"Lessons Learned" is an occasional series where we ask experienced ecommerce merchants about their successes and mistakes. With this setup, we asked Jon West, co-founder of 3tailer, a market company based in Charlotte, N.C. with over 50,000 individual products sold on 17 websites. West and Chad Ledford, another co-founder, began 3tailer in 2005 while studying at Appalachian State University. Since that time, 3tailer has grown enough to market over $1 million in yearly revenue, relying on stock suppliers to drop-ship each the sales. Here we provide you with West's expertise and suggestions.
On General Business Strategy
"Create systems that scale for every facet of your company. How are you going to handle support? How can you handle returns? How are you going to manage an influx of visitors? Architect your company in such a way that processes are automatic and protocols are described. Work hard. Play hard. Be patient. Be hungry."
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On Third Party Business Resources
"Third parties can be an important asset to a young company which might not have the tools available to possess everything in-house. We strive to have as many costs outsourced and factor as possible, such as our accounting and payroll. Outsource distractions that are not actually your core competencies so that you can concentrate on what you are good at."
On Shopping Carts
"There are tons of options out there. Your choice will be different based upon your budget and how tech savvy you are. For some individuals, Yahoo! makes sense, while for others a self-hosted solution works best. Fortunately for us we are knowledgeable about Internet technologies, so we opted to go with an open source base and add custom code on top of it. Our platform has been shown to be quite scalable and flexible, which is important to any market online retailer with a number of sites."
On Hosting
"In the start of your company you can usually get away with more affordable shared hosting solutions. Ensure you've got a plan to change to managed or dedicated hosting when it becomes necessary. It's difficult to win business with a site that's slow. It's also really hard to utilize social media websites and increase your traffic when you are concerned about your hosting equilibrium."
On Employees
"Take your time and look for red flags. Slow to hire, fast to fire."
On Marketing
"We now market only online, so it is crucial to get everything working in harmony: search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertisements, multiple stations, affiliates, email advertising and branding."
About Pay-Per-Click Advertising
"Google is king, Yahoo! isn't really worthwhile, MSN converts nicely, but because it is very simple to rank organically it is generally not worth the effort. Get PayPal and Google badges if your site qualifies. There are a whole lot of little tricks you can do to boost your click-through rate and conversion."
On Search Engine Optimization
"This is our bread and butter. Design your site with both customers and search engines in mind, and you will usually come out a winner. Avoid the urge to trick search engines. Have a long-term plan. Build good links. A good deal of people will just do something to fool a search engine. Have good content, unique name tags, have descriptive URLs with dashes, and it is fantastic to be in certain relevant directories."
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On Expense Control
"Make your company as lean as possible. Negotiate your merchant prices down, use less power and save everywhere possible. A hands on accountant is useful too."
On Order Management Software
"We do not carry stock and we rely on our suppliers to ship products directly to our clients. We currently just use what is built into our sites, an automatic backend. It just seemed to make more sense because we do not have a warehouse and do not manage stock."
On Shipping and Order Fulfillment
"We use strategic providers who manage this for us. Providers who send out automatic tracking numbers and have a transparent order fulfillment system are crucial. Build strong relationships with your suppliers."
On Credit Card Payments
"Accept as many types of payment as you possibly can. We now accept Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover, PayPal, Google Checkout, wire transfer, checks and trendy T-shirts. Also, be very wary of your credit card processor. Hunting around online for the lowest rate can get you into trouble. Ensure that your chip is offering you divide rates (debit and credit ), and ask what your mid-qualified and non-qualified rates are along with your own qualified. Focus on getting the prior twice as low as possible because most online orders will be mid-qualified. Depending upon your quantity, you have a great deal of wiggle room. Don't do any big international orders by credit cardjust wire transfer or certified check. Chargeback fraud is extremely frightening."
On Social Networking
"Use it as best you can. It appears obvious, but a whole lot of folks miss the pointbe social. Make friends and let them out, and they will return the favor. Our favorite sites are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Propeller and Sphinn. Each of our ecommerce websites has a site on it, so we see what type of whacky story you can put on a website. Digg has broken down on commercial websites, so it is better regulated others. We've got a hookah site, so we did a blog post on smoking tips. Social networking for us is more about hyperlinks than anything. We've got a few different Facebook pages and groups. Each page took only one hour. When the initial setup is done, it is just there, and it just keeps going."
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