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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Detailed Image
No Longer Shipping Internationally
Effective yesterday we are no longer shipping packages internationally. This also includes US Territory addresses and APO addresses. Much like closing down Tastefully Driven, there were a lot of reasons behind our decision, but it can all pretty much be summed up by saying that it was too much work for how small of a part of our business it was, and that we’d rather focus our time and energy elsewhere. However, unlike with Tastefully Driven, I think this will get a little backlash from our customers, which I’ll touch on more below. Here is the in-depth reasoning behind our … Continue reading
Thank You DI Customers!
It’s 4:13 PM on Tuesday and I think this is the first second that I’ve had to relax since last Wednesday. The past five days have been out of control busy. When posted on Thursday I was excited to find out what was to come of our Thanksgiving-Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday sale, but I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Even with all of the preparation and all of the things we’ve improved upon in the last year (namely the new Detailed Image site, which has only been around some six months even though it seems like we’ve had in place forever), the … Continue reading
Let the Fun Begin!
Last night Mike sent out the Detailed Image Black Friday newsletter (shown below). There are also some killer deals coming on Cyber Monday. Last year we were a bit rushed but managed to put together some awesome specials and have an amazing weekend. This year we’ve had a lot of time to plan everything out. We surpassed our November 2008 revenue by the second week of November this year, so it’s not a matter of if we’ll improve but a matter of how much we’ll improve by. It’s a good place to be. I’m very excited. For the next few … Continue reading
One More Little Shipping Improvement
Oke had a good suggestion for our shipping estimate feature in the comments on yesterday’s shipping post: The only thing I will add is to also place the actual day with the date the package will get to the destination. In that case, people wouldn’t have to look at the calendar to see which day it actually arrives Honestly, that never crossed my mind…I was more focused on saving space. It totally makes sense. Seeing “Mon 9/14″ is a lot more helpful than just “9/14″. Anyway, I just put it in place, changing this… to this… Definitely an improvement. Thanks … Continue reading
Our Exhaustive Shipping Project – What We Learned and What New Features We Added
Today we launched some really cool new shipping features on Detailed Image. They were a cumulation of about a month long shipping project that we took on. It was really the one big thing that we wanted to make sure that we got done before the holidays. Shipping options are just so important to customers that you’d have to be crazy not to be regularly reviewing and improving how you ship. The Study Like most online retailers, we didn’t have a good understanding of how accurate our shipping quoting system was. We use the FedEx API, but there are scenarios … Continue reading
New Detailed Image Home Page
In an effort to continuously improve our conversion rate, Mike recently re-designed our Detailed Image homepage. While there was nothing wrong with the old one, we know that the majority of customers are there to shop so we wanted to emphasize the things important to shopping – browsing, searching, our Daily/Monthly Specials – while subtly de-emphasizing the rest. Make no mistake – this isn’t exactly a science. It’s educated guesswork. We know that most users on the old homepage clicked those things so we decided to reorganize to put a focus on where they want to go…which is also where … Continue reading
Understanding Competitive Advantages
Compared to our e-commerce auto detailing competitors, we have a lot of competitive disadvantages: less space, less available cash, less employees, and less control over vendors and distribution. It can be frustrating and intimidating when entering a new industry. The incumbents will try to use those things to crush you (or at least make your life more difficult). From the beginning we’ve been about finding different things that turn the tables and give us the advantages. We don’t want to play their game – we’ll lose at that. We want to play our game. We have lower expenses. We don’t … Continue reading
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 3 of 3
Now that I’ve outlined the majority of the improvements on Part 1 and Part 2, I want to take a step back and quickly talk about why I think this was a successful project. The Process & The Time Frame We didn’t really plan it this way, but from the time we launched the previous cart in 2007 we were planning for this one. We kept track of every potential feature that we’d want, both on the front end and the back end, we collected data in any instances where we weren’t sure about something, and we kept tabs of … Continue reading
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 2 of 3
In Part 1 I took a look at some of the more obvious improvements on the major pages of the site. I think some of the subtleties are even more interesting. Things that might go unrecognized at first, but make a small positive impact on your business. Banner System One time during one of our sales a while back Mike decided to throw a banner announcing the sale into our template on the old site. It looked totally out of place, but sure enough, that sale performed exceptionally better than previous ones, most likely because every visitor on the site … Continue reading
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 1 of 3
Now that the dust has settled a bit and everything seems to be going well with the new Detailed Image, I want to go back and dissect the project and discuss the major decisions we made and why we think they will help our business. A ton of things go on behind the scenes on a large project like this. When you’re on a tight time frame and a limited budget as we were, you’re forced to make some very creative choices that either may or may not work. Nonetheless, it’s a very fun process that I think is worth … Continue reading