"Lessons Learned" is a biweekly series where we request ecommerce merchants to discuss their experiences and advice. With this setup, we interviewed Lars Hundley, president of Clean Air Gardening, an online store based in Dallas, Texas that sells environmentally friendly lawn and garden supplies. Hundley founded Clean Air Gardening in 1998. It now has 11 employees, 1,500 goods and gained approximately $3 million in revenue in 2008. Here we provide you Hundley's experiences and suggestions.
Shopping cart software
"We utilize Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Pro as our cart and website hosting for Clean Air Gardening. We have been using it since 1999, and we are still very happy with it. I am constantly looking around at other alternatives, but I have not found anything that I like enough to warrant switching away."
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"I enjoy the Yahoo! Store platform for a whole lot of reasons. It's a hosted solution, which means I don't need to worry about maintaining a server up and running . We do not have some IT employees. I do it all myself. I keep things as straightforward as possible, so I'm not running around doing IT work daily. Yahoo! Store can be very search engine friendly, which is totally important once you have an ecommerce website."
"I also like their secure system for managing credit card numbers where they delete amounts after 30 days, which means you aren't holding on to lots of information that becomes a goal. And on top of that, it is super simple to edit your shop with just a web browser. We can train a new employee to do it in only a couple minutes."
"There are tons of Yahoo! Store designers and developers who can make your shop look as custom as you want it to. They are also able to add in a great deal of additional features, like customer reviews. We are using 1choice4yourstore. Com right now, and we're happy with their services."
Hosting
"Additionally Yahoo! Store [a hosted shopping cart]."
Employees
"I was the only employee for the first six years that we were in company. I hired my first employee around three decades ago, and the next employee just a tiny bit under a year after that. We needed even more workers when we purchased a building locally, so we jumped up to 11 pretty fast. We're still fairly seriously understaffed, but it is far better to be understaffed than overstaffed in the current economy."
"One of our challenges is that as a gardening-related business, we've got a enormous burst of earnings in March through June. We're staffed about right from the non-seasonal weeks, but everybody has to fight to get out all of the orders throughout the spring busy year. We expect to employ more people to handle the phones before spring, which is our present point of where it hurts most about staffing."
Marketing
"We do some public relations in house. I have a degree in journalism, and I was a magazine editor before I began this organization. I have done all my own PR for its first couple of years, and Clean Air Gardening was featured in all sorts of top national magazines through the years. Nowadays, one of the authors does a lot of the in-house PR work for me, with my supervision, and she does a terrific job."
"We also use a little, two-person outside PR agency that specializes in the gardening market. This service only promotes one of our major products. We import a compost bin which we sell at retail and distribute to other dealers all over the USA at wholesale, and that's the product they market. We have been doing this since the last half of 2008, and we've been getting outstanding results."
"We also use a media buying service. It is a small company that specializes in purchasing advertisements for mail order gardening companies. That firm has paid for itself several times over by helping me just advertise in publications which make sense for our organization and in negotiating better advertising prices. Because they work for so many other gardening businesses, they are true experts, and I do not know what we'd do without them."
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Pay-per-click advertising
"We mostly only market with [Google] AdWords, and have not used Yahoo! or MSN pay-per -click advertisements in the past few decades. We do not have a dedicated worker to cope with PPC, so it is too much hassle to set up multiple accounts."
"We've been testing out a man recently who optimizes and manages AdWords accounts. He's a former Google employee who began his own company. We have been happy with how he's helped reduce our per-click costs, which more than pays for his services. We're slowly expanding the amount of campaigns he runs for us."
HT14ML
"Search engine optimization is important to us. We have three full time bloggers from our 11 employees. Before we hired authors, I did all the writing myself. It is that important."
"We do not really mess with super technical approaches to SEO. We just generate plenty of unique, well-written content about our products. We spend a whole lot of time composing unique product descriptions. Our writers can walk out to the warehouse and touch and feel our products, so that gives them a leg up on people that are only rewriting a producer's description of a solution or utilizing manufacturer copy verbatim. We also encourage workers to utilize our products, so that they have personal experience with them."
"Our writers are all educated about the fundamentals of how search engines work, so that they write both people friendly and search engine friendly backup. We feel that ultimately, search engines need good, solid content to appear well since that is what people want to find when they're trying to find something. If we keep writing strong content that's good and useful, then we believe it ought to do well over time."
"It seems kind of simplistic, but we are pretty happy with our results on the major engines for the keyword phrases that are important to us."
Expense control
"We're still small enough that I sign all the tests, which is one method we use to keep expenses in check. As a growing company, it's easy to let overhead and small expenses grow and escape control. You do not notice it as much as your earnings is growing. Since I started the company from my house, financed with a credit card, I generally take a'bootstrapping' approach to running a company and would rather keep overhead as low as possible."
"I had one really bad year early on where I was buying all of my print advertisements. My sales went up, but I closed the books at the end of the year and my gains were way, way down. I was wasting it all on ineffective advertising. This was when I changed to a media buying service as it was obvious I was really bad at it."
Accounting software
"We're using QuickBooks for accounting. My wife is a CPA and MBA, and she manages all our accounting and our fund requirements. Other workers help with accounting and billing and invoices. We're likely going to outgrow QuickBooks in another few years, and I don't have any clue what we will do then."
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Order management applications
"We utilize Stone Edge and it's working well for us. It's compatible with Yahoo! Store and dozens of other shopping carts. We use it to keep track of our inventory, to help set orders from suppliers, to take telephone orders and to ship and process online orders."
"We believed Order Motion if we had been looking at other possibilities, but the per purchase fees for Order Motion could have made it prohibitively costly for all of us. We also considered Mail Order Manager, but it was too complex to install when we tried the trial version, so we did not even try it."
"Stone Edge provided a service where they connect to a PC and put up all of the applications for you originally for a fee, which was the best money we've ever spent on anything. Stone Edge has a learning curve, but now that we're using it, we do not see anything else which would be worth the massive hassle of switching to."
Shipping and order fulfillment
"For the first six years I had been in company, I was the sole employee. I used an outsourced warehouse service for anything that would not fit in my home or garage. Finally, it grew too expensive to outsource warehousing anymore. As our order quantity kept increasing exponentially through time, so did our yearly warehouse storage and handing fees. When it reached a tipping point, it made more financial sense for us to buy a 14,000 square foot warehouse and office building. We ship from our own site."
"We drop ship a few products, but we like to concentrate on products that can not be dropped shipped, which will help reduce competition from the kinds of shops that just drop ship and are happy with low margins."
Credit card payments
"We use Authorize.net as our credit card gateway. We've been happy with their service and rates, for the most part. They work well with our purchase management applications, Stone Edge, and that's the reason we use them."
Social media
"We're experimenting with Twitter and Facebook but have not really found it to create plenty of traffic or revenue. People today go on Facebook to hang out with their friends rather than to buy things, it appears to me."
"We shoot a whole lot of our own product videos and a few gardening and lawn informational videos, and we place them on YouTube. Those videos get tens of thousands of aggregate views, and they do help create sales. We embed these videos directly into our product pages so that individuals can watch a movie when they want to determine if they would like to buy something. You can view our YouTube station at Youtube.com/cleanairgardening."
Blogs
"We have a Clean Air Gardening site, and it's been a fantastic way to create traffic. We maintain several weeks' worth of articles prescheduled from the site, so we do not have to worry about,'What are we going to write about now? '''
"We do plenty of informational blog posts about eco-friendly gardening in general, but we do some merchandise related posts also. It offers you multiple opportunities for your product to appear in a search engine for those who have an original blog post about the product and a merchandise page. The blog post can create search traffic directly to the item page, where you can make the sale. We will do posts like'Products We're Using' and'Newly Added Product. '''
Customer service
"Since we are understaffed, we are not always as good at answering the phones as we would like to be. We attempt to compensate for that by sending fast, so there isn't as much of a demand for customer support. It's like that book, The Best Service is No Service."
"We've got a 60-day money back guarantee, which is more than most companies. If a customer does not like something, we're generally pretty easy to work with when it comes to returns, exchanges, etc.."
"I seem to companies like Zappos and L.L. Bean as models. I'd really like to be half as good as either of these men."
General business mindset
"Our business is all about environmentally friendly products, so we try to conduct our company with this in mind. We've got an entire section of our site devoted to all the"green" things we do at Clean Air Gardening, and we are always seeking ways to improve.
"We also have a really cool app during checkout where people may opt to donate $1, $5 or $10 to Trees for the Future, a nonprofit that plants trees in developing countries. We match those donations, dollar for dollar, which effectively doubles the client's impact with their donation. In 2008, we raised just over $13,000 for Trees for the Future. That cash will plant around 130,000 trees. How's that for making a difference?"
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