Interview with Cynthia Oliver, Owner of Ethereal Decor Tell us about your business. What products do you sell? We started our business in 2002 in Bridgeport, CT. We sell wholesale, high-end event decorations and home décor products, specializing in chandelier replacement crystal prisms and crystal chains. Our signature product is…
Interview with Benton Tait, Owner of Prescribed for Life Tell us about your business. What products do you sell? We offer diet, health and nutritional products and bulk ingredients to online retail customers and to retail outlets. Besides our own site pforlife.com (built on Bigcommerce), we also promote our products on Amazon, with much success. We…
In the early 2000s, Nike had some major inventory management problems. The company lost around $100 million in sales due to these issues. It may be difficult to imagine that such a well-established corporation could have a massive operational failure like this, but they did. As they learned…
Most small business ecommerce merchants send automated emails to their customers to notify when an order ships. How personal should you make those emails? Here is an example. (via 37Signals) Do customers like such personal language in the notification email? The opinion seems to be mixed according to the…
How do you stand apart if you are selling just soap? How do you differentiate yourselves from the dozens of other soap sellers? The key to selling anything is to first identify a small group of customers, and to then offer them something that is better than what…
Recently, I read an interesting interview of Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com. He suggests that women customers (presumably on his site) are more sensitive to shipping charges than men. He also suggests an interesting way to offer more free shipping – Women [customers] care about the two…
Wall Street Journal reports the story of a few startups that are competing against eBay. These companies do it by choosing a niche and then differentiating within that niche via a higher quality service. Here are the sites listed in the article – and the niche they specialize in.…
Here is a revealing interview with the founder of Blinds.com. The webstore was launched in 1996 to sell window blinds online and today earns $50 million in annual revenues. And all of that with zero debt, and zero inventory. Remarkable! My key take aways from the 7 page…