Moving to technology and the nut and bolts of operating a site. Yahoo! Stores is well known as an excellent place to get started in online retailing and you’ve been on it for years now. Now that you’ve become a successful retailer, what are the pros and cons for remaining with Yahoo!?
Yahoo! offers retailers a very affordable platform that saves you lots of headaches. I think it would be difficult to find a PCI compliant, fully hosted ecommerce platform for the same budget. Particularly if you went the do-it-yourself route, say, by getting a server from Rackspace. While I think the price provides excellent value, your flexibility is limited. The back-end prevents you from doing some things simply. You’re forced to customize and create workarounds. There are extreme differences between an established platform like Yahoo! and Magento, which was designed from scratch for web 2.0/3.0 (or whatever they’re calling it these days).

As a company, we’re pretty loyal to Yahoo! and the Yahoo! platform. Still, if a company knows that it will grow beyond $5-15M in annual sales, I think they are going to ultimately regret choosing Yahoo! When we launched our newest store, I wanted to see what I was missing, which is why I researched alternatives and ultimately chose Magento. Revamping that site has been a good learning experience and an opportunity to really see the pros and cons of Yahoo!

Is Yahoo! a flexible platform for integrating the latest operational, web design, merchandizing and payment technologies and services?
Yahoo! isn’t a platform that offers the latest and greatest. It is always a couple of steps behind and there are number of integration and technology challenges that are really frustrating. One of the most obvious examples is integrating an alternative payment option like Google Checkout. While the Google Checkout icon can help your PPC clickthrough rates, if you actually want to integrate it, you’ll violate the terms of your Yahoo! agreement.

Talk about the Yahoo! Stores retailer and developer communities…what are their value?
These communities are really important. When we started out, we didn’t outsource anything because we couldn’t afford it. We learned Yahoo’s proprietary programming language, RTML, and grew the site to a level where we could afford to outsource. Once we had a development budget, we tapped the developer community. The sites wouldn’t be where they are today without the contributions of the professional store developer community.

Talking specifically about the Yahoo! platform, what are three things that you did that you would have done differently had you known better?
A. I’d like our site to be faster. We need to make some optimization changes but I’m going to have to do some research because I’m not sure right now if it is the underlying code or a graphics issue.

B. We need a lot more sophistication in our supplier chain. I would have really loved to have spent a lot more time developing real-time integration of our inventory data. We’ve since created workarounds but they are not as ideal as doing the most effective way right from the beginning.

C. The third change would have been to spend a lot more time and care building our product database. It is really valuable to have complete product information or attributes (notably dimensions and weights). This is especially true for retailers who drop ship. Complete product data helps minimize shipping costs. It helps you provide real-time shipping calculation to customers when they are in your shopping cart. It helps you calculate by dimensional weight. I can’t overemphasize the importance of having an accurate and up-to-date database.

How does Nextopia’s site search technology and modules that you use fit into the Yahoo! Stores world?
Nextopia integrates very easily into the Yahoo! Stores platform and we’ve been a happy customer for over three years. In a perfect world, your product database includes all of the relevant product attributes, which enables you to filter search results. In general, site search benefits a retailer in proportion to the completeness of the underlying product database. By working with Nextopia, we’ve been able to implement some solutions but as I said just now, I really wish we had built our database with complete product attributes from the beginning.

Enough about Yahoo!, let’s talk about Magento and your newly revamped site, IslandBeachGear.com.
Even though Magento’s basic version is open source and the vendor doesn’t charge for it, it isn’t your least cost option by any means. Magento is neither simple, nor is it free. It took many, many hours to develop our IslandBeachGear.com site to the point where it is now. It required a lot of tweaking to get it right and you’ll probably require some knowledgeable developers. We used a combination of in-house resources and some third-party development. Additionally, the hosting level you need to have a fast website is expensive.

Nextopia Site Search integrated on a Magento site-IslandBeachGear.com

In contrast, you can get a Yahoo! Store up and running in no time. In about twenty minutes, I could create a functioning one or two SKU Yahoo! Store that could actually take orders and process payments. It wouldn’t look pretty but it would work. In contrast, Magento isn’t nearly as easy to use. The tradeoff is much greater flexibility. I’ve been very impressed by the design and usability and the out-of-box functionality. I love the flexibility. There is no limit to what I can do. I haven’t run into one adjustment or request that we couldn’t implement. With Yahoo, I run into roadblocks all the time. Magento is designed using the latest software technologies and online retailing, marketing and merchandising processes. The SEO capabilities, integrated reviews and real-time inventory access are great. That said, I would love it if Magento provided an on-demand platform like Yahoo!

Thanks very much to Patrick. Great information and guidance from someone who’s been in the ecommerce trenches for a decade. As you can see, the road to success requires a lot of hard work and iterative trial. If you fish or know someone who fishes and might appreciate an angling-themed Christmas gift, you know where to start your shopping.

Can you give us a quick summary of your company, operations and markets.
We’re an ecommerce retailing company, currently operating four sites in the fishing and outdoor leisure markets. Our corporate headquarters are in Somers Point, NJ and we run our Island Beach Gear retail store in Ocean City, NJ. In total, we have 25 full-time employees. We’ll add seasonal staff during the peak fishing and beach-related retailing months (spring and summer). Our fishing sales are split 80% in the United States, with the balance from overseas markets. The big overseas markets are South America and the United Kingdom with some sales in parts of Asia. Our beach gear sales are almost exclusively North American sales.

Who are your competitors?
We’re a specialty fishing retailer. We don’t generally–or even try to–compete against mass merchandizers like Wal-mart or the national chains like Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shops. We win customers on service and know-how, not private branding or discounting. There are probably 6,000 independent fishing retailing stores in the United States, the vast majority of which are small Mom and Pop stores. To give you an idea of the market fragmentation, a really successful independent fishing retailer will do one million dollars annually in sales. But while they’re small, these local stores are really important because they know their regions. They know specifically what works in the local rivers and lakes and costal waterways. In contrast, our specialized knowledge is product-centric. Our company and our sales reps have lots of product knowledge, but the local fishing market knowledge is found in local stores. A final word on this retailing category is the fact that people who like to fish have been much slower to adopt to Internet product sourcing than in other categories.

Let’s talk about mixing fishing and business, or in your case, making fishing your business. How often do you actually get out and test the products you sell?
While I do get out on the water, I’m the head guy so I’m not out as much as our customer service and sales staff. Our product buyers and customer service team all fish a lot because they have to test lots of gear to figure out what we should buy. I tend to test the beach gear products more often than the fishing catalog.

Let’s start by talking big picture. Your retailing properties target outdoor pursuits that are restricted by climate seasonality across much of the North American continent? How does the seasonality of your customer base affect your operations?
We sell a good amount of gear twelve months per year. We sell all types of fishing gear, primarily saltwater, although we also sell freshwater and fly fishing. But saltwater is definitely our focus. While fishing sales increase considerably in the summer, the winter months are not exactly dead. The seasonality issue is certainly real but we balance that against a very wide product selection.
How has your customer base been affected by the economic downturn since 2007?
Although our number of orders for the 2009 fiscal year were up over 2008, average order value was down. We’ve done much better than the industry average, I think, in 2010.

Has their behavioral change affected your growth plans?
When economic times are tight, focus on the things that are working. At times, your focus could be to gain market share, not lose it. We’re trying to do a better job at everything we do. We’ve reduced our PPC spend as well as adjusted some of our other marketing activities. Inventory projection is always a gamble but we have reduced large inventory purchases to extend our cash resources.

Has it changed your plans for upgrades in technology, marketing activities or third party services that you use?
I’m constantly evaluating third party add-ons like Nextopia site search, and I probably get several phone calls per week from vendors pitching me on some third party tool or conversion booster. I like to listen to learn if we’re not doing something that we should. You really have to distinguish between what can help you and what will waste your time. If something comes out that is better than what we’re using, we’ll make the change.

Nextopia site search helps fishing enthusiasts find exactly what they need among the thousands of product SKUs on TackleDirect.com

Two things I noticed that you are not using are reviews or videos on TackleDirect. Why not? Reviews are available on some of your sites but not all of them. Are you planning on integrating them any time? What are you thoughts about user generated content (UGC) and online retailing?
It is time to get serious about both reviews and video across all of our sites. Incorporating reviews into Yahoo! Stores isn’t easy. We evaluated review technology for our Yahoo! sites a while back and it was premature. We’ve also found limitations with PowerReviews on the Yahoo! platform. To really do the job well, we’ll probably have to redesign our product layout because our current site design doesn’t work easily. It will take some effort. In contrast, the Magento site (IslandBeachGear.com) included review software from the beginning. Integrating reviews into that site was far easier.

Any comments on UGC?
One thing I’d really like to create is some kind of customer showcase. We receive hundreds of pictures every year. We’ve received everything from pictures of landing a 1,000 lb. blue marlin, to a variety of world record catches to little kids who caught something really special. My favorite, though, has to be a picture several years ago from three guys who went to Thailand. One of them landed a huge tuna using a very special and very expensive fishing reel that cost over $1,300. What I loved about the picture was that the boat they were sitting in, a very beaten up 14′ aluminum, was probably worth $50.

Come back in a couple of days for the second part of our interview with Patrick.

Let’s talk technology and the nut and bolts of operating your website. You’re on the Miva platform? What do you see as the pros and cons of it?
We were already established on the Miva platform (hosted with Cyberhost) before I arrived. It is secure and works 24/7. Even though we’re on an older version, it works well and I’ve had a good experience. Although some things are not as customizable, we’re not looking to upgrade MIVA. We’re developing a custom shopping cart, though, because we want some additional flexibility and customizable functionality.
What about processing and payments?
We don’t do any card processing online. It is all offline and non-real-time. Part of the reason is security. Part of the reason is that we’re not a widget company that ships boxed inventoried products the same day. Rather than dealing with backorders, we find it better to process the order as it it is filled. The benefits of doing offline processing definitely outweigh the benefits of doing it online. We deal with fewer refunds and backorders.

How do you handle international customers? Any special fraud programs in place?
We do address verification, and direct contact and confirmation with international customers. Because each order is hand processed we can spot inaccuracies and potential fraud threats. Any orders over $300 require a special form we send after the order has been placed.

You have a corporate policy against shipping to Mexico, Russia and all of Africa. Why?
There is just too much fraud that takes places as a result of doing business with these countries to make it worthwhile.

Let’s talk customer acquisition. It looks like word of mouth is important? Event marketing, I assume is big, too.
Both are really important. We do word of mouth and event marketing across the country. We don’t host events ourselves. Instead, we get involved with green living events around the country, such as The Green Festival in San Francisco, Green America and numerous other conferences. I love trade shows and I’m trying to find an herbal IT conference that I can attend. Haven’t found one yet, unfortunately.

Let’s talk SEO.
We do all of our SEO in house. We use Google Analytics and Google Base for our shopping feeds. Also, we cover our keywords, meta-data, headers, alt tags etc… everything indexable to keep us in the search light.

We use Nextopia’s technology in a several different ways. We use the EcommISearch module for our site search and the new Out of Stock Alerts module which enables customers to add their email on a per-SKU basis. When we receive new product and update our inventory and shopping cart, the system automatically sends out an email. It is a great way to drive sales.

Selecting Nextopia for our site search has been one of the best decisions we made. I love Nextopia. I really do. I’ve really enjoyed working with the engineers tremendously. When I’ve needed applications developed, they’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty several times. Probably the main reason our relationship works is that they’re the right size of company for us. I know I can talk to Chris Bannister (my Nextopia account rep) and get stuff done. I work with other vendors and don’t get anywhere near the same level of personalized attention. With other vendors, I’m not just not as important. With Nextopia, I am really, really important.

The Right Amount of Cardamon at Just the Right Time

Let’s talk Social Marketing. You’re tied into Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and You Tube. What does social marketing do for you?
Keeping in touch with the herbal community is critical for us. Social marketing gives us a face, so we’re not an anonymous wall. It allows customers to talk to us as well as interact. As we both participate in this discussion and observe it, we find out what our customers want.

Mountain Rose Herbs launched a user generated video contest in October 2009. Customers were asked to showcase their love of herbs, teas, spices, oils, and all things botanical.
The creator of the winning video received $1,000 and featured placement through the company’s social media accounts.
The idea came from internal discussions. The promotional video introducing the contest really captures who we are as a company. We wanted the video to encourage customer participation, we hired a local guy named Norm Scott, who did a terrific job. The entries were great. It is really fun to see how we touch people’s lives and play a part in their practice of an organic herbal lifestyle. (The delightful winning entry came from Catherine Wing and Bill Buckendorf who created a rapping rodent, Chives the Mouse).

Looked at your Twitter feed. Seems to be a combination of news tweets and coupon offers?
The key is having someone on your staff who has the time to keep on top of it. I’m definitely not that guy. Our marketing department handles it. Overall, Twitter helps keep our name present in any discussions relating to the herbal industry. From my perspective as a Mountain Rose employee and as a musician, I think it is a really good tool.

Where do you go to learn more about ecommerce innovations? What are some of the resources?
We work with a database programmer, Will Emmerson. He does a lot of our custom backend development for our ERP system. For example, he wrote the back end between Miva and our system. I work with him collaboratively. I’ll take an idea for a program or problem we need to solve. We’ll talk about options and possible solutions and then develop whatever we think is the best fix. Between Shawn, Will and I, we follow advances in technology and reason about how it could fit into our shop.

For a new retailer just starting out, what are a couple of things you would recommend they do?
First, I’d invest in IT and use it. Don’t go cheap and scrimp unnecessarily. Allocate whatever is necessary (time and/or money) to do a good job. It really can help you grow efficiently.

Finally, what is one thing that people probably don’t know about Mountain Rose Herbs?
Our corporate IT policy dictates that everything we buy is EPEAT Certified Gold. Everything we buy for our staff of 80 plus people, from desktops and monitors, to networking equipment, needs to meet this standard.

(Ed Note: EPEAT is a system that helps purchasers evaluate, compare and select electronic products based on their environmental attributes.)

Thanks Nate for your time. If you want to hear Nate’s other love, visit his band’s website. He manages it, of course.

Can you give us quick summary of your company, operations and markets.
Mountain Rose Herbs was founded in 1987. We’re located in Eugene, OR, and sell a wide range of natural botanical products, including organic herbs, spices, teas, and oils. We carry approximately 2,000 product SKUs. We have a head office in Eugene and operate several warehouses around the city. We do some manufacturing to produce our own finished products. Our business, however, is primary selling bulk ingredients to people who want to make their own herbal or aromatherapy products. You can order 4 oz or 200 lbs of nettles from us.

MountainRoseHerbs.com-Nettles

Our customer base is people into organic agriculture, herbs, aromatherapy, herbal and alternative healing, sustainable business practices, and botany. They take what they source from us and make their own products for retail and personal use.

Which products are your favorites?
I use a lot of the products we sell, especially the herbal teas. Once you start working around herbalists, you quickly learn that there are lots and lots of cool products and uses for them. For example, I’ve got a friend who burned himself while camping. He didn’t have health insurance so I spoke with some of the herbalists at work about a solution. They gave me a recipe for a salve which helped him completely recover without any scarring.

If you weren’t running the back end of an ecommerce outfit, what would you be doing?
Playing music or working in IT. I love music and I love IT!

Does your business have seasonality?
Getting involved with herbs and the products we sell is a lifestyle. We’re pretty steady all year long, although we do see some fourth quarter spikes from people who do bulk orders to make products for one-of-a-kind holiday sales and fairs, or who are planning to give them as Christmas gifts.

How has your customer base been affected by the economic downturn?
As I said, we sell to people who are enthusiastic about the herbal lifestyle. Buying from us forms part of their healthcare. When the economy is tough and health care increasingly expensive, people take more responsibility for their own health.

What do you do to stand out to in the marketplace?
We have an awesome marketing department that is very in tune with the movement. They focus on the fact that we are a company worth supporting, we value our employees, our loose culture and, of course, our high quality.

Thanks for your time, Nate. We’ll be back in a couple of days with part two.

An Internet Retailer Top 500 retailer, ToolFetch replaced its Google Mini site search engine earlier this year with Nextopia’s eComm|Search and the results have been anything but…mini. ToolFetch CEO and co-founder Andrew Brown reports that since integrating our technology, his company’s sales have jumped approximately 20%. Customers are returning to the site more often and purchasing a broader range of products.

The article does a great job of detailing how eComm|Search helps site visitors find what they need, and why it delivers such a huge ROI to online retailers. Worth reading, of course!

1. What are the three most important metrics that you track?

2. For a new retailer just starting out, what are three things you would recommend they do?

3. Benefitting from hindsight, what are some things that you did that you wished you hadn’t?

4. What single thing that you’ve done has had the greatest impact on your business?

5. The proverbial magic wand…If you could wave one and invent some technology that would make your days easier, what would it do?

Thanks Maria for your time. Good luck finding an integration wand.

As a follow-up to our two-part interview with Ken Kikkawa, president of eHobbies.com, we gave him three really tough and provocative questions that only an experienced entrepreneur, steeled in the fiery cauldrons of online retailing, could answer. He answered them almost too easily:

How do you define merchandising in an online environment?

Presenting products to customers in a way that would entice them to buy.
What are the three most important metrics that you track?

A. Overall company sales.

B. Site visitors.

C. Site conversions (percentage of site visitors to purchasers).

For a new retailer starting out, what are three things you would recommend they do?

A. Don’t over-invest in inventory.

B. Develop a business plan and stick to it.

C. Focus on the customer and customer service.

Here is the second half of our two-part interview with Stefan Von Imhof, a business graduate of the University of Massachusetts (and proud Minuteman) who turned his love of gaming into a thriving online retailing operation. He discusses his most important vendors, why Black Hat SEO isn’t worth it, and the real value of Twitter (hint: it’s not notifying the world that you had toast for breakfast).

Let’s talk about technology and the nut and bolts of operating a site? Who are you hosting with and what are some of the vendors you use?

We host with a company called Channel Advisor. We started working with Channel Advisor in the early days back when we used to sell a lot more on eBay and Amazon. If you are a multichannel retailer (selling on eBay and Amazon as well as online from your own site) you need something to tie everything together. The Channel Advisor platform allows us to sell through multiple channels under one “dashboard.”

The second big vendor we use is Shipworks, which provides our shipping software and is closely integrated with Channel Advisor. When you really look at our business, we’re not a video game company, we’re a shipping company. Shipping packages is what we do. It’s certainly the most important thing we do. We ship hundreds of packages every day and getting stuff out the door correctly is everything. Shipworks is both inexpensive and very customizable. It handles emailing customers, email notification (such as “Your Order as Shipped” emails), out of stock notifications, and a bunch of other stuff.

A third company we rely on is Nextopia. With 9,000 SKUs, it can be very difficult to organize all of the info. One of the things that bugs people with Google searches is that you can type in “Wii controller” and not easily find any Wii controllers. Instead, you might find Wii controller jackets, skins, holders, and everything else related to Wii controllers. That’s kind of what I wanted to avoid on our site. On a regular day, we’ll have 3500-8000 search queries on our site. Nextopia has been a great tool to deliver relevant answers to about 99.5% of our searchers. The other half percent who can’t find what they want – we find out why and tweak the engine. It’s a constant improvement process and Nextopia has been really important to what we do. They have been a great partner in our growth. They make a great product, provide great support. and they’re super friendly. What more can you ask for?

Have you been tempted by any SEO black hat opportunities?

Absolutely. SEO is such a tricky game. There is no question that blackhat SEO works; if it didn’t, nobody would do it. But the last thing you want to do is break the rules because 1. you can get caught, and 2. the benefit will only last a short time before Google finds out what you are doing, tweaks the algorithm, and it’s all over. My advice to retailers considering blackhat techniques is not to do it: you run the risk of getting blacklisted from search results, and that is death for a website.

With gaming inherently linked with people on the leading edge of Web technology and behavior, how are you finding the ROI of involving yourself in social media?

As far as Twitter, we used to use it far more when it first became popular, primarily with sales offers and coupons. My personal opinion (as someone who has done social media consulting for other companies) is that I honestly don’t think people are terribly involved with Twitter. Twitter boasts a really huge user base, but I’m just not sure how many of them are actively listening to each other, and how much is just “noise”. The one area where we’ve found that having a Twitter presence excels is in customer service. It is really the best way to reach a retailer like us because it cuts through the email and email filter walls. I tell people all the time – if you are having trouble reaching a company, try Twittering them or write on their Facebook wall – it’s probably the quickest way to get a response.

Do you see social media as an opportunity to blow out old stock or juice monthly sales?

Yeah, absolutely. While I think Twitter is maybe overrated, all social media is still important. I personally think a lot of small businesses sell Facebook short. Facebook is probably the most important social media presence a company can have, because it offers much more personal communication. With Twitter, anybody and their brother can show up in your Twitter stream. But when a company shows up in your Facebook news feed, it is a much more personal experience. We are active on Facebook because we want to show people that we’re both open and responsive to customer complaints. That’s really the key – connecting with customers on a personal level.

Final question, if you weren’t running an ecommerce store, what would you be doing?

I don’t know – to tell you the truth I haven’t really thought about that. Probably working in the renewable energy industry, maybe solar, which is of course going to be huge someday. There are a lot of companies doing a lot of amazing things with solar energy around here. My college background is business so I’d probably looking for opportunities in green tech/renewable energy. Either that or city planning. Santa Barbara is an amazing place, and it takes a lot of urban planning to keep it that way.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with us Stefan. Good luck finding the time to actually eat some breakfast; filling orders for Modern Warfare 2 and I’m sure DJ Hero is probably keeping you very busy.

 In between driving holiday sales and driving his family to nearby Disneyland, eHobbies.com, President Ken Kikkawa talked to us about how he provides hobby enthusiasts with more than 60,000 SKUs in a wide range of hobby and specialty toy categories.

A Nextopia customer since January 2009, Ken discusses his favorite metrics, how he succeeds against national toy chains, why he likes the Yahoo! Stores platform, and the challenges of seasonal retailing.

You sell hobbies and specialty toys that are purchased by a wide demographic range. In addition to B2C customers, you also sell to institutional organizations such as camps, schools and the Boy Scouts. How do you address their different purchasing needs?

It is a challenge we’re just starting to figure it out. Each organization is different. Firstly, in terms of awareness, most of these organizations find us through online search or word-of-mouth referrals. We haven’t done any real specific marketing other than add a couple of pages to our website.

The second big area is in payment type. Most of these organizations do not pay up front with a credit card, and the preferred method and terms differ widely. For example, schools usually need to pay via purchase order. Because we need to make it easy for them to order from us, we’ve modified our payment and financial policies (including adding different payment options in our shopping cart).

A third area is in our product selection, where we offer a wide range of categories that reflect the different age levels, for example, that you find in scouting. A big category for us is model rockets. For the youngest scouts, say in first grade, we’ll provide pre-assembled kits that are simpler than what older boys in grades 4/5 want. Offering a wide range of products allows us to meet whatever level of product sophistication a scout troop needs.

Are there any challenges in selling toys online that you think affect your company more than other retailing categories? I’m thinking here of the annual media “hot toy” frenzy, with the Tickle Me Elmo craze of 1996 coming to mind.

We try not to play in the hot toy arena. It is very competitive (product availability, pricing, etc.) and you are up against the large/national mass merchants and toy chain stores. They can get behind certain products with huge advertising budgets, leaving a very tough grind for independent retailers. Instead, we play more in the specialty arena, with a product line comprised of more timeless categories like car model kits.

You said in your September 2009 Practical Ecommerce column that your priorities before the holiday season became too hectic “were optimizing SEO & PPC programs, site enhancements (updates to the item pages including video demos and product delivery estimator) and a quick and easy way for customers to get real-time order updates without logging in to their account.” How easy it is for a Yahoo Store to incorporate the customization that this obviously requires?

Customizing a Yahoo! Store is not easy—and I speak from many years of experience—but the tools are there for developers to work around. (We rely heavily on our developer network to do it). Over the years, Yahoo! has rolled out additional enhancements that are beneficial for merchants. The options to customize the shopping cart have been a very good upgrade and it is now totally customizable. We moved to Yahoo! in 2001, left in 2005, and returned late in 2006. We just found that for a retailer of our size, it provided a really robust platform that we could depend on.

In the same column, you describe yourself as a merchant at heart, having worked as an assistant buyer for May Company department stores in the 1980s. You mention working on the floor during November and December and getting a chance to get customers reactions to merchandise on the spot. How is this different from the online environment?

I used to be a buyer in the pillows and bedding categories. There are very specific fill weights and densities that help people sleep comfortably, depending on their sleeping positions. When you are physically standing on the store floor, it is easy to impart this knowledge to shoppers and either help them find what they’re looking for or what you know will really help them.

You can’t really replicate this interaction online but there are tools that can help you. I really like to help customers on the phone and find out exactly what they need. Email support is another good opportunity. I like to peruse our customer support email boxes. I look at what they are asking for and what we are saying. While it obviously helps close more sales, it also helps me exert some quality control over our sales conversations, ensuring that we’re converting as many prospects as possible into happy customers.

How can online retailers recreate some of the key elements of in-person retailing in a virtual store?

You need to create a conversation channel with the prospect. We use email, telesales, and live chat. We’ve used the latter for two years and I frequently review the logs in the same way that I look through email threads. We have also started to take the best questions from our customers and turn them into a hobby FAQ.

How does site search fit into your merchandising strategies?

About 25% of our visitors go straight to the search box so it is a really important piece of technology. I particularly like Nextopia’s redirection functionality, which enables us to direct shoppers to specific landing pages based on their search terms. For example, here is what a shopper will see when searching for “slot cars” on our site.

Thanks for your time Ken. Give Mickey a big hug from the engineering team at Nextopia.