EBizInsider

Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
That quote from science fiction royalty sums up what happened when technology helped generate financial magic for—ironically—a California-based magic shop.

eBiz Insider profiled TrickShopMagic.com in December 2007. Owner Sam Blankenship was getting ready to launch his redesign. In January he went live and the results have been, well, magical.

Sales are up. Customer confidence is up. Conversions are up.
“Things are better in a number of areas,” says Sam. “The most important factor is our dollar sales are stronger than ever. Sales for the last 90 days are up 165% compared to the previous 90 days. Those are ‘before and after’ numbers, since we launched the redesigned version of The Trick Shop’s site three months ago.”

TrickShopMagic.com has over 6000 items available, so navigation has always been a challenge. The redesign improved site navigation with cascading menus, dynamic paging and other features.

“The new menu system flies out from the left nav and the paginated item pages are within the section. Our customers can easily page through our section and really dig deep into everything we have to offer,” Sam explained. “One of the sections that flies out from the left nav is our ‘new item’ section. That is the section that we’ve heard the most feedback about. Customers can hold the mouse over the section and see if we’ve added any new items since their last visit.”

As a part of the redesign, TrickShopMagic.com opted for many of the Solid Cactus features including the log-in feature and the “wishlist” feature. “We’ve already added the Shipping Manager, which gave us the confidence to ship orders internationally for the first time,” Blankenship said.

“One other feature that has really set us apart from our competition is the item page shipping calculator. The customer can easily determine the shipping costs that will apply before they even get the item to their cart. I strongly believe that a big chunk of new conversions have come as result of that feature alone,” he said.

Along with the redesign, Blankenship also added a customer service feature, Live Chat.

“The live chat feature is getting rave reviews. Many of our products require a certain amount of technical skill and now, before they buy, customers will be able to ask in real time and not have to call our store or wait for an email response any longer.”

Blankenship says the combination of features has had a cumulative effect for driving business.

“From an owner’s perspective, my favorite parts are the little things that make the site easy to use on my end,” says Sam. “Beth Hartman, my Solid Cactus rep, understood what I wanted to accomplish on my home page. She made sure the programmers provided adequate custom variables that allow me to easily add stuff to my home page without needing to worry about knowing RTML. In my old site, it was very difficult to make any changes without being worried that I’d totally mess up the home page.”

Blankenship advises anyone weighing a redesign to consider more than price. “I looked at a la carte options from other companies that could have saved significant money,” says Sam. “I even tried add-on features from other developers. But the old saying, ‘You get what you pay for’ has never been truer than it was with re-designing my website.

“Solid Cactus committed to me, and my website would have never looked this good with out them. Since the redesign Solid Cactus is still my partner every step of the way. I feel with their technology and help, we finally feel like we can challenge our much bigger competitors when we know that we have a resource like Solid Cactus on our side.”

What’s next for TrickShopMagic.com? What else do they have up their sleeve? It’s business as usual, albeit, a lot more business.

“After seeing TrickShopMagic.com come to life, it’s tempting to run out and try to start another web retail idea, but we’re going to stay focused on this core site and budget some of the new income to pay for future design elements.”

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