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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
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
Customers Never Cease to Amaze Me
This weekend we’re running a 20% off coupon code on Detailed Image. Coupled with our free shipping on orders over $150 for the rest of the year, it’s a pretty enticing pre-holiday sale. Apparently it’s not quite good enough for one customer. Said customer decided that he was going to outsmart our system by buying a gift certificate at 20% off and then turn around and use the gift certificate to then place his actual order for 20% off, effectively double-dipping and getting 36% off (20% off of 20% off). Since we do not allow discounts on gift certificates, this … Continue reading
Amazon Let’s Us Pay Them to Grow
In my continuing efforts to prepare for the holidays, I’ve spent the last few weeks reviewing and improving our product listings in our Amazon Seller Central account. We sell on Amazon under the Tastefully Driven name. We list almost everything that’s up on the TD website, but the majority of what we actually sell is either fitness equipment or detailing supplies. I automated a few of the mundane tasks, added new products (which involved building a bridge to easily migrate products from DI to TD and then to Amazon), and reviewed pricing. There’s one other thing I’m really excited about … Continue reading
It’s Holiday Time!
Coming off of last year’s successful holiday season, I’m really pumped for this year. We have two busy times of the year: spring time and the holidays. Spring is super busy because that’s when the weather starts to get nice and people start spending money on their cars. Detailed Image is the place to be. From a strict revenue standpoint, if we we weren’t growing so fast, spring would probably be our busiest time of the year (now we grow so much every few months that it’s hard to tell because whichever season happened most recently was our largest ever). … 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
The Manager – Programmer Disconnect
Nethy left an interesting comment the other day in regards to a potential new feature I mentioned: I’m always impressed with how your processes [flow]. Having a system like this that works properly needs: a) the programming doing the work and b) someone to plan the process. That’s something that’s very hard to do on a small business budget. It’s something that’s hard to do via consulting, for example. For a competitor, they might think “Adam blogged that he took 1 week to do this. 40 hours. I can get that done for $4000 (or $400 on elance) by a … 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
Chargebacks: how we were taken for $6k and how we’re fighting back
This post has been a long time coming, but it’s one that I finally made sure I sat down and wrote because I’m sure it can save someone from getting scammed the way that we did. What is a chargeback? According to our good friend Wikipedia: A chargeback is the return of funds to a consumer, forcibly initiated by the consumer’s issuing bank. Specifically, it is the reversal of a prior outbound transfer of funds from a consumer’s bank account or line of credit. The chargeback mechanism exists primarily for consumer protection. U.S. credit card holders are afforded reversal rights … Continue reading