Adam McFarland

One of our Tastefully Driven vendors recently contacted us to see if we were ready to re-order their products yet.  We’ve placed one other re-order since the launch of the site, but overall their products haven’t sold very well compared to other brands.  We don’t have a ton in stock, but they’re moving so slow that we’re certainly not inclined to re-order at this point.  So, we bluntly told them as much.

Their response?  Push the product more.  Give out samples, hold contests, give some away to bloggers in the industry.  Not bad ideas, but the premise is that WE need to push THEIR products.   Thing is, their product is very up-and-coming and does not have the name brand recognition that our other lines do. We rank multiple times in the top 10 in Google for all of their products.  Our main disappointment in sales isn’t because we haven’t pushed their product enough (hell, we’ve hardly pushed any of the products on TD), it’s that their isn’t more of an existing demand for their products.

Don’t get me wrong - it was our choice to carry the line and the responsibility lies with us to research the demand for a product before selling it. We’re just disappointed that the existing demand for it isn’t stronger.  Who knows, maybe it will pick up and we’ll capitalize on our solid rankings.

Which got me to thinking - there are really two types of products that we can pick up:  push products or pull products.  Push products, like the one described above, are products that we have to push on to our customers through newsletters, mailings,  announcements in the blog, on-site cross-product upsells, or other promotions.  Customers have never heard of the product, so we’re relying on ourselves to sell them on it.  Pull products are products that have such an existing demand that by adding them to our shopping cart we automatically generate sales due to their auto-inclusion in our product feeds and on our extremely SEO-friendly site (a large portion of TD products already rank top 10 in Google without us really doing anything).  Any pushing we do is just an added bonus.

Why would anyone want to carry a push product?  IF you have a built in audience that listens to you, push products give you the power to push the products you want to sell.  Maybe it’s your own brand with a higher margin, or a brand new product that you have exclusive rights to.  A site like Detailed Image for example, has 3+ years of forum presence in the (relatively) small auto-detailing community.  Everyone knows “George and Greg from Detailed Image” and therefore they have the ability to push products.  If they tell people that a new polish or wax is better, people will listen…at least initially.  If there are two comparable products and they decide to support one over another for any number of reasons, customers will likely listen and buy the brand they recommend.

Tastefully Driven is only a few months old.  It’s not in a niche like auto detailing.  Maybe someday we’ll have that kind of loyal audience, maybe we won’t.  It’s two different types of businesses and that’s fine. One thing is clear:  for new sites or sites built to generate sales via search like TD, you had better do your research and pick up only pull products.  Taking advantage of existing demand is far easier than creating the demand.  Otherwise it’ll just remain sitting on your shelves collecting dust while you’re wishing you had that money available to pick up a more popular line of products.

Quick post here guys.  Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve updated our free FaceUp Web Marketing eBook.  It’s been over six months since the last update.  The book still gets a decent amount of downloads so I want to be sure that the information conveyed is accurate.

The biggest update has to do with the Keyword Research section.  Google recently started displaying search volume on their AdWords Keyword Tool.   This is HUGE for anyone with a website and an interest in SEO.  Prior to this we were left to extrapolate data from Yahoo (Overture) or Wordtracker and “guess” how often something was searched on Google.  Since the latest studies seem to show that Google may have upwards of 70% of the search market, these data points are clearly the most important.  Also, I LOVE that you can type in multiple keywords at once - one per line - and do all of your keyword research in one well thought out search.  You can also download your results.  Basically, it’s the perfect keyword research tool.  Vastly different from tools like the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool, based on Wordtracker data, which was what I was using prior and only allowed you to search one term at a time.

I also made minor updates to all of the other sections where I saw appropriate.  Download it for free over at Faceup-Sites.com.  Enjoy!

A few months back one of our friends - a former business owner who has now cashed out and is “living the good life” - turned us on to a distributor of high quality cables for low prices.  We take his word pretty highly since he’s hardcore into ultra high-end audio equipment. He told us that the quality of these cables are equal to the quality of Monster cables, but for 1/20th the price.  So we picked a few up, liked them, and decided we wanted to carry the line on Tastefully Driven.  With that, the Electronics Cables & Accessories store was born.

We carry things like iPod cables and headphones, HDMI cables ($15 for a 6 foot cable!), component video cables, USB cables, and Nintendo Wii component cables.  These items are also the types of things that we can easily sell on eBay - a place where we want to have a presence but nothing else we carry really fits (some of our products are prohibited by the manufacturer from being sold, others - like personal care products - just won’t sell much based on our research).

While we’re on the topic of Tastefully Driven, my guess is that at least half of you are saying to yourselves “where are they going with this?”  The direction of the site, of the business, is very defined in my mind but it definitely doesn’t look like it from the outside and I’ve probably done a bad job (or no job) of explaining it.  I think from the outside it just looks like they’re just picking up random product lines left and right of things that interest them.  While there’s some truth to that, here’s the overall big picture:

Our cart is very SEO friendly.  Each page has a dynamically generated unique title tag, all of the text is indexible, each page is URL rewritten, we use proper formatting, etc.  We know that on equal footing - most notably the number of links and the age of our domain - we can outrank the majority of the competition.  So the reasoning by putting all of these loosely tied stores on one domain is to get all of those links pointing to ONE domain and not to many domains so that each product benefits from the success of the others.  Think about how every page on Wikipedia ranks high.  Now apply that same strategy to e-commerce, a place where most sites aren’t very SEO friendly.

Which is then where the Lifestyle Blog and our quest to get a team of writers comes in.  Links directly to products are hard to come by.  Links to great information, on the other hand, are relatively easy to come by.  Create lots of great posts, get lots of links, help out every page on the entire domain.  So this post about polyphasic sleep really does help us sell more shit drops even though the connection isn’t obvious.

So far it’s already worked for a few products. In time, it should work for all of them.   Not saying this is a foolproof plan or that it couldn’t fail, but it’s the plan we’re going with.

If it works, we should end up with a pretty solid community on the forums/blog and then we can step everything up to the next level and become a “social shopping” site like we originally envisioned.  For example, displaying ads on the forum/blog for our products based upon your conversations and your purchase history.  If we ever get to this point, that’ll be where the fun really begins.

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.

I’m going to take a step back from our pre-launch marketing for Tastefully Driven to go over our overall launch plan - from conception to where we are now to what we have left to do. I’m not saying that there aren’t different or even better ways to deploy a site, just that this process is how we do things, in large part based upon prior failures, successes, and other professional experiences (I’d be lying if I said my engineering background didn’t play a large role in the way I structure a project).

None the less, I’ve never in my life missed a due date on a project and a large part of that is my meticulous planning so hopefully this post will help other young entrepreneurs better formulate their business plan.

Conceptualization

You have that “ah ha” moment where your entire perspective on the world changes and you think to yourself  “I’ve got to do that“. This is the start of what I call the conceptualization stage. For us, after the Detailed Image shopping cart far exceeded our expectations, we naturally asked ourselves how we could repeat the DI model in another industry. That led to us considering several similar high-end niches, and eventually the light bulb moment where we could combine those stores and a community into one large site - hence Tastefully Driven.

When I’m at this stage with a project, I’m so excited that I put a self-imposed waiting period on myself before acting (similar to my 24 hour rule). During this stage you’re likely to be so certain that you have just come up with the next big thing that you’ll ignore reality and down play very real road blocks. There’s no set time period, but I’d say wait at least a week before taking any action beyond registering a domain name.

In the case of Tastefully Driven, we conceived of the idea sometime around Thanksgiving of ‘07. For the next month we discussed the pros and cons - the features we’d want and those we wouldn’t, how we would market it, how it would impact the rest of the company, and how much of our resources could be devoted to it.

Aside from preventing you from doing anything stupid, it allows you (and your team, if you have one) to refine your vision. By the end of this period for us, everyone usually shares the same vision and knows what’s going through everyone else’s head. When you finally do start the project, you start it on the same page with the same vision for success.

Making it an Official Project

By late December we had decided Tastefully Driven would be our future. At that point I consider the project an official project. During this phase we started to get more serious: would we keep client work (ultimately, no)? how would this impact Detailed Image (we would finish all DI development work for 2008 before starting TD)? when could we realistically launch with several product lines (initially, we said 8/1/2008 at the earliest).

This is where I really shine. We have a MONSTER project and we need to figure out how to start tackling it. This is also where I think a lot of people get paralysis by simply being overwhelmed with what to do next. As Theodore Roosevelt once said: “In a moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” In this case, the right thing to do is come up with a plan.

Up to this point, we had literally written nothing down and neither should you. Don’t get caught up in the minutia when you’re conceptualizing. However, once it’s an official project there has to be extreme attention to every single detail.

We tend to convene around our company wiki, so I like to write my project plans on the wiki. Since we had agreed to finish Detailed Image development before touching TD, I focused on that first. There were around 10 additions to the cart that needed to be completed (mostly stuff for me to do). I gave each an approximate completion time and I figured it would take until the end of February or early March to complete. Somehow I caught fire and wrapped it up on 1/12, which gave us an early indication that our 8/1 launch date for TD might have been too much of a time cushion.

Once complete with that I started an in depth plan for Tastefully Driven. The site will launch with 5 or 6 e-commerce stores, a community, a blog, and full integration of accounts between the three - by far the largest project we have tackled, and therefore the most daunting to plan. I started by breaking it up in to several key categories:

• Design (mostly Mike)
• Development, which essentially involved improving and scaling the DI cart (mostly me)
• Quality testing, which could fall under Development, but I like a whole section of tests to run prior to launch
• Product selection (mostly George)
• Content creation, including writing product descriptions
• Marketing ideas

Each category had a simple bulleted list, and each task that needed to be done to launch got an approximate completion time. The latter stuff - like marketing ideas - was more of a brain dump than anything else. Even though we create a marketing plan later on, it’s important that we have a place on the wiki to jot down an idea as we come across it in the development of the site.

Setting a Launch Date

Some people like to use Microsoft Project (or similar project manager tool) to plan out due dates and choose a launch date. I was forced into using these tools in college, and to be honest I just see them as complicating the matter. I like the freeness of one large blank wiki page. I am smart enough to know that keyword research needs to be done before launching a pay-per-click campaign, so I won’t assign a due date to the PPC campaign that doesn’t allot for that. With the entire project in front of me it became pretty obvious that we could finish it by 3/1 (a far cry from 8/1). We figured with the warehouse move and a little cushion time, that 4/1 would be perfect. Any later in the year is prime Detailed Image season so if we didn’t do April we’d probably have to wait until Fall…or launch with limited contribution from George and Greg.

As I touched on a bit in previous posts, the one key thing I grossly miscalculated was how long it takes to contact vendors. I figured a month would be sufficient time to contact a vendor, get samples, place our first order, and receive it. More realistically, that stuff takes several months and I’d like at least a 3 month cushion for that alone next time. Our final order just shipped, so miraculously we will have all of our products in the warehouse for weighing and photoing by 3/14, but we cut it waaaay too close in my book.

Developing the Site

The development portion is different for everyone. Some people use open source software like WordPress or osCommerce with very little customization and this portion isn’t much more than design work to get the aesthetics right. Others hire an outside developer….which I’ve never really done so I have no clue how to integrate that into a project plan. We develop everything ourselves, so we were able to relatively accurately estimate our ~2 months of development work.

*side note - if you or your developer don’t develop with SEO in mind, this is the time to start building and structuring things properly. Do your homework - it will pay off.

When I do development work I do it with the understanding that we’re spending a few weeks solely on quality control testing at the end of the project. That means that while I’m developing I test every scenario and interaction I can think of, and once it works I move on.  I usually miss some stuff, but that’s OK. In most cases there will be other interactions created later on, some of which we won’t appropriately test - which is why having a QC testing phase is so important. I also encouraged Mike to think the same way with his design. Essentially - lay it all out and get it working most of the way and fix the nitty gritty shit at the end.

I always map out the entire site - every feature and function I can think of - before touching anything. Once that’s done, I create the database that should encapsulate every single possible scenario. This is pretty obvious: you need to be able to enter test data to see if what you’re trying is working.

All of this resulted in a more detailed list of features to develop, how long they’re going to take, and what order to do them in. By far the most challenging part of Tastefully Driven was to get our login and user information to work seamlessly between our forum (built upon bbPress), our blog (WordPress), and our custom built cart. Every project I’ve ever been a part of has those “if we can just get this to work, we’ll be fine” features and this was the one thing we were really uncertain of the difficulty going in. It’s important to identify these types of issues at the start and try to tackle them as soon as possible so you know where you stand. These are the things that will throw off a time line and screw a launch date.

Announcing the Launch Date

For the reason in the last sentence, we have an unwritten policy of not announcing a launch date until the development work is nearing completion. While internally we set 4.1.08 as the date, we always knew it could be delayed if need be. Once I announced the launch on my blog, I considered it set in stone and - short of an extreme emergency - will make sure it happens.

Every company has different pressures and a lot of times those pressures dictate premature launch dates, but if you can help it I encourage you to set a date and stick to it. A launch date really forces you to buckle down and focus on the task at hand. It forces the BS stuff out of your project plan and dictates that you work on only what is necessary. We’re in this phase now, and I’ve been knocking things off of our wiki list like crazy. Some get moved to “post launch” and others get canned because they just don’t matter.

I normally work a lot more hours prior to a launch. The past few days George and I have been doing a double shift (8 AM to 8 PM type of stuff) to ensure that we get everything done on time.

Creating a Marketing Plan

Up until this morning we just had our marketing list on the wiki. We created the splash page, the pre-launch blog, and the teaser business cards, but the plan wasn’t really formulated. Today I finally created our marketing plan. Some people like to do this sooner than now (a month before launch), but I encourage you to wait to create a marketing plan because so much changes in development that much of an earlier marketing plan would be rendered useless.

I’m not going to rehash all of my favorite web marketing tactics - my free e-book does that - but I will say that for an e-commerce site we’ve pretty much got a formula down pat that we are sticking to. The majority of our marketing will consist of:

• Content creation. Articles, forum posts, podcasts, and videos where we do product comparison, tests, and case studies. Since our site is perfectly SEO friendly and we will produce quality content, over time this will suck in a ton of targeted traffic. It will also become viral and hopefully spread through social bookmarking and social networking sites (we have a “share this” button on every product page, blog post, and forum post).
• Pay per click marketing. PPC is such a simple formula if executed properly: pay $x per click, y% of clicks turn in to purchases. As long as the number of clicks/sale is greater than your margin, you win. Split testing and refining ads can push your cost per click down and conversion rate up.
• Google product search. So many sellers don’t take advantage of this. It’s free, and in about 2 hours I automated the process so that we automatically create and submit an updated product feed daily to Google via FTP. DI gets a lot of sales this way.
• Email and RSS marketing. This is really just maximizing the sales we can get out of our existing members. I’d also include great customer service in this category - every customer service email is an opportunity to positively influence someone who could become an evangelist of your site. When you’re starting with zero members, email marketing can take a while to have an influence. We see it now with DI though: every newsletter results in a wave of sales. This is one of the reasons why the pre-launch splash page is important: the faster we can build an email list, the better.

There’s other stuff too, but these are what will drive sales. Obviously PPC and Google product search will help immediately, while the other two will take time to develop. We’ve launched so many sites that we understand that you don’t truly see the impact of great content for months and even years. With this project, we know that what we’re doing works and we’ll be as patient as we need to be to make it work correctly.

Quality Testing

Maybe it’s because I spent my engineering days as a QC engineer, but quality testing is a big deal to me.  Test every single page and every single possible function of your site.  Do it in every browser, every operating system, and under every condition you can think of.  Test your emails in every email program available.  Do REAL transactions and make sure they work.  Recruit a handful of BETA testers (i.e. friends and family) to try everything out.

You’ll never catch 100% of the errors, but the difference between 80% and 97% is huge.  I allot a minimum of one week for QC testing and it’s usually the week prior to launch.  That means that everything else should be done at least a week before launch day.

Launching

I always create a launch day checklist.  While you should pause to celebrate (for like five seconds), once you pull the trigger there’s a lot to do:  announce it on your blog (if you have one), submit your product feed to Google, submit a sitemap to Google/Yahoo/MSN,  activate your PPC campaign, email friends and family, etc.

You’ll likely start discovering some of those errors you missed in the QC testing phase as real people do stupid things to inadvertently challenge your software like it never was before.   The better job you did in QC, the more you can focus on your first order coming through and the less you have to worry about your first users getting pissed off and leaving.  When it comes to Tastefully Driven the platform is built upon Detailed Image, which we know is stable, so I’m more worried about minor integration issues than I am about all-out systems failure (which was definitely a concern of mine when we went live with DI….even if I never let my partners see it).

Bottom line:  it’s a fun day when you launch, but in reality it’s just the beginning.  Take a day to catch up on sleep and then get to the “real work” - getting people to actually pay you money.

Ongoing Development

I have a rule: other than fixing errors, don’t make any major development changes or additions for at least a month…three to be safe.  Why?  Because on the second day you’ll get an email from Aunt Betty telling you that she thinks the site would be better if it had feature xyz and you’ll think “if she thinks that, other people must be too” and then you’ll begin to hack up your code and try to rush xyz to market.  Not only could this make your site worse, it’s also a poor use of your time.  You’ll get emails like this all the time, and if you concede to all of them you won’t make much money and your site will suck.

If you have confidence in your project (and you should if you got this far), there’s a good chance that you launched with a pretty solid site.  That’s good enough for now.  Take in your customer feedback, study your analytics, and focus on sales right now:  in the grand scheme of things you’ll look back at the launch version of your site as a piece of shit but you need to let those things play out so that you’ll know what you should and shouldn’t do to improve upon it.

For Detailed Image, we waited from September to January before I started on the laundry list of features for 2008.  The result, however, was a million times better than if I kept programming in September.  Some features were deemed unimportant and scratched from the list, some were re-affirmed by our data….justifying our time expenditure, and some became simpler to program because of everyones more intricate knowledge of the cart.

One thing I think most developers look past:  just because you made the software, doesn’t mean you know it.  Often times, customers will use things vastly differently than you intended.  By letting those things play out naturally you save yourself a ton of headaches and ensure that the changes you do make are worthwhile.

Conclusion

Phew.  Can you say longest post ever?  I think I’ll get back to work now….after all, I’ve got a lot to get done to launch this site

We’ve made the decision to make my Faceup Web Marketing eBook available for free download.  After filling out the form on the eBook page you’ll be emailed a link to download the book directly.

I updated the book last week, and it now includes updated information on keyword research tools, link building, Google AdWords, and more…in addition to all of the topics outlined on the eBook page.

I’m hoping this:

1. Helps spread what I’ve learned in SEO/web marketing in the past few years to all web entrepreneurs.  Now that it’s free, everyone can afford it
2. Creates new business for Faceup Sites and some of the other services I reference in the book

Anyone who purchased the book prior will be compensated with some free products/services from us, although I haven’t decided exactly what yet.  If you read it, let me know what you think.  Feedback from customers who purchased the book and received advanced copies last time was very good so I’m hoping people get a lot of good info out of it.

I’ve been really surprised and encouraged by the emails I’ve received after the announcement yesterday of the re-launch of our client services under the Faceup-Sites name. I wasn’t sure how it would be received by other developers/young entrepreneurs, but I received a handful of emails from people I respect a great deal who love the idea of going after the market we’re going after.

One of the biggest components of the site is the Faceup Web Marketing eBook that I wrote, which is essentially a compilation of the SEO/web marketing work I’ve done for clients over the last few years. It includes all of the techniques I taught them….except it’s only $39.99 and not $1,500. You can check out the book page on Faceup to see what topics are covered, and also to read some testimonials (there are some really good ones from Anthony from Xonatek and Tricia from Webmail.us…which was an Inc 500 company and was acquired by Rackspace last week).

ANYWAY - to help kick off the promotion of the book and start spreading the word, I’m offering it for free on this blog. The link below will be active for one week (until 10/16/07). No signup process or anything, just click the link and you’ll be redirected to the book download.

http://www.faceup-sites.com/ebook-download/free-blog-download

If you download the book and like it, I’d greatly appreciate it if you tell a friend…or if you have a blog or website give it an honest review.

Thanks

This first year as Pure Adapt has been interesting.  All four of us have had to get used to working together and running our first incorporated business.  Way back in December of last year when we officially formed the company our primary source of revenue was SEO and web design services.  Around March we hit a road block:  many of our sites severely needed upgrades and we were very inefficient with our client work because we didn’t have the proper systems in place.

So we decided to take a step back.  I spent a few months re-launching SportsLizard and the Price Guide, which has been very successful, profitable, and best of all efficient (I probably average around 8 hours/week on SL now).  Then we saw that George and Greg were spending 3-6 hours a day doing tasks that could be automated with Detailed Image.  So Mike and I spent a few months overhauling the entire system.  About a month in, over 75% of customers are using our upsell system and George and Greg have reduced order processing down to about an hour a day.  All in all, our moves have been successful, but I’d be lying if there wasn’t a cost.  It came at the expense of quite a bit of revenue…I’d estimate about $100k if we had focused more on our services.

Whether you agree or not with our choices, we’re operating at close to 100% efficiency now and it’s time to “cash in” and scale up.  Today is the first day in about 8 months that all four of us are working on revenue-generating tasks.  Our systems are in place and we’re spending our time marketing.  George and Greg for DI, and Mike and I on our client services.  We made one major decision when re-launching our client services:  we decided not to do it under the Pure Adapt name.

With that said, I’d like to introduce Faceup-Sites.  There are three components to the site:

• Web design services
• A SEO/Web Marketing eBook that I wrote
• Business card design and printing

Why did we launch this separate from Pure Adapt and why did we target this market?  A handful of reasons:

• I have officially deemed SEO work to be very inefficient.  We only consult and put together plans now, we don’t actively do work for clients - it just wasn’t profitable and we had a hard time getting cooperation from people.  While I’ll still take on the occasional client by referral under Pure Adapt, I’ll direct everyone else to the eBook which is selling for $39.99.
• When you do web design/development work, you can go after low-level clients (think restaurants or lawyers that only need a few updates each year) or mid and high level clients that require much more management and much more challenging work.  We’re not a team of A+ programmers, so we chose to go after the former because they suit our skillset the best.  We also seemed to be getting A LOT of referrals for small, simple sites and we didn’t have the infrastructure in place to do the work cost-effectively until now.  Mike has developed his own “version” of Wordpress that allows us to build completely custom sites on top of WP - saving us time and giving clients the ability to edit their own sites.  Because of how efficient the process is, we’re charging $249 for a basic site or blog, which is extremely affordable.  The Faceup site itself is built upon WP, with quite a bit of extra functionality that we built on top of it.  The coolest feature by far is the Site Builder that lets you choose a layout, color scheme, and header before contacting us (again, saving time going back and forth).
• We noticed that the margins on our reseller account that we have with a print shop are HUGE.  We initially got the account just for our own business cards and promo work, but have just realized that it’s worth offering because of the huge mark-ups.
• We want to keep the Pure Adapt name associated with high end, high quality.  Faceup is more “affordable and efficient” so it made sense to put it on its own domain.
• We’re counting on the recurring hosting fees to increase the profitability of Faceup over time.
• Because we’ll have efficient systems in place, this will be the perfect site to have interns and part time employees start with before moving on to more challenging coding projects.
• We seem to have easier access and more personal connections to this target market - restaurants, lawyers, accountants, real estate, new businesses, bloggers - than we do the higher end market.

Is it a risk?  Of course.  We’re evolving our client work based upon what we’ve seen in the past, and we think it will work, although it wouldn’t shock me if it didn’t (nothing shocks me at this point).  I know a lot of developers who swear by the higher end client and would tell me this is a mistake.  Maybe so - both have their pros and cons, but we think this approach fits our business better.   If it doesn’t, we’ll adjust the model until it does.

I’ll post in the coming days about our marketing plan, and also more info about the SEO/Web Marketing eBook and how you can get a free copy.   Off to start executing said marketing plan

Since we launched the new Detailed Image site last week we’ve had a lot of “the site looks cool” compliments. While we certainly appreciate the positive feedback, 99.99% of visitors will never ever recognize the changes we made to help improve Pure Adapt as a business. This post is dedicated to those features, why we put them in place, and the lessons learned in building a custom shopping cart from scratch. The goal was to have at least the functionality of the old cart for about half the site (which was an osCommerce cart) while implementing a laundry list of improvements for the rest of it. I think this post will be particularly useful to programmers who are planning to program their own e-commerce platform - many of the problems I encountered I struggled to solve because there were very few resources available.

Let’s start with some of the features:

Rewritten URLs
One of the primary reasons that we decided to pull the trigger and begin developing the site was that DI received virtually no search engine traffic. The osCommerce site consisted of literally two files /store/index.php and /store/product_info.php and all pages were dynamically generated based upon a series of URL variables like ?category=12&cpath=4&productid=99. Search engines are getting better at indexing dynamic sites, but DI was clearly having problems (they have several thousand links and still were barely being crawled).

The solution to this problem for dynamically driven sites is URL rewriting, which is basically changing the URLs to become unique for each page and product without using any URL variables. For example, http://www.detailedimage.com/Poorboys-World-M1/Spray-Wipe-SW-P32/. These URLs are “hackable” (you could visit http://www.detailedimage.com/Poorboys-World-M1 and it would work fine), and also provide the added bonus of being more “clickable” when someone searches. Example - if you searched “Poorboys World Spray and Wipe” wouldn’t you be more likely to click if Google displayed that URL as opposed to http://www.detailedimage.com/store/index.php?productid=89 ?

If your site is on an Apache server, you can accomplish this relatively easily in your .htaccess file. The biggest thing to remember is that you need to 301 redirect all of your old pages to the new ones so that search engines (and people) looking for the old page will be redirected to the new one.

Product Upsells
We built a product upsell system that recommends “Complimentary Items” and “Works Best With” items uniquely for each individual product. The relationships were hand coded by George based upon his years of experience, so they are highly relevant. Users can purchase the item by itself, or as part of their own custom bundle based upon the upsells they select. We anticipate that these will raise the average sale price quite a bit.

Google Analytics E-Commerce Integration
I think that by now most people know that Google Analytics is the preeminent web analytics tracking software available. Aside from being the right price (free) and easy to install, the automatic integration with Google AdWords and configurable tracking ‘goals’ make it a hands down choice. But one of the features that most people don’t know about is the e-commerce revenue tracking that they have built in.

This is one of the most useful features I’ve ever seen in analytics software. We pass the product information for each transaction to Google on the receipt page via a simple javascript, and in turn it tracks EVERYTHING related to the transaction. We now can determine how much revenue is derived from organic search vs. PPC vs. forums we sponsor - it brings web analytics full circle. We can even see revenue and products sold for each individual forum - so now we can precisely evaluate the ROI on a $300/month forum, for example. We can also see which type of visitor spends the most on average per transaction…or which type of visitor purchases which products. Data can also be segmented by location (country, state, etc), browser, and just about any other way you’d want to splice and dice it. Oh, and you can even use it to track affiliate sales if you have an affiliate program (we’re planning one on in the next few months). You can’t put a price on the value of this information to a small company like us. We can make much more informed decisions now.

Backend Automation
For the past two years, George and Greg have spent several hours each day manually processing each order: they charge out the customer, enter his/her billing info into Quickbooks, request a FedEx quote, print out invoices and shipping label, pack and ship….for each and every customer. Now we’ve got all of that down to a process that takes less than 3 minutes (not including packing time of course). In addition to saving them 3-6 hours each day, it eliminates the mistakes that they made manually entering customer info over and over into Quickbooks.

In addition, we also have full tracking capabilities for FedEx packages through our site for both us and the consumer, further eliminating customer service inquiries related to tracking.

CSS Overlay for Pictures
The art for the site was primarily done by artist Sam Li, who does absolutely spectacular work. His talent allowed us to bring the “driver cockpit” idea for the site to a reality. The coolest innovation was the navigation screen on the right that displays category information, specials advertisements, and product photos.

One thing I always HATE on other sites is a pop-up window when enlarging an image to view a close-up of the product. Problem solved with a slick CSS overlay for product photos.

Auto-generated Sitemaps and Froogle Feed
The Sitemap, Google Sitemap, and Froogle feed (Google Product Search now) are all completely automated. If we add a new product, they are all updated appropriately. Previously, George was manually compiling them.

Of course, the best benefit of all is that this new system is completely scalable without limitations. We created it, so we can expand it however we want, something that wasn’t really possible with osC.

NOW, on to some of the problems I encountered and how I overcame them. This section will probably only be of value to programmers, particularly those looking to build an e-commerce site themselves.

The #1 thing I learned from a programming perspective is that most companies use an off the shelf cart (Yahoo Stores, osCommerce, CubeCart, etc), so don’t expect there to be a ton of information out there if you’re looking to build an extremely customized cart. The majority of problems I solved on my own.

FedEx/USPS Integration
This was by far the most difficult. Surprisingly, neither company makes it very easy to integrate with their site. We began the project with the idea of generating shipping labels ourselves for 100% integration…which we quickly dismissed because of the lengthy approval process that both have. We only ship USPS for International orders (relatively uncommon), so George and Greg decided to continue to do those labels online themselves.

So I needed to be able to generate rate quotes for FedEx and USPS, and be able to ship FedEx with our system. In addition, I needed tracking integration for ourselves and our customers. Here’s the solution I came up with:

• Generate FedEx rate quotes using Vermonster’s Open Source FedEx Direct Connect. Support is nil (I tried emailing them for help once), but if you take the time to read the documentation and comments in the code it shouldn’t take too long to get up and running. Of course, you’ll need to register with FedEx to get testing (and later, production) keys.
• Generate USPS rate quotes using Aldirgas Varnagiris’ USPS PHP rates calculator. It worked perfectly right away, however you can only run the specific examples (as opposed to using your own address) with your test account. You also can’t run any international examples using the test account (took me a day to figure that out). My advice - try the domestic example, if it works, apply for the production key and test international using that.
• Use the FedEx Ship Manager to print invoices and generate tracking numbers. The software sucks ass, but using it means you’ll generate 100% perfect shipping labels…much easier than trying to make them yourself and then go through FedEx’s verification procedure. Our backend generates a text file for the days orders, which you import into the the Ship Manager (using what they call the “Hold file”). You click to ship, the labels print, and you export a text file back to the website to insert the tracking numbers. Sounds relatively simple, but “Hold file” documentation is scarce, so I relied on some of the FedEx DC documentation from above and also the really-hard-to-find Tagged Transaction Guide to get the file formatted properly.

If you’re trying to replicate those steps, I’ll be happy to answer any questions that might arise throughout the process.

Redirects and URL Rewriting
When moving a site or changing URLs it is critical to implement 301 search engine friendly redirects to tell both people and search robots where your new files are.

I’ve always written a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file like the following:

Redirect 301 /feedback.php http://www.sportslizard.com/contact.php

And I never had a problem. Turns out in this case, there were some higher level server issues messing with our redirects. In addition, we had dynamic URLs for our old site, which can cause problems if redirecting that way. After many, many, many hours searching around and using trial and error, I came up with the following solution for redirecting a dynamic URL to a static one using the aforementioned URL rewriting:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^cPath=21_113&products_id=266$
RewriteRule ^store/product_info.php$ /Menzerna-M10/Auto-Shampoo-P71/? [R=301,L]

In this example, we’re redirecting http://www.detailedimage.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=21_113&products_id=266 to http://www.detailedimage.com/Menzerna-M10/Auto-Shampoo-P71/. The QUERY_STRING is the URL variables (anything after the .php in the URL). The SUPER IMPORTANT thing to remember is that last question mark - that prevents the query string from being appended to the new URL. You’ll see that the R=301 tells the user agent that this is a 301 redirect as opposed to a normal URL rewrite.

PHP Dynamic PDF Generation
I decided to take a fresh approach to invoices and receipts. Instead of the standard “view printable invoice” we provide each customer with a link to a printable/downloadable PDF receipt. In addition to always printing correctly, it gives them the option of just downloading it to their hard drive (saving the paper). I got the idea from Mike (our fourth partner) when he told me he used PrimoPDF to PDF any receipt from an online purchase.

We’re also using dynamic PDF generation to store digital copies of all of our invoices.

After trying a whole bunch of different options, I finally settled on using FPDF - a simple open source PDF-ing software for PHP. While it’s really easy to generate a simple PDF with different text sizes, colors, and pictures, I had a ton of trouble printing the tabular data necessary for an invoice. FPDF works much like a dot-matrix printer: it prints line by line and you control the location on the line based on left/right padding. This caused problems when trying to line up an invoice. Eventually I found the Write HTML Tables add-on scrip that allowed me to format the invoice like an HTML table which worked perfectly.

CONCLUSION
Hopefully this will be a valuable resource to anyone developing an e-commerce platform, or anyone who currently has one and is looking to make a few upgrades. As I mentioned last post, this was one long and exhausting project, but it was worth every second: 3 months of work for years and years of cost savings and improved efficiencies. Over time I’m planning on posting examples of how these features help take the company to the next level.

One of the things I’m interested most in regarding the move of this blog is the SEO impact that it will have on both SportsLizard and on the blog.  SportsLizard ranked very high for key terms related to both sports collectibles AND entrepreneurship, and both are clearly at risk by moving such a large part of the site.  All of the old posts are now 301 (SE friendly) permanently redirected to their counterparts in the archive on this site.

For this domain, I’m hoping to FINALLY get that boost I need to rank #1 for “Adam McFarland”.  The old blog ranked #3 behind the dork that has Adam-McFarland.com.

I also am hoping to not lose the #3 ranking for the term “entrepreneur blog”.  I get a lot of great traffic that way, and countless people searching for an entrepreneur like themselves have found me via search and dropped me encouraging emails.

Here are the different scenarios I can envision (each of which I’ve seen happen to clients/friends):

1. All of the links pointing to the old YE blog will be correctly applied to Adam-McFarland.Net and it will retain its rankings, as will SL.
2. Adam-McFarland.Net will retain its rankings, but SL will suffer because it will appear to be losing ~30% of its inbound links.
3. Adam-McFarland.Net will suffer in the rankings (after all, it is a brand spanking new domain getting all of these redirects from a sports collectibles site) and SL will suffer for dishing out all of those redirects and the loss of inbound links.
4. Search engines (I particularly could see this happening with Google) will rank both sites HIGHER because the topics of the domains will be more clearly defined.*  There may have been some confusion in algorithms seeing a site as both a sports site and a YE site (two distinctly different niches).  Adam-McFarland.Net will be seen as the business/entrepreneurial site, and SL will be solely sports and sports collectibles.

#4 is what I hope will happen…and I think will be the end result, it’s just a question of whether or not there will be a step back before a step forward.  It will be interesting to see.  I’ll write a post updating you once it’s been a few weeks.

*If at any time you want to see what Google thinks the topic of your domain is, you can log into Google Webmaster Tools and read the page analysis.  It will tell you what words Google finds prevalent on your site, and the anchor text of your internal links and external links pointing to your site.  Having a clearly defined domain topic will help a search engine rank you appropriately, and is particularly helpful in helping you rank high when you launch a new section of your site that follows in-line with other content on your domain (that’s how the Price Guide on SL ranked extremely high in a matter of days).