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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
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
Where have all the Chargebacks gone?
Two of the most commented posts I’ve written were my posts on chargebacks. It’s a fascinating discussion because it’s a problem that all retailers have, and it’s a problem that most consumers either don’t know about or don’t care about. Retailers are on their own with this one. A few years ago it looked like it was going to be a major problem for us…until it wasn’t. Despite our volume more than tripling since my first chargeback post, we’ve seen chargebacks reduced to almost zero. Last week we had a chargeback come through for the first time in a long … Continue reading
How We Use Pre-Sales to Improve Cash Flow
I’ve written before about how the cash flow cycle of inventory can be the death of e-commerce companies of all sizes. One of the things we’ve done this year with surprising success is pre-selling items before we get them in stock. As soon as we place an order with a distributor, the product goes up on our site. Most of the time the description just says “coming soon” and the picture is just something like this: This isn’t all that intuitive of a practice. I mean, you could argue that it’s not worth the effort of even posting it until … Continue reading
A Milestone For Our Shopping Cart Software
Upon finishing a programming project to improve how we manage out of stock products and then integrate it with our shipping estimates (see image above), I completed all of the major initiatives that we wanted to complete in 2011 to improve our shopping cart software that powers Detailed Image. The reason why we’re at this point and it’s only June 5th is a pretty simple one – most of the important stuff is finally finally done! We’ve built a stable, scalable, easy-to-manage and easy-to-use platform that will serve us well for years to come. There’s nothing “major” left to do…at … Continue reading
Attempting to Quantify How Busy We Are
Detailed Image has had a really busy Spring season. Everyone has had to chip in a bit extra at the warehouse to ensure that we get all of the orders out the door in a timely manner. This past week was so busy that Mike, Greg, and I went in Sunday to pack boxes for about five hours, something we’ve never done before outside of the Black Friday to Cyber Monday rush. We’ve also each had many days where we’ve had to go into the warehouse unplanned to help out. One of the more difficult things has always been figuring … Continue reading
Another Record-Breaking Cyber Monday for Detailed Image
Today we completed another killer end to November. Much like in previous years (2009, 2008), we really nailed the prime Holiday shopping period that now stretches from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. We surpassed last year’s revenue for that stretch and we had our largest single day in company history yesterday on Cyber Monday. This month also broke our company record for revenue in a month, and early this month we set our company record for revenue in a year. All of that is even more impressive when you consider that in January we closed Tastefully Driven, stopped … Continue reading
Testing a New Promo Upsell for the Holidays
I’ve mentioned on a few different occasions that offering free shipping all of the time, say for orders over $100 or $200 doesn’t work well for a business like ours. We’re in a unique industry where weight doesn’t correlate at all to money spent – you can spend $60 on three heavy gallons that cost us maybe $20 to ship to CA, or you can spend $200 on a wax that costs us $8 to ship to CA. We’ve found that as a policy it’s much more fair to everyone if we charge you based on weight, not on amount … Continue reading
The Story Behind the Detailed Image Mobile Site
Yesterday we launched a dedicated mobile site for Detailed Image. Above are a few screenshots. Overall I’m extremely pleased with how it came out. The functionality is nearly 100% of the full site. That said, the story of how this mobile site came about over the past two weeks is much more interesting than the functionality of the site so that’s going to be the focus of this post. Why a Mobile Site? I think the main answer to this is obvious – more and more people are browsing the web from mobile devices. The second reason, and what threw … Continue reading
Coupon Code Strategy Ramblings
We run a ton of sales. Just check the Detailed Image home page at any given time you’ll always find a daily special, weekly free item if you spend $x, and products on sale for monthly special. There’s also a good chance we’re running a big site-wide promo, such as free or flat-rate shipping, a brand or category of products on sale, a percentage off of everything on the site, buy product x get product y for free, or some combination of those things. At any given time we’re also running countless promos behind the scenes for various segments of … Continue reading