likely solely buying based upon price - if your site doesn’t totally suck you’ll probably get the sale every time if you are Company 2.

Now - for funsies - let’s say that each company profits $100k for the year. Company 1 sells 2,041 units (x $49 profit/unit) and Company 2 sells 3,333 units (x $30 profit/unit). Again, I think that a lot of people would rather be Company 1.

I disagree. Here’s why: Company 1 has the advantage of less customer service and less work packing/shipping, but has the disadvantage of having to work a lot harder for each sale. In reality, a lot of that $19 difference goes away when you factor in the time/expense of marketing a product when selling it at the same price everyone else is. Company 2 spends more resources on packing/shipping and servicing customers, but minimal time marketing because the sales just come to them. Company 2 also gets purchasing discounts and shipping discounts because of their extra volume. In addition, they cycle through inventory faster…meaning they don’t tie up money/space with inventory that isn’t going to move fast. Over time the advantages of Company 2 are more valuable to me: it’s easy to find warehouse workers and customer service reps relative to how easy it is to generate sales. Generating sales is the hardest thing to do in the world of business. If I find a hands-off way to drive sales AND can turn over inventory faster by doing it, I’ll gladly sacrifice some profitability.

Think about it from the outside as a venture capitalist or someone trying to acquire your company. Taking the example to the extreme, would you rather have a company that ends the year with $100k in revenue, $10k in expenses, and profits $90k (a web design company could look like this) OR would you rather have a company with $10 mil in revenue, $9.91 mil in expenses, and also profits $90k? They both profit the same at the end of the year. But the second company has far more cash passing through their hands and because of that revenue they will be able to secure outside financing (bank loans, private investments, venture capital, etc) easier because their cash flow will allow them to manage their debt. The company is simply more valuable because they generate a lot more revenue.

I’m not sure if this is intuitive or counterintuitive to people or what. All I know is that it’s been on my mind a lot lately, and profitability is becoming less and less important to me.

*side note: salaries are being factored into our expenses whenever I discuss expenses, so breaking even is just fine with me for now. In addition, this does not mean that we aren’t constantly trying to improve our processes and systems so that we can maximize our profitability. I’m solely referring to pricing and how it impacts the bottom line…not all of the other factors that contribute to the bottom line of a business.

When it comes to matters of web development and SEO, I’d like to think that more often than not I make the right decisions. When I am wrong, I’d also like to think I learn from the experience, minimize the damage, and apply it to the future.

Of course, that’s assuming that being wrong is a bad thing.

Last summer, when we first committed to developing the Detailed Image shopping cart ourselves, we had an array of potential features that we had to pear down before launching. If we didn’t, we’d have spent six months doing what we needed to take three. The majority of the most important features made the cut, and it was easy to wait upon the rest…except for one that really sparked some discussion: packages.

My rationale was that there was no need to have pre-made packages for people if we had our dynamic upsell system. So we launched in September without packages, and eventually added them in January. I spent less than a day programming the feature (the inventory management on the back end was what made it somewhat challenging), but for the most part I did it because George and Greg wanted it done…not because I really thought it would make a difference.

I was wrong. REALLY wrong. There isn’t a day that goes by where at least two packages don’t sell. That’s a big deal - take a look at the packages available: most are over $200, and some are close to $1k.

Kudos to my partners for pushing the feature. Hey, I guess if I’ve got to be wrong, it’s good to be wrong in a way that puts more money in our pockets.