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“You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Yes, and isn’t that the problem? Appearance is paramount! When you meet someone for the first time, that first look formulates your opinion of that person for quite some time to come. The initial impression another person makes on you may well vary depending on whether they are neatly dressed or completely disheveled.

Appearance is crucial in our world. In cyberspace, you have only a few seconds to make that initial impression on the person visiting your website. If your site looks disheveled, contains outdated content and is an organizational nightmare, do you think customers are going to stick around to shop from you? Here are some tips to make that first impression count:

• Keep your navigation simple - break down your nav bar into clearly defined “departments” to avoid confusion.

• Don’t clutter your front page or landing pages - don’t overload them with tons of product, loads of text and blinking or flashing distractions.

• Keep content fresh and timely - if it’s January 3rd, you shouldn’t have your holiday products featured, unless you’re blowing them out. Change your featured products at least once a week.

• Keep customer comments updated -
last thing a potential customer wants to see when deciding whether to order from you or not is a comment from a customer dated four years ago. Kill the dates or replace outdated comments with new ones.

• Get a designer! You’re neighbor in 8th grade is NOT a designer. You wouldn’t have him paint your house and you shouldn’t hire him to design your website. Professionalism is important.

Here is an example of how appearances count. I was on a domestic flight recently and sat in a row which is a bulkhead seat. As in any bulkhead seat, you’re going to have people putting their feet on the wall getting it a little dirty. But the appearance of this bulkhead wall was something more than just a “little dirty” as you can see from the photos below.

The first thing that came to my mind was, “wow, if they can’t take five minutes to bring in a rug shampooer to go over that wall, are they doing regular maintenance on their planes?” I fly a lot and recognized the plane as being at least 20 years old, but that isn’t an excuse to not clean it. I’ve been on planes that were older and much cleaner. The point is that impression made me begin to question not only the plane, but the wisdom of flying that airline at all.

Don’t let your customer’s minds wander when they hit your site, make that first impression count!

Each morning before I open my office door, I brace for the clutter.  I’ll admit that my office should be condemned, but it’s my “system” and it works!  Outside my messy space, though, organization counts.

In business I have always focused on organization – even when there were just four of us.  Building a structure and tweaking it is extremely important in preparing your business for growth.  Too many companies mushroomed only to collapse like a house of cards because people had no direction, no supervision and no clear understanding of how the company worked.

Communication is Key

I recently spoke to a very frustrated marketing manager.  Her department’s goal for the 1st quarter of this year was to increase the customer base by 7%.  Unfortunately the tele-sales group’s goal was customer retention.  It’s a bad structure when department managers aren’t talking.  If they had communicated their goals, the marketing campaign could have worked.  Every department should be working towards agreed-upon goals.  If everyone isn’t on the same page, you’ll go nowhere fast.

Be Goal-Oriented

Structuring your company is more than just a flow chart showing who reports to whom.  It’s about analyzing each department, each task and each responsibility to ensure that they all support the overall goal.

As you grow, you need to insert levels of management with specific responsibilities, direct reports and departmental goals which match the goals of the company.

Structure benefits everyone.  Workers without direction aren’t as productive.  Unmanaged employees, no matter how good they are, are never good for business.  Structure instills a sense of security in the minds of your employees and also makes them feel like they’re working for a company with clearly defined goals and practices.

Expect Growing Pains

Improvements take work.  Your first efforts to add structure may be met with resistance.  Hey, we all hate change!  Explain the benefits and improvements and most of all stress how the changes will make everyone’s job easier. Make sure everyone understands that all changes are positive, never anyone’s “fault.”  Negativity leads to employee resentment.

Every successful business needs structure.  The sooner you get started, the better.

When the going gets tough,
the tough get creative.

There is no better time than the present to embrace that phrase and live by it. Let’s face it, the economy is taking its toll on everyone right now and the ones who creatively market their products and services will be the ones to come out on top.

So what is an online merchant to do? Make sure that you (and your e-business) are seen as experts in the field and position yourself as a credible source of information and products!

Blog, Blog, Blog!

Blogs have come a long way in the past year. What used to be second and third tier media have now made it into the mainstream and should be part of every e-business plan. If you’re selling trains, you should be writing about the new special edition from Lionel or some new must-have accessories for your platform. Blogs get indexed very well in the search engines, so use keywords in your paragraphs that people will be searching for and that wil give links back to your store when mentioning the specific product that you sell.

Market to existing customers.

Every customer who places an order on your site can be a repeat customer. If you’re not doing anything to bring that person back, you’re leaving money on the table. E-mail marketing is one of the best ways to market to your existing customers. For a reasonable investment, you’re keeping them informed and up-to-date on new products, special offers and what’s going on in your store. On average, you should be touching your customer with an e-mail campaign two times per month. But be compelling! E-mailing them to say “hello” doesn’t cut it. E-mailing them a coupon for 15% off their next order is a win. E-mail Marketing to current customers has higher returns than any other online marketing method.

Spread the virus.

Viral marketing is hotter than ever and is perhaps the most creative thing you can do to spread the word about your company. Have a funny, captivating flash application created that’s funny enough that it’s going to be forwarded to everyone in your customer’s address book. Create a video and put it on YouTube that features your products being used in an entertaining way that will get people watching and sharing. Create pages for your business on MySpace and Facebook and keep them updated. These are especially effective when your target market is the under 30 crowd. Become an expert on LinkedIn using their ‘Answers’ and generate traffic to your site through effective tell-a-friend campaigns.

There’s no such thing as a free…
oh wait, yes there is!

When we sold our pet supply division, we wanted to stay e-commerce owners, so we opened a lawn and garden site (neeps.com). To start us off, the only form of advertising we used was listing our products in the comparison shopping engines (CSEs). We used FeedPerfect to manage the items and watch profitability. We were astonished with the sales we generated without any other form of advertising. More than a year later, the majority of our ad spend is still directed to the CSEs. Feed Perfect is available with a special 45-day free trial, just use the promo code “ebizsept” at FeedPerfect.com. Invest a bit of time into setting it up and give it a try. You’ve got a free ride for 45 days, so take advantage of the revenue opportunity!

Market yourself.

You know your products better than anyone. Remember that you are the expert in your field, so flaunt it a bit! Here is an example of how this can pay off. When we still operated our pet supply businesses, we weren’t doing any business locally. We had a 20,000 square foot warehouse and a $5 million dollar inventory, but no local sales. Looking to capture some of the local business, I teamed up with our local talk-radio station and bought two hours of time on a Saturday afternoon. I did a call-in talk show about pets, sponsored by none other than our company! You might not have the time or resources to do the same, but you could create “expert” videos using a webcam and YouTube!

“The Pet Guy” Show ran for five years on two different stations, generated a buzz in the community, boosted our local sales and gave me more recognition as “The Pet Guy” than the owner of a high-tech company in coal-town.

I’ve been off the air for three years now, but my reputation still carries. I was recently approached by The Luzerne Foundation, a local non-profit agency, to “star” in a commercial promoting a benefit Texas Hold-Em tournament they’re having, but not as Scott from Solid Cactus - as Scott, The Pet Guy. The video features me and five dogs sitting around playing poker. (Check out the video on our blog, http://blog.solidcactus.com.) It’s viral, It’s on YouTube, I blogged about it, I was the expert and it’s creative marketing. Who can ask for anything more?

I guess it’s safe to call this our “Holiday Issue.” Hey—it’s August and the kids will soon be going back to school and then Halloween, then Thanksgiving and in no time it’s the jolly fat man in the big red suit… well, you know what I mean. So I have to ask, are you ready?

Ready or not, now is the time to start putting your holiday plans in motion. We’ve got some great articles in this issue to help you along the way with everything from e-mail marketing, shipping perishable items, and the article that gets the most request for reprints every year - Preparing Your Warehouse for the Holiday Rush.

Forget what you’ve heard about the uncertain economy. For those of us in e-commerce it doesn’t matter. Shoppers will be shopping and hopefully your store is ready to turn them into buyers. For many of these buyers, this is their first experience with your store and your one chance to get it right so they’ll be back. Follow the tips and advice in this issue to make them long-term customers.

Many Happy Returns

I order lots of things online and one of my favorite places to shop is Zappos.com. I’ve been a longtime fan because of their customer service policies. For example, buy a pair of shoes and if they don’t fit, send them back - at their expense.

As the cost of fuel continues to rise and UPS and FedEx continue to charge Fuel Surcharges, I find it amazing that a company can offer such a customer-friendly return policy! Granted, the margin on a pair of shoes is greater than a bag of dog biscuits, it’s still an expensive service. It’s also the Zappos.com driving force for new customer acquisition and most importantly, customer retention.

Costs are increasing for everyone, but you should never let those increases take a toll on customer service. I’m sure you may be looking for ways to shave a couple of bucks here and there, but don’t do a cut at the expense of your customers. Remember, they’re all we’ve got.

Now I have to go and try on my new
pair of, um, Crocs. Guess where I got ‘em…?

E-businesses expand at the holidays because of increased business, and it is critical to have a product location plan to teach to your holiday temps. An easy-to-navigate system is crucial, and is one of many things we learned along our very long road of very hard knocks as we developed our own company.

If you’re selling product and stocking it in your warehouse, you probably have some type of bin location system in place to make picking easy for your employees. You don’t? Well then, read on!

If you’re just starting out and have a few employees who know where product is located by memory, it may seem like a good system to have. Don’t be fooled. For instance, what happens when those employees take jobs elsewhere or you need to quickly hire new people to take care of the influx of holiday orders that suddenly crept up on you? Chances are you’ll be wasting a lot of valuable pick/pack time having those employees walk around aimlessly searching for product. The solution to your warehousing evolution is bin locations.

Bin locations are simply the places where products are housed in your warehouse. This is a crucial system for every e-business to develop, and you should organize your warehouse right down to the exact location on every single shelf. Taking the time to setup bin locations now, before the holidays, will save you time, money, improve your order turn-around time and eventually lead to greater customer satisfaction down the road. Here’s how you start.

For the purposes of these examples, I will assume that your warehouse is set up with racks making up aisles, which we call pick lanes. The first thing you need to do is find a starting point for your pick route. A good origination point is the spot where you keep your pick tickets and baskets or carts for picking product. The second step is to label your pick lanes. Pick lanes should be labeled alphabetically. The aisle closest to the start of the pick route can be labeled “A”, second closest is labeled “B” and so forth.

Once you have a map of your pick lanes, it’s time to label the racks that are located in each of those aisles. In order to maintain a flow, racks are labeled in such a way that your picker will start at the beginning of the pick route, walk up the first aisle, down the second, up the third and so on, eventually ending up back at the start of the route ready to pick another order. For obvious reasons, we call this a serpentine layout.

Labeling your racks along the pick aisle is simple. Let’s assume there are three racks in each aisle. Starting at the beginning, assign the first rack on the right the number 01 (put a zero in front of single digit numbers to maintain consistency and allow for future growth), the second 03, the third 05. On the left side of the aisle, assign the first rack 02, second 04, third 06 (see the example warehouse diagram). Once your racks are labeled, it’s time to drill down to the details of each rack.

The first rack in aisle A is called A01 (aisle A, rack 01). Let’s assume that rack 01 has three shelves. Starting at the floor, label the bottom shelf as A, the middle shelf as B and the top shelf as C. On those shelves your product is contained in boxes or “bins”. Starting left to right, each “bin” will be labeled 01, 02, 03, etc. You will do this for each shelf, so that in this example, product in the 4th bin on shelf B of rack 02 in aisle A would have a bin location of A02B04 (see the example rack diagram). The key thing to remember: the bin location is not tied to an item, it’s tied to the rack.

At first, organizing your warehouse may sound confusing and look like a lot of work but believe me, it will pay big dividends over time! The time spent training new employees on how to pick product takes no more than 5 or 10 minutes because the system is easy to learn. With a system in place like this, when you need to bring in temporary help to pick and pack during the holidays, your training is minimal.

Once your bin location system is up and running, you can tweak it even more to improve warehouse efficiency. For example, you may want to put your most picked products right at the beginning of your pick route so your pickers don’t have to go three aisles back to get the most popular items they pick on a constant basis. Or, if you have items that only sell in the winter, move them to the end of the pick route and put your summer merchandise at the beginning during the spring and summer months.