Tag: eCommerce

My Second eCommerce Company: Steak Jerky
I’m attempting to document recent history that is just outside my immediate memory and it’s a frustrating task because accounts change and files get deleted. Domains are let go and information is lost. This is an attempt to recreate the story of my second ecommerce business, Steak Jerky, which was a partnership with my friend, Jason, in 2002.

I think we should have some western theme in at least one of the logos. We’ll also need a common thread among all the artwork including the logos and the text buttons. We need buttons that say: Jerky, About Us, Jerky History, Contact Us, Store, Jerky Benefits and any others we think of.” –Jason, October 9, 2002

Jason had purchased a food dehydrator and had started experimenting with making beef jerky at home. He had just moved to Greenfield from Muncie and had a bigger kitchen to experiment in. This was before either of us had kids and while I was still finishing up college, he had graduated and so had lots of free time to experiment.
Some flavors I’m planning are:
- BBQ
- Original
- Hotter than Heck
- Chinese
- Black Pepper
Will be served three ways:
- Flats (3” by 5” sheets)
- Strips
- Bits (Like popcorn jerky)
Jason was the product guy and he had big ideas. He came up with a list of possible flavors and different ways to serve them. “If I can figure out how to do it, we might even have jerky chew also.” He spent a lot of time learning about jerky, how to make it, and about companies that were selling it. That’s actually how he got the idea – after stopping at a jerky store while out on vacation.
Here is what I need from you to start:
- Logo family
- Website feel (colors, font, etc)
- Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
- Humorous stuff
- The contract
- Logo for bags
- If you’ve got some other ideas let me know.
I was tasked with creating the website, logo, and the contract. I found a ‘mountain ranch’ image and used it as a backdrop for the relatively crude logo. Although I don’t remember for sure, the site looks like it was built on OScommerce, which was around in 2002. That’s the same platform I chose to use for my first ecommerce client in 2007 so it’s a good possibility that’s what it was.

Here’s what I’m thinking… To make the equivalent of a full time job, I would need to sell 2000 pounds a year and that would cover most expenses prior to going legal. That’s 5.5 a day which is quite a bit when we are only talking on the web. However, we have several options of distribution available to us: Web, eBay, Gun Shows, Fairs, Local word of mouth, and eventually going after the big contracts (Marsh, Kroger, convenience stores, even the coveted…WalMart!!!)”

Not just beef jerky….Steak Jerky!

The first sale was on November 20, 2002. The order went out in a plastic ziplock bag with black marker labeling. I remember asking Jason if he could vacuum seal the bags to make them look more professional, but at the time he didn’t have a sealer (he later got one). He was always experimenting with new flavors and cuts. He found that the best jerky was thinly sliced.

I write on the labels for the customers. It wouldn’t be hard to design a logo for the packages and print on stickers that I could print out, but I don’t have the money to buy the sealer. I am going to add black pepper and backwoods garlic and pepper as flavors on the website this weekend. They will be variations on the original marinade. I’m not going to put up teriyaki until I know I can make it, but I will experiment with that too.

We didn’t how to do SEO or any online marketing back then. This was even before we started Neighborhood Geeks together (we had previously ran an antique booth together and formed a band named Shog). I didn’t learn about SEO until I started Telablue in 2007. This was 2002. Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace didn’t even exist then and Google Adwords was relatively new (2000).

I looked into Google advertising and I think that is the way to go at first because it should also get our listing up there quicker. Erich, I have sent you the hot flavors picture and the will be sending the 2 other flavors soon. I will need web versions of these. I also plan a page describing how much a half pound is and how much a pound is. Ross, if you still have interest, we need some modifications to the cart system.

Ross was Jason’s technical advisor back then. That was before I got my A+, Network+, and Microsoft Certifications. That was before I learned CSS, PHP, and WordPress. The business didn’t last long. By December Jason had shut it down but not before we had orders from all over the country. I recently asked Jason why and he said, “At the time, it was going to be too expensive to scale up the professionalism of the product (like good packaging, consistent manufacturing, separate production area) to really be proud of our work for clients we didn’t know.” But we learned a lot.

If this story interests you, you might also be interested in my first ecommerce business or my latest ecommerce business.
April 7, 2014
How We Had Our First $10,000 Day

This is a story about how we had our first $10,000 day in e-commerce on Shopify. It shows the power of the press and the compounding effect of little steps that can eventually pay off if you keep working.

The short story is that we got some national news coverage, which resulted in over $20K in sales over two days. Yahoo! Shine picked up WRTV 6’s story on an Indianapolis dentist (http://www.calmingfears.com/indianapolis/coconut-oil-pulling) and oil pulling (http://www.skinnycoconutoil.com/blogs/skinny-talk/12991161-the-skinny-on-oil-pulling).

The article didn’t contain a link to our site, but the video included many pictures of the bottle and our brochure – information that people then used to search. According to Google Analytics, most searches were coming for the term “skinny coconut oil“, which is the name of the product – and they were coming to buy.

Conversion rates averaged 13% over the two days the article was on the home page of Yahoo! Shine and we actually had less traffic and more orders the second day than the first. I’m not sure if I would classify this as “going viral”, but as of this writing it has 3903 shares on Facebook and 696 comments.

Fortune favors the prepared mind. –Louis Pasteur

While it was certainly fortunate that Yahoo! Shine decided to include WRTV 6’s video featuring our oil, it was the exclamation mark on a long sentence that started back in 2013. [Note: If you’re interested in the story behind how this company got started check out, E-commerce Metric: Time to First Sale.]

One thing content marketers (and lean entrepreneurs) do well is listen. When the vice president of the company told me that our oil was good for oil pulling, I wrote a blog post about it on the dentist’s website. Soon after, the concept of oil pulling started to become more mainstream and it was becoming a hot news item because people knew relatively little about it.

After hearing a story on a business podcast about a man who got some initial publicity by walking into a newspaper office and asking to speak to someone, I asked the receptionist at the dentist’s office to contact local news agencies to see if they’d be interested in covering the topic.

A few weeks later the news agency, WRTV 6, contacted Dr. Reese and ran a story on his thoughts on oil pulling. It was this news article that was later picked up by Yahoo! Shine, which brought it to national attention and our first $10,000 day.

March 20, 2014
How an eCommerce Business Grew to Become one of the Fastest Growing Companies in Indiana

This is a story about how One Click Ventures became one of the fastest growing companies in Indiana.

One Click Ventures (OCV) started out as a man and wife team (Randy and Angie Stocklin) in their Greenwood, Indiana home with $20,000 in 2005. They now own a portfolio of niche retail websites, including SunglassWarehouse.com, HandbagHeaven.com and Scarves.net, which brought $5.3 million in revenue 2011 alone.

In 2006, the couple acquired SunglassWarehouse.com. In 2007, One Click moved to a 1,000-square-foot facility in Greenwood, Indiana. That same year, Randy and Angie hired their first full-time worker. By 2008, the Hoosier company expanded into a 4,000-square-foot facility (still in Greenwood), and two more affordable fashion brands were acquired: HandbagHeaven.com and Readers.com.

OCV grew quickly, eventually touting nine online brands in the affordable fashion and travel product industries. By 2012, the One Click team moved into a 68,000-square-foot facility in Greenwood. All of One Click’s team operates in-house, with people in marketing, technology, merchandising, customer happiness, business intelligence, order fulfillment and human relations. (Wikipedia)

According to the OCV About page, Randy and Angie Stocklin are, “Looking ahead, One Click has the team and infrastructure in place to significantly scale-up its audience, customers, and revenues. One Click will continue to aggressively grow the company by acquiring, developing and managing Internet properties.” They do this by leveraging their team and their group of brands.

You can get a sense for what systems and technology they are using by reviewing their job ads. For example, they use X-cart for their shopping cart. They have a “Content Team, Tech Team, Customer Experience, and other OCV departments.” They use Google Analytics and focus on customer retention and lifetime value. They use “ESP automation and database tools” (ESP stands for “email service provider”). They compute GMROII (Gross Margin Return on Inventory Investment).

You can also get a sense for their marketing strategy by looking at what each brand is doing online. For example, they use email marketing (and have a full-time Email Marketing Specialist), design custom landing pages. They put links to their social media, shipping times, email specials, and help/chat/contact in the very top of every page. They have a “Free Shipping [when/if]” on every page along with their phone number. They use credit card logos, BBB logo, a Bizrate log, and a Paypal logo at the bottom of every page.

You can get some real insight from previewing OCV’s Team page and Brand page to get a feel for what type of team you’d like your e-commerce company to have and how to manage multiple brands through one organization. I’ve attempted to build multiple brands under one organization so I know this is not an easy feat to undertake and manage, but OCV seems to do it with ease. Randy and Angie Stocklin are two of my e-Commerce Heroes that I look up to a lot. Thank you for being such great examples for our community.

February 7, 2014
From the Garden to the City: The Epic Entrepreneur’s Story

Every entrepreneur has their own version of the classic “entrepreneur’s journey”. They usually share this story at the beginning of an interview or podcast. I’ve never been interviewed or been on a podcast so I decided to write my own. I’m choosing myself. 🙂

Family Background

From the time I was born my family moved about every four years. Two of those houses were in Missouri and two were in Indiana. When I lived in Missouri I was young, but I remember I had this white, Lamborghini Hot Wheels car. I remember telling my dad I wanted to start a Lamborghini car dealership when I was older so that I could sell Lamborghini’s to kids like me for a $1. I remember my whole family laughing at me.

My mom volunteered at church events as a clown. She would come up to me and say, “I’m your mom,” and I’d say, “No you’re not!” and run away in fear. She sold Tupperware on the side. I remember her having Tupperware parties, but mostly I remember how much Tupperware we owned. I still use some of it today in my own house. This was my first view into entrepreneurship, which I sort of later followed when I was in Amway for a year.

My dad worked at GM during the night and during the day would volunteer at the church doing maintenance work. He would change out light bulbs in the ceiling of the sanctuary using a giant ladder. I remember watching him and wondering if he was going to fall. I’m scared of heights. We did a lot of land sculpting at every church we ever attended. For some reason, my dad just liked moving dirt around. He liked how dirt shaped water’s direction.

My First Businesses

One day after moving to Indiana I was walking through a shopping center with my older brother and we went into a Hooks Drugstore. He bought some baseball cards with his allowance and I was hooked. I collected baseball cards, bought Beckett Magazine price guides, and traded with friends. I never made any money, but this was my first experience with buying, collecting, and curating something with the intent of future earnings. I had a trader in my neighborhood in Southport that shared with me his dream of opening up his own baseball card store. This inspired me. I wanted to open up my own baseball card store. One day he setup a professional-looking stand in his garage and operated a neighborhood store for a day. I really looked up to that guy and always wondered how he turned out. I don’t remember his name though.

I also had small stints in buying candy and gum from the grocery store to sell at school. There was a time when “sour balls” just came out, which weren’t available from vending machines at school. I’d go to the grocery store, buy a bag, and sell them at school for 10 cents a piece. I actually didn’t sell any though. It was a complete failure. By the time I got into the game, I was already too late, the market was already saturated with other sellers. You see, it wasn’t my idea. I stole it from someone else – someone who had greater access to capital (their mom) and more prone to risk (willing to ask for the sale). Not only did my competitors have these things, they had prior experience selling Big Red and other types of gum. This is the same guy who later shot me in the back with his BB gun and gave me a bad haircut.

His name was Joey. We were both in 5th grade and one day Joey and I were walking home from that same strip mall in Southport. We started to come up with a plan for a new type of business. We both liked going to the local Putt-Putt and playing arcade games so we thought it’d be cool to start a small theme park or game center where you could do things like ride go-carts or fly small aircraft in addition to your standard arcade. We drew out pictures and made grand plans. We were doing it for kids like us who didn’t have a place like that. We were our own customers. We were scratching our own itch. It was “selling Lamborghini’s for a dollar” all over again. It never happened.

Business Education

Middle school was pretty much the dark ages of my entrepreneurial journey, but in high school I really ramped up. I started an antique business with a friend, started taking business classes at school, began editing websites on the side, started a band, and subscribed to INC and Entrepreneur magazines. When we had Career Day at school I told a speaker I wanted to “own my own island”. I was rude and full of hot air. I didn’t understand at that time how much value I would have to provide the world in order for me to one day afford my own island. I didn’t learn that until much later.

I kept studying business in the various colleges I attended. Each one taught me a little something different. At Kentucky Christian College I learned about how much I don’t like accounting. At Milligan I learned that first impressions make a lasting impression. At Ball State I learned about art. And at IUPUI I learned about computer science. I took 3 classes on Microsoft Office, 2 speech classes, and 1 marketing class. I took 2 years of Accounting in high school and 2 years of Accounting in college. I joined every business club I could find and failed 3 out of 4 of my math classes.

I don’t feel that I learned that much from college, but there were a handful of professors that made an impact on me. Dr. Charlie Starr, a literature professor at KCC, taught me about symbolism in movies, and although I can’t remember all of their names, the most impactful teachers were my literature teachers. Those were the ones I seemed to connect with the most in high school and college. The other most impactful professor was Andy Harris at IUPUI. He taught me about computer science and STAIR, which is an iterative method of problem solving, similar to customer development.

Business Development

I made the mistake of thinking that a college education was the key to any sort of financial windfall. In fact it had the opposite effect. I became debt-ridden and after I graduated I was no better off in the job market than the day before I graduated. I even asked my employer at the time, Old National, for a raise, but they said no. It wasn’t until I went back to school at a technical school for a specific skill set that I was able to get a higher paying job. However I later learned that the thing that actually helped get me that job was what I was doing on the side: web design. They wanted someone who could do IT work and help out with their website.

In my last year of IUPUI, Jason and I worked together to build a computer repair company called Neighborhood Geeks. After I graduated college, instead of going to classes in the morning I started going on IT service calls. I had no formal education as an computer technician, but I knew a lot about how Windows XP worked and had a good idea of how to troubleshoot problems. Google, like now, was our friend. After two years of not getting ahead in my day job at Old National, I started get CompTIA and Microsoft Certified. I still couldn’t find a better job so one day, I just quit.

A coworker asked me what my boss, Corey, said when I quit. He said, “You filled out the wrong form.” I couldn’t help but laugh. Old National didn’t use to have a formal “2 Weeks Notice” form so years earlier Corey had me make one up for our department. I used the form I had made, but by the time I quit, Old National’s HR department had come up with their own form. I had worked there full time for 6 years. It literally took me an hour 1-way to get to work everyday. I drove through rain storms and snow storms. I made stupid mistakes that will haunt me for the rest of my life. I essentially grew up there, but it was time to move on.

Career Development

2 days later I got a job at a call center helping teachers learn how to use web-based software to make tests and quizzes for their students. It was brutal, but even in that environment, I added value. There was a particular problem that no one knew how to fix and people would often call in about it and we’d have to say we didn’t know. One day I decided to dig into the problem and I discovered what was causing it and how to work around it. I was one of the few people who didn’t get laid off during the slowdown, but that’s when I got the opportunity to work at IBM’s call center, so I left after working there 2 months.

I worked at IBM 3 days before I got the job doing IT full-time. The first job I ever had was washing dishes for $4.25 an hour. I started Old National in Muncie at $7.47 an hour and ended in Indianapolis at over $12 an hour. The call center in Lebanon paid $10 an hour and IBM paid $11 an hour. My new job as an IT professional paid $20 an hour, which was quite a big jump for me at the time, but I stayed at that same rate for 5 years. Despite moving on to a business analyst position at another bank for 3 years and working as an interim manager at a dental office for 9 months, I stayed at that same rate until I went back to being an IT professional for a new rate of $25 an hour.

But I was tired of “trading dollars for hours” like Robert Kiyosaki talks about in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Even for the year in which I ran my own consulting business doing IT and web services I was still trading my time for money. I longed to move beyond the employee or self-employed roles (or the technician role in The E-Myth Revisited) and into the business owner or entrepreneur role, respectively. I needed a product or service I could sell systematically that took my time out of the value equation so that I wasn’t the one holding myself back from earning the income I wanted to fulfil my vision for the future.

Vision and Mindset

I’ve spent a lot of time learning about how to start a business. I’ve read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. I know you need to start with a mantra, make meaning, and have milestones. I read Jim Collin’s Good to Great. I know that you first have to get “the right people on the bus.” Eric Ries’ Lean Startup says to start with the product and ask people if they want it. There are many ways to start a business, but I know some of the worst include choosing a business name, buying business cards, incorporating, and designing a logo. None of those things bring in new customers or revenue. That’s how I developed the theme of #SellFirst, and it’s a tag I own on Twitter.

“Sell First” is a mindset that says, “before I invest more time, energy, and money into this new business, I am first going to ask someone if they want to buy it.” I believe that sales is essentially “asking someone to buy something.” In high school Jason and I called this “spontaneous asking”. We found that when we asked for something, we were much more likely to get it than we did not ask for it. This seems obvious after the fact, but there is much fear in asking, which may be part of the fear people have of selling. I certainly still have that fear, but it’s something I’m learning to get over as I view it as more important than marketing. Marketing Supports Sales.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and motivational speaking lately and several reoccurring themes have emerged. The first one is the need for a vision of what you’re future will look like. This sets your mind in the direction it needs to go. The second is the need for mentors and education that gives you the information you’ll need to get to where you’re going. The third thing is hard work and the ability to temporarily discomfort yourself now for a better future later. Extraordinary effort now is greater than the same amount of effort spread out over time. The fourth thing is your product. When given the choice between working on anything else and your product, always choose to improve the product.

Product Development

I live in Tipton. I’ve lived there for most of the last 10 years. It’s a small town with little to nothing going on. I have to drive at least a half hour in any direction to see anything other than cornfields and pickup trucks. But it’s from this location that I’ve worked professionally for 10 years, developed and ran side and full-time businesses, and raised a family (I now have 5 kids). It’s out of this desolated place that I’ve come to shape my ideas of place and community. It’s how I came up with the ideas for Seektivity and Outure. I believed that it didn’t matter as much where you were, but who you were hanging out with and what you did with the situation. Even Tipton could be a cool place with the right people, the right knowledge, or the right stuff.

I had a vision of a mobile app that allowed you to post and activities and things to do around you. If you discovered a tennis court you could add it to the app and tag it with “tennis” and the next person who came there might add “badminton”. In the same way, someone might find a baseball diamond and first tag it with “baseball” while someone else might tag it with “Wiffle ball” or “softball”. If Foursquare is for tagging places to go, Seektivity would be for tagging what there is to do at those places. There may be a hundred different fun things to do in Tipton, but without an informational tool like Seektivity, I would never know about them. In this way, people can transform their communities into more active and happier places to live.

In late 2012 and early 2013 I started getting interested in physical products and ecommerce. That’s when I got the idea to create products to help Seektivity users get more out of their communities. Outure was developed out of a need to facilitate “activity in your own backyard.” I felt that outdoor adventure companies often glorified exotic places like mountaintops and sunny beaches while most of America lives in mostly flat, mostly dry areas of the country. That doesn’t mean there isn’t fun things they could be doing if they just had the right information, similarly interested people, and the right equipment. By providing the people with the gear to have fun in their own backyards, my mantra in both products is to “facilitate play”.

The Reality

The reality is I’m not as great as I thought I was. I never finished making Seektivity. I got a minimally viable product (MVP) and stopped working on it in February of 2013. That same month I stopped being an entrepreneur and went back to work for a company that made me extremely uncomfortable for 7 months. In August of 2013 I switched jobs and began working on Outure and everyday I take a little step forward by posting a picture to Instagram or commenting on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter. I hired a VA in November to help write reviews of urban activity equipment sold on Amazon as an affiliate, but hope to one day open my own e-commerce store. That’s my vision and this is my reality.

November 7, 2013
e-Commerce Metric: Time to First Sale

This is not just a record of the amount of time it took to get to first sale, a metric called “time to first sale”, but a story about what it took to go from idea to first sale. This is a story of how one idea can lead to another and how people can influence each other. This is the story of how Catchrs and Skinny Coconut Oil got started.

TL;DR; After months of discussions and meetings that started in August of 2011, Skinny Coconut Oil officially launched on August 26, 2013 and had its first sale on August 31. From the first meeting specifically about coconut oil on April 4, 2013 to the first sale on August 31 was 3 months and 27 days, 5 days after the store opened.

How it Started

In 2010, instead of starting a normal job after college like everyone else, Luke Geddie decided to take a year off and travel around the world. It was, “an adventure that would open their eyes to the rare beauty hidden in Southeast Asia.” Luke’s brother Matt accompanied him on parts of this trip and, “with their hearts set on exploration, Luke and Matt Geddie ventured through Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, India, and Vietnam with a desire to see and experience everything.” It was Luke’s time in Vietnam when he met Kim Vo, a local celebrity who introduced Luke to many different people, government officials, and business owners in Vietnam. Through these introductions Luke started to get a sense for the value he could provide the local Vietnamese economy by using the business skills he learned while in college and his connections back in the United States.

On August 1, 2011 I left my day job at First Merchants and went full time consulting. 2 days later Luke’s mom, Joy, called to have me come over and help Luke’s brother’s computer ready for school. Luke had just got home from Vietnam after traveling abroad for a year and Joy wanted me to talk to him about some of the things I had been working on because she knew we were both entrepreneurial-minded. The three of us ended up going out to breakfast on August 18 and that’s when I told Luke about what I was doing with affiliate marketing. Luke started telling me about the ideas he had to have art created in Vietnam, which lead to the first business idea of “art catchers”. This eventually lead to the name of “Catchrs” and after the domain Catchrs was purchased on September 9, 2011 the first official Catchrs meeting was held on September 16.

The business idea went through several iterations, eventually becoming an import/export business. Luke continued working on the business in the United States where he incorporated Catchrs, LLC through the fall, but in December of 2011 he went back to Vietnam to build the business with his partner, Kim. Matt began going to school in New Zealand where he helped Luke and Catchrs by contacting manufacturers and shipping companies around the world. In May of 2012 I helped Luke launch the Catchrs website while simultaneously beginning to work full-time at his mother’s husband’s dentist office. It was during this time that I developed my relationship with Luke’s mother, Joy. After working with her husband’s business for 9 months, Joy and I decided to begin meeting regularly in February to see if there was any businesses we could start together.

I had been learning more about e-commerce as a business as far back as November of 2012 when I began looking into drop-shipping and various e-commerce platforms. This is when I first got introduced to Andrew Youderian at eCommerceFuel.com. At the same time I had just started reading Hacker News and was learning more about programming and startups. In February I started working on a software project called Seektivity, but I quickly hit a hard wall in my software skills. I had also just started a new, stressful job that didn’t leave much time for anything else. However, this didn’t stop me from researching ideas at night while lying in bed. It was during one of these nights that I did a Google search for “where to buy…” and noticed that the second to top auto-complete said, “where to buy coconut oil”.

On March 17, 2013 I reached out to Luke about the rise of 3D printing and on April 2 he asked to have a phone conversation about “traditional medicine and online marketing it in the USA”. On April 4 we had the phone call where we talked about all of the things he had to sell. One of those things was coconut oil. I wrote Luke on April 6, “I’m interested in that because Joy, Suzanne, and my friend, Jason’s wife, Krista, all use coconut oil for cooking and as a lotion. I’d be willing to pay you for a sample to send over so I can have them try it out. I own a website called topical-cream.com and the domain tropical-cream is currently available. I’m thinking that with a ‘cute’ enough package that this stuff could sell well in local boutiques, Fresh Market stores, Whole Foods, and on Amazon.” On April 6th, Luke offered a sample. By May 22 I still hadn’t received the sample so I emailed Luke an image of the Google Trend line for coconut oil.

On May 27 he had the supplier re-send the sample of coconut oil. The original bottle had been mistakenly sent to Luke’s brother, Matt, in California, who would later become much more involved. On May 31 it was shipped from Canada and on June 5 it arrived at my house and by June 8 I had already met with Luke’s mom, Joy about it and had started to reach out to Matt who was still in California. Matt had experience launching his own product and was currently working as a marketing director. I saw him as an integral part of this process.

On June 9 Luke returned to the United States along with Kim, his business partner from Vietnam. On June 11 we had our first meeting about coconut oil as a business and decided to call it “Premier Grove”. On Friday, June 14 we had our second meeting about the business. By July 3 we had a business plan for the company that had been renamed to “Skinny and Co” and who’s first product was named “Skinny Coconut Oil” after the tall and skinny shape of the original bottle. On July 12 we had our EIN for the corporation and could finally start setting up Shopify, Amazon, and Opensky.

On July 9 Matt moved back to Indiana from California and we had our first meeting with Chris Murphy, a boyhood friend of Matt’s who had just graduated from college with a Marketing degree. His mom was best friends with Matt’s mother, Joy. Chris was all about “community” (he even loved the Community, the show). On July 10 Kim visited the United States from Vietnam and we all decided to offer Chris a position with Skinny and Co. He began working on the label design right away and by August 19 we had our first prototype.

After incorporating Skinny and Co. with the state of Indiana in July, the Skinny Coconut Oil website officially launched on August 26 and had its first sale on August 31. Although Luke had offered, I had no equity in either Catchrs, LLC or Skinny and Co. and I had only been paid for the web design work I did for Catchrs. My agreement with Skinny and Co. at that time was to get a percentage of online sales in exchange for my work building out the website’s content, doing SEO, and helping with social media.

On September 3 we began working on our first brochure, an Oil Pulling Guide, and on September 26, Joy went to her printer to have flyers printed for the upcoming Gluten Free Living festival on October 5th. The printer kept staring at the flyer. She began asking questions about the coconut oil and shared how she sold raw chocolate and was looking for a coconut oil to sell, but she wanted to sell it as a subscription monthly. She sold one jar. This is the beginning of selling coconut oil as a subscription and it paved the way for the second event which was a health fair on September 28th in Southport, Indiana.

October 5th was a rainy day. I had to get up early in the morning to be in Richmond at 8 AM. At the same time, Matt and Chris were up early getting ready for the Gluten Free Living festival in Carmel. We had recently hired two interns, Michael and Stephanie, but only Michael was there that day. Rachel from the dentist office also stopped by to help sell. We sold almost 50 jars and I got my first check after 2 years of work. On the drive home Andrew Youderian gave me a “First Sale Shout Out” on his podcast. It was a good day.

SEE also: The Skinny Coconut Oil Story

Update: if you’re looking for a coconut oil that tastes, smells, and feels like Skinny Coconut Oil from Skinny & Co., check out Dignity Coconut Oil (affiliate link). Like Skinny, their coconut oil is raw and they use glass jars instead of plastic, but the best part is their mission to raise women out of poverty.

October 6, 2013
Amazon Webstore Review
I signed up to test Amazon’s eCommerce Software, Amazon Webstore, mostly because of these two factors:
- List Amazon.com items on your own Webstore to augment your product selection
- Take advantage of additional services such as Selling on Amazon, Fulfillment by Amazon, and Amazon Prime on Your Site to grow your business and improve customer satisfaction while reducing your Webstore fees
I liked the idea of being able to just pull in Amazon products to your store and having Amazon fulfill them for you. It all sounded so easy. It wasn’t.

Contrary to other parts of Amazon, I found the site incredibly hard to use and very slow. It takes up to 15 minutes for an item you’ve posted to appear on your site. When I went to figure out how to cancel, I couldn’t figure that out either so I did a Google search and ran across this Amazon Seller forum post, which cracked me up.

redknight781 wrote: It’s built for techies by techies and not for those that are more interested in sourcing and selling. It’s the worst sitebuilder on the internet. mpowell624 wrote: I will go farther and say that it is the very worst experience I have ever had with anything technological. I have basic knowledge of coding and I would rather try to make a website out of twigs and berries.

You used to have to call Amazon to cancel, but now to cancel your Amazon Webstore, simply make your way to your Amazon Webstore Subscription page and click, “Cancel Webstore”. You can do this as long as you don’t have any outstanding orders.
June 17, 2013
My First eCommerce Company

While I didn’t think of it as an e-commerce company at the time, I was buying books in real life and selling them on Half.com – something I’ve wanted to get back into for the last year. This is a story of my first e-commerce company, Blu Bukx.

The Beginning of Blu Bukx Company

Like a lot of companies, this one started as a result of what my friend, Jason, was doing. He had visited a local library with his new wife and discovered they were selling off their old books by the bag. He looked up how much he could sell them online and quickly discovered he could turn a profit. He already had an eye for this type of thing as he was already actively selling antiques on eBay for his dad, a retired antique dealer. For those following along, this is the same dad that allowed Jason and I to have a booth in a closet in his antique store (hence the name Closet Collectibles Company).

Not one to let this newly found arbitrage go unexploited, I soon found myself visiting every library in town, buying up as many books as I could find and posting them to Half.com. I found that children’s books and non-fiction books sold the best and although I was selling at least one book a day, the books were piling up in my bedroom. I was still in college at the time and during this process had just recently met the woman who would later become my wife and had recently just started working at a bank doing items processing. I would go to class in the morning, come home in the afternoon, package up books to ship, then take them to the post office on the way to work.

It was a big process to enter in the ISBN codes for every book purchased into Half.com. My future wife would stay up late at night in her dorm room to help me out. I remember one time she entered in hundreds of books on the site and I did something to delete all of her work. I think she cried. As part of the process you would have to price your book. Half.com would let you see what other people were selling it at and you could price it accordingly. One book stuck out. It was a book about the mafia’s role in the oil business and someone had it posted for $150. My soon to be wife thought it would be a “great deal” at $120 off. It sold. She told people about that book sale for years. She was so happy.

When the libraries ran out of books to sell I had to find another source to keep up my inventory. That’s when I discovered the clearance section at the local Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Half Price Books stores. I could buy a book there that nobody locally wanted to buy for say $3 and sell it online for $15. This was in 2001 when a lot of local booksellers hadn’t really caught on to the whole Internet thing. It wasn’t that there weren’t any websites selling books online: at the time, Amazon.com was still the biggest (and I even experimented with selling some of my books through them as a reseller), but there was also efollet.com and textbooks.com, which is part of one of the funnest nights of my life.

One of the Funnest Nights of My Life

The fall semester was about to begin and as was the tradition, Jason and I would walk around campus figuring out where all of our classes were before the first day of school. The campus was mostly empty at this point, but all of the building doors were open. One of the buildings we went into had a large dumpster in the hallway where professors had been dumping old papers and whatever else they didn’t want. As book resellers there was one thing Jason and I both noticed right away: a trunk-load of textbooks. They were the kind of books that textbook publishers would send professors to get them to buy their books, but if the teacher didn’t want to use them, they were of no value to them.

We loaded all of the books into Jason’s car and drove them back to his house. After getting them all inside his office we began systematically looking them up on efollet.com and the total value quickly got into the hundreds of dollars. Needless to say we were getting giddy, but the real fun started when we “got serious” and started to cross-reference the different textbook buying sites on a per-ISBN basis to create the highest payout possible. Now that was fun. We ended up splitting the money which I no doubt put into food, rent, my computer payment, or more books.

One of the Changiest Years of My Life

2001 was the year I moved to Muncie, Indiana, changed colleges, worked four different jobs, dated two different girls, got engaged to one of them, bought my first cell phone, my first apartment, started my first ecommerce business, and watched our country go through September 11th. I was mowing that morning as there was a period of time when I would mow in the mornings, go to school in the middle of the day, and then go to work at the bank in the evening. The first thing I heard when I got back into the truck and turned on the radio was, “It’s an act of war!” My first thought was, “What was?” As I listened to the radio my first inclination was to call Jason and ask him what was going on. He filled me in and said he was recording the news in case I missed any of it. My next call was to my soon-to-be wife. I told her I loved her then called my parents and did the same. It was a weird year and one with a lot of changes, but things didn’t stop changing. They keep changing every year.

The End of Blu Bukx Company

Eventually local book sellers did catch on to the whole “Internet thing” and started competing against me directly. The market inefficiencies were gone and it became increasingly harder and harder for me to turn a profit as my margins continued to shrink. I tried to sell the business and it’s inventory to my mom, but she didn’t want to do the work involved. I had got laid off from my bank job in Muncie and got transferred to the same job in Indianapolis. I was engaged, but was now living back at home with my parents. I ended up picking out some books to keep for any future kids I might have, giving away some to friends and family members, and taking the rest to Half Price Books to sell. I still have two of the book shelves (I made one), but the others got sold to a guy at the bank I worked with. My kids do read some of the books I kept from Blu Bukx company, but mostly they just sit there.

Although I walk by these books every day I almost forgot that I even had this company. Looking back I can see how much time it took (for both me and my wife) and how much it influenced a small part of my life. The one thing I find odd is that because of the way Yahoo! stores it’s mail and because of me switching computers over time I have no digital record of this company ever existing. I can’t find anything in any of my emails, on my hard drive, or on the Internet (via Google search). If I didn’t write this post, no one would have ever known it ever existed. And that would have been okay. I just wanted to write this for my own sake as it touched on a lot of different parts of my life that helped shape where I am today. Maybe I’ll start up another e-commerce company again – and maybe my wife will help me input product descriptions and pack up orders – and maybe we’ll be happy.

May 12, 2013
Best eCommerce Platforms in 2013

Which e-commerce site would you recommend? Is it better to have a site that starts as a blog with a shopping cart added, or an e-commerce site with a blog added?

I’m currently recommending BigCommerce.com as the number one best eCommerce platform in 2013. It’s an online shopping cart/ecommerce platform that performs well, looks great, and has a standard HTML/CSS backend theme structure. It’s an example of an e-commerce site with a blog added. It’s a managed site that you pay monthly for, rather than a self-hosted site like WordPress, osCommerce, or Magento Community, but it’s not much to pay for the amount of support and consulting that comes with that fee. I’ll discuss more on this later. For now, let’s look at the number one blogging platform, WordPress, when ecommerce is added.

WP-Ecommerce is the most popular ecommerce plugin that runs on WordPress, but I don’t recommend it. I have experience using it myself and from helping clients with it. It does work most of the time, it’s just that when it doesn’t, support is hard to come by. It’s also hard, but not impossible, to make it look good. CSS and theme elements have a lot to do with that, but the plugin has it’s own CSS too, which makes it harder to configure. If you are deadset on using WordPress as your platform, consider Woocommerce first because of all the great themes and support available for it, but if you truly want to self-host, consider Magento Community instead. You might also want to consider osCommerce (read my comparison of Magento vs. osCommerce). Self-hosted ecommerce packages are not easy. If you don’t want to pay someone to support it (or to put it another way, if you want to support it cheaply), what I am recommending right now to clients is BigCommerce.com.

BigCommerce is easy. Software and hosting are managed for you, it has integration with Google Shopping, is SEO friendly, loads super-fast, has blogging functionality, and has gorgeous themes. For a low monthly rate you also get support and some initial consulting. Compare that with hiring a web designer like me and/or hosting it yourself. The bottom line is that WordPress is not an ecommerce platform, it’s designed for blogging. Although it is powerful enough to run an ecommerce site, it’s not its specialty and it will always be harder than a platform designed for ecommerce. For a second hosted solution, consider Shopify. It’s slightly more expensive than BigCommerce and uses less ‘open standards’ of coding, but if you like it better, it’s still a great shopping cart system.

January 18, 2013
osCommerce Vs. Magento Community
Recently an e-commerce customer who uses osCommerce asked me about re-installing his e-commerce site from scratch or whether or not he should switch platforms:

1. Can I start from scratch to build an osCommerce site? What’s involved? Would I need to link my shipping and payment?

Yes, but I don’t recommend that because it’s out-of-date technology that’s hard to update and doesn’t look that good compared to what else is out there. Installing a new OS Commerce install involves:
1. Creating a blank database via your web hosting control panel.
2. Downloading the latest osCommerce zip file from osCommerce, unzip it and extract the ‘catalog’ folder.
3. If you want your shop to be available at http://www.yourdomain.com/catalog then upload the whole of the catalog folder to the root directory of your website via FTP. If you want the site to be available at http://www.yourdomain.com then just upload all of the contents of the catalog folder, but not the folder itself.
4. Make sure that the permissions on all of the folders are set to 755, and if that does not work then set them to 777. Make sure that the includes/configure.php file and the admin/includes/configure.php file are set to 777 for the duration of the install. Once the install is complete reset to 644, 444, or 400 depending on your server setup.
5. Go to http://www.yourdomain.com/install and begin the install procedure. Your DB Server will probably be ‘localhost’, your db user name and password (for mysql access) will have been provided to you by your web hosting company. The name of the database you already know – because you just set it up. Do not enable SSL, elect to store sessions in the database and not files (untick the box), and do not enable persistent connections.
6. After the install create a folder called ‘backups’ inside the ‘admin’ folder (via FTP), and delete the install folder. Reset permissions on the two configure.php files.
7. Password Protect your ‘admin’ folder using the Password Protect feature in your web hosting control panel.
2. Can the new site be full screen format? Or can it have a different look? I have not yet figured out how to give my osCommerce site a different look.

The CSS files in the catalog folder control the color and look of the site. The “catalog/includes/header.php” and “catalog/includes/footer.php” files contain the structure of the tables that control the width of the site. A quick find and replace in your editor will replace all the pages that have the same code as above in the catalog folder. The header.php and footer.php files have a little different code and would need to be manually changed. Look for the “table” element that looks like this:

[html]
table width=”100%”
[/html]

3. I’m not sure if I want a completely new site – different address or just revamp my current. I think maybe both. Can I use the same shipping and payment for two sites? New site would be O.S. only….I need a no cost option otherwise I would consider something else.

Magento Community Edition is a much better ecommerce platform and is free to download and use, but to answer your question, yes, you can use the same shipping and payment information for both sites. If you’re serious about considering Magento, there is a osCommerce Migration tool to convert your osCommerce site to a Magento site.

4. Why Magento vs. osCommerce?

Magento has ‘Store View,’ which allows online shop keepers the ability to set up multiple stores with the same products, at different prices, and even in different languages from a single admin area. Magento is better in terms of what it allows you to do and the customer experience. However, the community around osCommerce is huge, and even a person who does not know programming is able to enter and modify the code. If your shop is a huge online store and you are planning to have thousands of products then it’s better to use Magento as it is more robust and has a dedicated support team because of it’s enterprise customers.
January 18, 2013