Adam McFarland

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!

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.

Finally at 11:50 AM a day later Detailed Image is up and running and orders started coming through immediately.  Having a dedicated server with a dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM is fast…very fast.  I’m liking this already.  Considering when I started out with SportsLizard I barely could navigate my own control panel, I think I did a pretty good job under pressure to set up and config the server for the first time.

For the one issue I had, Liquid Web’s support passed the test - I received THREE emails from them between 4 AM and now.  The first was acknowledgment of the issue and a note that he was looking into it (not an automated response, but a real person!).  This was only about an hour after I submitted the help ticket.  Then - after the issue was fixed a few hours later - I got another email from the same person asking me if everything was OK and providing me with some info on what happened.  Finally, I just got a courtesy email from a customer support manager asking if everything went OK and how I was doing with the new server.  I’m impressed.

I am now about 1,000% more knowledgeable in less than a day of doing this stuff.  Every other issue I ran into I was able to find a tutorial or video to watch somewhere online to help me learn what I needed to do.  The best part is that now we’ve got all of this under our control and moving forward we aren’t relying on someone else.

Only bad news is that our business insurance doesn’t kick in until 72 hours of downtime, so we aren’t going to get much (if anything) from our claim.  Oh well, at least we’re familiarizing ourselves with the process.  According to George, the insurance company seemed to never have actually processed an e-commerce claim before.  You’d think that would be more common but I guess not.

Personally, I’m worn out.  There’s a lot of work left, but I’m going to take some time off and get away from the chaos sometime in the next week or two once everything is settled.

Before moving Detailed Image to the new server I decided to move PureAdapt.com.  The reasoning behind this was two-fold:  it would give me a test run with a site that wasn’t super important and it also was preferred to move this overnight because our email hosting with Google takes a little while to configure.

Around 10 PM last night I started running into issues with cPanel.  Of course, being a server newbie I decided I did something wrong.  I didn’t.  Finally at 3 AM I gave up and contacted Liquid Web support.  The good news is that they passed the test and fixed the problem with the server configuration within an hour.

So after a quick nap it’s now 7:40 AM and I’m finally getting to Detailed Image.  Should be up by early afternoon at the latest.

Side story - last night around 9 PM I decided to run to the grocery store because I was completely out of food.  With my mind pre-occupied, I basically ran around like a chicken with my head cut off, completely taking the longest possible route in the history of grocery shopping to pick up 11 items.  I couldn’t possibly have gone back and forth from one side of the store to another without forgetting something any more times than I did.

Today was just one of those days where everything that could go wrong went wrong.  When it rains, it pours, and the flood gates were open today.  The good news is that our server problems are now in our control:  the server is up and running so it’s just a matter of me migrating the files and databases and making everything play nice before changing the domain nameservers to our new server.

Last week - when I was in a decidedly better mood - I was thrilled that we finally “weathered the storm” and turned the corner.  I said “these are the times you live for as a business owner.”  Maybe so, but what we’re going through right now is what makes those times so great.  I’ve been working since 7 AM (now 7 PM) and I’m not going to bed until DI is up.  Armed with a four-pack of sugar-free Red Bull I’m as dialed in and focused as I have ever been…and it’s not going to wane as the night goes on.   In a way, I love the pressure.  I thrive under the pressure.  I want the pressure - it makes me feel alive.  The adrenaline rush that I get after banging out a time-sensitive task like this is second to none.

Since there’s lots of waiting when doing this stuff, I’ll try to post updates as I go.  Sort of like that wacky Twitter thing that the kids these days are all into

Sometimes owning your own business isn’t so fun.  I know it’s a total cliche, but if it was easy everyone would do it.

We had what we thought was a great situation for our web hosting. One of George’s friends from college runs a small hosting company. The server we are on has only a few sites in addition to ours, is blazing fast (4 GB of RAM I believe), and extremely affordable. While the company was a one man operation, we were generally satisfied with the level of service. All in all, nothing to complain about.

Unfortunately on Friday night one of the nameservers (that he does not control) went down….it’s still down, causing Detailed Image to load sloooooow. We eventually learned that the company controlling the nameserver was recently sold and our server manager was going through hell trying to get in touch with the people who could fix it. Not his fault, but a cause for us to re-evaluate our situation.

We decided that our sites are too large now for this to be out of our control. The cost of a managed dedicated server is essentially negligible for what we’re doing in sales. Prior to this we didn’t have a compelling reason to move. Now we do, so we did. After spending quite a bit of time researching, we pulled the trigger on a managed dedicated server from Liquid Web.

The next few days I’ll be scrambling to migrate our sites. Not the way I really wanted to be doing this, but the end result will be more control in-house of something that’s critical to our business.

As for the lost sales: our business insurance covers e-commerce revenue caused by forces outside of our control, so we’re already starting the claims process to recoup some of the lost revenue. Once everything is up and running again we’ll be profusely apologizing to all of our customers and offering discounts & specials.

Should we have probably done this prior to now? I guess so. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty. The best we can do now is move forward and continue to put as many systems in place to prevent future issues.

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.

Like most companies we use our business credit cards quite a bit. In turn, we get quite a few rewards points which result in all sorts of gift certificates. A little over a month ago we got a $40 gift certificate to NFLShop.com. No one else really wanted it, and there was a DVD for $39.99 that I did want, so my partners were nice enough to let me use it. I placed the order and when it arrived it was the wrong DVD.

Freeze it right here. In this situation, here’s what we would do: have the customer ship us the item back, immediately re-ship the correct item, apologize profusely, and throw something extra in for free/give them a credit towards a future purchase. If they need the order by a certain date (say to do a detail) we will work with them to overnight them their order…on occasion we even let them keep the wrong order and expedite the correct order. It’s our mistake, and we go above and beyond to make it right with the customer. It’s what any person or business should do: apologize and make amends.

So what did NFLShop do when I called? They told me to ship the item back, but that they only accept returns (not exchanges). They said they would refund my credit card and I could place the order again. Only one problem - I paid via gift certificate. Couldn’t they just ship me the correct DVD once they got my return? Nope - they had to re-issue me a new gift certificate which took about six weeks. A few days ago I got my new gift certificate. Yesterday I placed my order again, and I should finally get my DVD almost 2 months after the initial order.

Hey NFLShop - great job turning a simple exchange into a complex process. Even more kudos for making no effort whatsoever to correct your mistake.

Why do some companies have such a hard time with simple business policies that should seemingly be so intuitive?

Since the launch of Tastefully Driven I’ve been intending to do a post similar to the DI Features and Lessons Learned. But since this project had less “unknowns” there weren’t a lot of “lessons learned” from the programming side. We knew what we needed to do, and it was more about execution than figuring out a way to get stuff to work.

Nonetheless, there’s still a lot of cool stuff on TD that isn’t completely obvious if you just scan the site for a few minutes. So below are my Top 10 favorite things about the site:

10. One Account
When you have a forum on an e-commerce site, I think it’s utterly important to tie the two accounts together. Instead of just throwing up a copy of vBulletin and making the colors match, we took a bare bones copy of bbPress and hacked it apart until we were able to mesh it seamlessly with the shopping cart. Right now the only benefits of this are that you log in once (at the top of any page…another cool feature) and that you have the same username/password across the board. In the future - assuming the forum becomes somewhat popular - this opens itself up to all sorts of interesting social-networking-type opportunities: for example, imagine getting product suggestions (via PM, email, or displayed inline on the site) based upon your previous purchases and the threads you participate on the forum. In 2-3 years this could be how we make that jump from large e-commerce site to “social shopping” platform. It’s a ways away, but we laid the foundation now.

9. Integrated Affiliate Program
A lot of affiliate programs make it ridiculously difficult to sign up and create links. Using a 3rd party affiliate software is something we didn’t want to do for Detailed Image and we brought the same system over to TD. Our payout rates are posted for everyone to see, and signing up is really easy: in your My Account page there is a message enticing people to sign up:

If you click ‘Apply Now’ you only have to choose a payment type, click ‘Apply’ and you’re good to go. We also make it super-simple to create links. In addition to a tutorial page, we now display an affiliate link on every single product page for that specific product when you’re logged in:

8. Forum Product Recommendations
When you are viewing a forum topic we display a banner ad of up to five related products at the top of the page. So if you’re in a discussion about caffeine it will “recommend” the caffeine capsules for sale in our nutritional supplements section. Again, this has large potential to be highly customized in the future based upon more than just the forum topic.

7. Personalized RSS Feeds
This is one of the few features that came with bbPress that we kept in tact. Every user can mark their favorite forum threads and then subscribe to a custom RSS feed to track the progress of the conversations they’re interested in.

6. Blog-Forum Sync
One of the other things I saw as absolutely necessary was merging the blog comments with the forum. Each time we post in WordPress, a corresponding thread is opened in the forum. If you click to comment on the post, you are redirected to the forum. Blog posts also pull the conversation from the forum and display under the post just like normal comments.

5. Upsells
Inline upsells offering a 5% discount was one of the most fruitful moves we made with Detailed Image. Average order value went through the roof. With TD we changed the page structure around and moved the upsells up “above the fold”. This may or may not be better - we’ll see.

4. Image Upload System
One of the most time consuming aspects of Detailed Image was uploading pictures. Each picture needed to be re-sized several times, watermarked, and then linked to in the database. For TD, I built an image upload system to automate all of this. After we’ve entered the product info in the database, we can log in to our admin section and upload a 500 x 500 png file and the script automatically re-sizes it, saves it, watermarks the images, and creates the appropriate database relationship. Big, big time saver.

3. Shipping System
Sure, this is basically the same as DI, but it’s the backbone of our company. This system is the single most efficient process we’ve put into place. If we didn’t have it we would have a full time employee processing and shipping orders right now. Each morning we click “Process Orders” in our admin section: the PDF receipts pop up to print and save, along with a text file to import to FedEx Ship Manager, which prints the shipping labels and gives us a text file back with tracking numbers, which we upload to auto-email each customer their tracking info. It’s a 2 minute process whether there are 5 orders or 25 orders (or 250 orders down the road).

2. Design
The design of the logo and the site was all Mike. I think he did an A+ job aesthetically conveying exactly the image that we want our customers to see….especially by differentiating each store with it’s own unique color scheme. The Games store, for example, has an orange color scheme but you still know that you are part of TD:

1. Commerce with Conscience
The icing on the cake for me: we’re donating 5% of our pre-tax profit from the site to local charities with our Commerce with Conscience program. Sure, 5% isn’t much now, but it will be as we grow. We’re choosing new charities quarterly, and the first charity - The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern NY - has been very supportive (I got an email back from the Executive Director, which is pretty cool). Along with participating in events like the Climbing UAlbany Event, we hope this program is how we funnel some of the money we pull in online from all over the country/world back to our community. I anticipate that as we grow we will spend more time personally working with each of our charities so that we give back more than our money - our time and expertise can do equal amounts of good. My favorite part about this program is that it ensures that no matter how big we grow we are giving a corresponding amount back to the community. Target does the exact same program and you see the immense social impact they are able to have because of it. If we can even have a fraction of the impact locally that they do nationally, it will be a huge success.

We’re also all rocking Commerce with Conscience wrist bands:

The bands are included with any order over $100 for free, or can be ordered for $4.99 on the site (with all of the profit from the wrist band being donated).

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What’s next? I’m a firm believer in letting things settle for a bit before diving back into more development. Aside from a necessary focus on marketing, I’ve learned (the hard way) that you need to provide ample time for data/feedback to accrue before jumping to any conclusions about what you do and don’t need. By the end of 2009 I hope to have expanded the forum functionality with the aforementioned social-shopping stuff and to also integrate some AJAX into the cart in places it can really help (coupon codes and add/update cart come to mind), but other than that changes will be dictated by our users and the data.

All in all, we couldn’t be happier with the site we put out. We’re a small team and we did it on an extremely tight time schedule. I’m ridiculously excited to see where this cart takes us over the coming years.

I’ve said it before, but it amazes me how many online retailers don’t submit their products to Google Base. It’s free, they support a slew of formats (upload products one at a time, upload a spreadsheet, or auto-FTP from your database like we do), and it gets your products shown on Google Base, Google Product Search, and - most importantly - normal Google searches.

Take the example below (click to view full size screenshot). When someone searches for Men-U Healthy Face Wash, a product we sell on Tastefully Driven, Google automatically recognizes the query as a product search and displays Google Product Search results above the natural results. Sure it’s below the high performing PPC ads, but those people are paying for those impressions/clicks. The natural results have been organically grown over the course of years with expensive and time consuming link building and on-site SEO. All I did was spend 15 minutes submitting a product feed last week. As an added bonus Google gives you impression/click-through data for products listed (imagine how cool it would be if they did this for organic results?). Seems unfair huh? Take advantage of it while it lasts…I know we are.