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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: Ecommerce
Breaking Down The New Detailed Image
Over on The Detailed Image Blog I wrote a post outlining the features of the new DetailedImage.com. I copied that post below, and then added in some additional thoughts about each feature in italics. — Yesterday we were extremely excited to unveil our new DetailedImage.com website. Our goal is to provide you with the simplest, fastest, and most secure shopping experience in the industry. Let’s take a look at what’s new: The Design We’ve kept the important functionality where it’s familiar – navigation on the left, search box up top, My Account and Cart information in the header – while … Continue reading
Almost There…
We’re almost ready to launch the new Detailed Image site. The planned launch day is Saturday, April 20th. We’re putting the finishing touches on everything and then later this week we’ll start testing pretty heavily. It’s nice having an entire team of people to test. Last year prior to launching the revamped LockerPulse we found quite a few little bugs by having our employees use it for a while. An e-commerce site is a little tougher to dogfood than a sports news app. But given the amounts of money exchanging hands on any given transaction, it’s also much more important … Continue reading
Our Caching System, Guide Improvements, and the Exciting Next Step
Continuing the theme from Adding To The Foundation [Of Our Cart] and A Better Search Experience on Detailed Image, I recently wrapped up a few more important features. Caching One big opportunity for improvement on any database driven website is caching. Let’s take the example of our sitemap. When someone used to land on that page, it would run a database query to extract the product name and URL of every product on our site. If it’s hypothetically accessed 100x/day, that would have been 100 queries. They’re not particularly taxing queries, but there are hundreds of similar scenarios happening simultaneously … Continue reading
A Better Search Experience on Detailed Image
I’ve been chipping away at the next round of improvements to our shopping cart. The past week was one of those really good weeks where I deployed a ton of code. jQuery A precursor to moving forward was to (finally) switch our javascript library from using the outdated script.aculo.us to the more lightweight and more powerful jQuery. This required quite a bit of code to be rewritten, most of it critical to the shopping experience, but it has paid immediate dividends: the site is significantly faster, jQuery is much easier to develop with, and the plug-ins available make it extremely … Continue reading
Adding To The Foundation [Of Our Cart]
In the coming months we’ll be rolling out some big improvements to the Detailed Image website. We launched the current site in mid-2009. Since then we’ve iterated with the Ask-a-Pro Blog, Free Weekly Special, a new home page, a mobile site, free shipping every day, and more, but the site has largely remained the same as we’ve hired and trained two new full-time employees, launched the new version of LockerPulse, refined our warehouse operations and customer service process, and dealt with all of the other many challenges that come with growth. In the meantime, we’ve been collecting data. Lots and … Continue reading
Thoughts on a Killer Cyber Monday Week
The Expectations A few months ago we weren’t sure where to set our expectations for this year’s holiday shopping rush, what I like to now refer to as “Cyber Monday Week” – the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. Last year was a huge success, setting the bar pretty high for this year. Then we had a surprisingly successful October of sales where we saw larger-than-expected growth in a month that’s traditionally been one of our slowest. The month ended with Mike and Greg traveling out to Las Vegas for SEMA, “the premier automotive specialty products trade event in the … Continue reading
Our Custom Built Newsletter System
In December of last year we released a project that we’d been working on for a long time. It’s since saved us countless hours, reduced errors, improved accuracy, and opened the doors for some really unique future opportunities. The project was a complete overhaul of how we perform one of our most critical business processes, one that is one of our largest revenue drivers. Yet none of our customers have noticed. And that’s the way we wanted it. That meant it was a success. From the title, you’ve probably already figured out that I’m talking about a custom built newsletter … Continue reading
Inside The Decision To Offer Free Shipping Every Day
On Thursday we announced that we are now offering two new every day shipping options. Customers who spend $49 or more and use coupon code DI499 will get $4.99 flat rate ground shipping. Customers who spend $149 or more and use coupon code DIFREE will get free shipping. These are just two new coupon codes in addition to the many codes that we have out there, but in many ways they completely change how we do business. The Background We’ve always believed in charging our customers what we’re being charged for shipping. No more, no less. We’re in somewhat of … Continue reading
A Huge (& Highly Efficient) Cyber Monday!
That picture says it all. I couldn’t stand back far enough to get all of the boxes in the shot! I’m writing this at 4:45 PM on Monday, so I’m not sure whether or not today will break our record for sales in a day. I think it will based on our pace, but if it doesn’t, it will be close*. Regardless, we’ve already surpassed last November in sales, and the year as a whole surpassed 2010 a while back so in some ways it’s kind of insignificant. To me, the real significant thing about today was just how easy … Continue reading
Holiday Shopping Season Starts Now!
You know what that means for us – a really really busy month. Like most retailers it seems like we keep starting our holiday sales earlier and earlier each year. My inbox this week was full of early Black Friday promotions. I guess technically our early early holiday sale in October was the beginning, but the real holiday craziness starts today with our always-interesting 25%/20%/15% off 3-day sale: The last time we ran this sale I was on vacation and the first day crashed the site. It was kind of a nightmare. That was in mid-2009 just after launching our … Continue reading