Why is it that vacations are always a time when you end up working a ton harder the week before and a ton harder the week after? How relaxing is that? Many of us in the IT industry, especially the web industry, end up doing some sort of work on our vacation. For me, it was uploading a new site for one of the companies owned by the place my paycheck comes from. Done mostly in flash, that'll rank really well in search engines. About as well as my house on a search for blue jeans. In any event, it was some amount of work, and wasn't exactly a vacation activity.
While I was out, the techs came in and figured out what was wrong with our carousels. One will be needing a motor rebuild soon, 2 need it already, and 1 had a motor hooked up wrong and it blew up. I suppose that explains the problems with them. Thank you warranty.
Well, I'm going to get back to doing nothing for the rest of the night, and I still have tomorrow and the weekend to enjoy some time away from work.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Carousel problems
Ok, so the carousel that is showing so much promise started acting up without me knowing about it. Two of the four carousels decided to move as slow as they can and still be classified as moving. I guess that's how they go on strike. It's also really tough to get any real support without paying quite a bit for a tech to come out and work on it. Every time that the tech comes out, it seems like we end up paying for a lot of time for him to read the manual and very little time actually working on the carousel. If there were other options, I'm sure we'd be looking at them. However, we're sort of stuck since there aren't a lot of people who have ever even seen a carousel like this, let alone knowing how to fix one.
I've been reading the manual on it, and the manual is about as useful as salt water to a fresh water fish. It starts with how the bolts and nuts work, then has a somewhat useful section on programming it to work with the hand controller, then goes on to troubleshooting for things like "Unit doesn't power on" (check transformers, ensure it is 230v single phase power, check circuit breakers... gee, I wouldn't have ever thought to check any of that) to error code (enter programming and make sure it is correct... insightful.)
So there are a few useful pieces, but the overall is pretty bad. Reminds me of a car manual. You know the type, "Put car in reverse, then hit the gas to go backwards." Why are manuals so bad? I suppose they expect us to just toss them aside anyway, but surely the first manual ever written they expected would be used. I'm sure it was a letdown, and nobody has ever read the directions since. Someday, they'll hire someone that can speak the language they're writing in fluently. Until then, the manual is just a waste of paper.
Well, at some point I'm sure we'll get this thing fixed again. Until then, we'll just wait 1/2 hour for the carousel to find "Home" and go from there.
I've been reading the manual on it, and the manual is about as useful as salt water to a fresh water fish. It starts with how the bolts and nuts work, then has a somewhat useful section on programming it to work with the hand controller, then goes on to troubleshooting for things like "Unit doesn't power on" (check transformers, ensure it is 230v single phase power, check circuit breakers... gee, I wouldn't have ever thought to check any of that) to error code (enter programming and make sure it is correct... insightful.)
So there are a few useful pieces, but the overall is pretty bad. Reminds me of a car manual. You know the type, "Put car in reverse, then hit the gas to go backwards." Why are manuals so bad? I suppose they expect us to just toss them aside anyway, but surely the first manual ever written they expected would be used. I'm sure it was a letdown, and nobody has ever read the directions since. Someday, they'll hire someone that can speak the language they're writing in fluently. Until then, the manual is just a waste of paper.
Well, at some point I'm sure we'll get this thing fixed again. Until then, we'll just wait 1/2 hour for the carousel to find "Home" and go from there.
Monday, March 07, 2005
The power of the carousel
We are just getting a corousel system implemented in our warehouse. After years of running around the building to fill our parts orders, it's become too cumbersome finding things. This means that we're now going to allow the parts to come to us. With a platform that raises and lowers, we'll have people waiting at the end of 70' long carousels for the parts to come to them, then light up a bin number and a quantity next to the shelf that is supposed to have parts pulled from it. That's all fine and dandy, but what's the best about this is that it becomes tougher for people to make pulling errors, so we'll not only be able to ship out more orders per day, but also have fewer errors and store more inventory. Considering that we've got well over 100% more sales than just 12 months ago, this will be important as we move forward.
After getting top rankings for many of the most obvious key phrases for our site, there are still so many combinations available that I'm expecting to be able to double to triple our volume yet. If that continues, just counting the parts as they arrive is going to be a huge task. Both exciting and scary at the same time.
When we started building this site, I wasn't sure it would ever grow to a substantial sales volume. After all, how many people are competent enough to repair their own tools, let alone have the desire. Boy, were we all shocked when sales started taking off. That was even before we started really concentrating on SEO. After SEO, we're doing more in a month than I ever really thought we'd be doing in a year through this site. Now that I have more experience and insight, I think we're leaving a whole lot of business out on the table yet. I can seriously think of thousands of phrases that we're not showing up at all yet that would be decently converting phrases. Just about the time I think we're doing well, I start thinking about everything we're still missing. Amazing how much my attitude has changed.
Now that I've seen the volume we can do in parts, doing many times that volume in tools seems like it should be very easy. Granted, we're one of the few that sell parts online, but there aren't too many that know much about SEO and sell tools online. Put some accessories on the carousel and we can start moving through those in large quantities as well. It just seems like now that we have a carousel system, we should put almost everything on there. Obviously pallets of nails don't belong on a carousel, but it'd do a great job for smaller tools (drills, grinders, etc.) Table saws would be pushing it. Staplers would be great on a carousel.
I don't know how many companies in our industry use a carousel system, but I'm fairly certain that it isn't that many. Very exciting stuff, and it gets more exciting every day.
After getting top rankings for many of the most obvious key phrases for our site, there are still so many combinations available that I'm expecting to be able to double to triple our volume yet. If that continues, just counting the parts as they arrive is going to be a huge task. Both exciting and scary at the same time.
When we started building this site, I wasn't sure it would ever grow to a substantial sales volume. After all, how many people are competent enough to repair their own tools, let alone have the desire. Boy, were we all shocked when sales started taking off. That was even before we started really concentrating on SEO. After SEO, we're doing more in a month than I ever really thought we'd be doing in a year through this site. Now that I have more experience and insight, I think we're leaving a whole lot of business out on the table yet. I can seriously think of thousands of phrases that we're not showing up at all yet that would be decently converting phrases. Just about the time I think we're doing well, I start thinking about everything we're still missing. Amazing how much my attitude has changed.
Now that I've seen the volume we can do in parts, doing many times that volume in tools seems like it should be very easy. Granted, we're one of the few that sell parts online, but there aren't too many that know much about SEO and sell tools online. Put some accessories on the carousel and we can start moving through those in large quantities as well. It just seems like now that we have a carousel system, we should put almost everything on there. Obviously pallets of nails don't belong on a carousel, but it'd do a great job for smaller tools (drills, grinders, etc.) Table saws would be pushing it. Staplers would be great on a carousel.
I don't know how many companies in our industry use a carousel system, but I'm fairly certain that it isn't that many. Very exciting stuff, and it gets more exciting every day.
Barcodes are everywhere.
Barcodes are everywhere. Seems like I can't turn anything over without a barcode showing up. I wonder why nobody has barcodes on the back of their business cards yet that work for their email address and website URL. Seems like an open market for some enterprising person, but not me -- today.
Trying to figure out what barcode to use can be a real pain. Is this a UPC-A, EAN13, Code 39, or some other form of barcode? Barcode scanners are pretty amazing that they work as well as they do when you stop to think about it. They can identify what type of barcode this is, decode it, and be ready for the next one while I'm still in a trance from the red light. Pretty colors.
Well, we had to create some mock-ups today for a few barcodes to be printed on our invoices / shipping tickets. This caused me to come up with a simple utility to enter your text and get your barcode. I've been having fun with names, URL's, and phrases.
The base URL (if you'd like to play yourself) is http://www.toolbarn.com/web-tools/. From there, you can select from most of the common types of barcodes to generate. Sort of a fun thing to play with, but also a real waste of time in many cases.
This has basically come to pass because we're using product UPC barcodes on the product pages of our website for people who print the pages and bring them in. What better way to quickly pull up information about the product they're interested in? I love it when technology can actually have a decent use, but just creating toys is good enough in most cases.
That's it for now,
Trying to figure out what barcode to use can be a real pain. Is this a UPC-A, EAN13, Code 39, or some other form of barcode? Barcode scanners are pretty amazing that they work as well as they do when you stop to think about it. They can identify what type of barcode this is, decode it, and be ready for the next one while I'm still in a trance from the red light. Pretty colors.
Well, we had to create some mock-ups today for a few barcodes to be printed on our invoices / shipping tickets. This caused me to come up with a simple utility to enter your text and get your barcode. I've been having fun with names, URL's, and phrases.
The base URL (if you'd like to play yourself) is http://www.toolbarn.com/web-tools/. From there, you can select from most of the common types of barcodes to generate. Sort of a fun thing to play with, but also a real waste of time in many cases.
This has basically come to pass because we're using product UPC barcodes on the product pages of our website for people who print the pages and bring them in. What better way to quickly pull up information about the product they're interested in? I love it when technology can actually have a decent use, but just creating toys is good enough in most cases.
That's it for now,
Sunday, March 06, 2005
PPC'ing against our affiliates
We have an affiliate that just started creating some content, which we encourage. However, they started bidding against us on Overture and getting quite a few sales from that. While it isn't a problem them getting sales, when it's sales that we would have gotten already (same keywords on Overture) it raises a question with me about the real value of this affiliate.
The other question I have is this: would they be seeing enough traffic for it to pay off? Granted, these keywords are mostly under 20 cents per click, but even a 20% conversion rate means they need to make almost $1.00 per sale (if people are following their links in the first place). They don't rank in any of the 3 major search engines, so we aren't competing in that market yet, but they originally copied most of our homepage as their homepage and now they're paying for traffic that we normally buy. Sure, we can afford to get the #1 position back from them, but the real question is why should I have to buy traffic back from our affiliates?
I guess I should start thinking about putting something into our affiliate program about purchasing traffic on keywords we bid on, but that seems like it could cause issues with obtaining affiliates at all. With the way our affiliate program is structured, they do have to create at minimum a landing page so that it'll properly track. It still doesn't make me happy that I have to buy traffic back from them.
Obviously, if they insist on a bidding war I'll just revoke their affiliate status. I don't mean to create an unfair playing field, but this is our primary source of revenue that they're dipping into. Had I not attended SES in NY, I wouldn't have been thinking about my Overture account as much and probably wouldn't have even noticed what they were doing. However, now that I know, I need to make sure to address it before I'm in a bidding war with 100 of our own affiliates.
I really feel for the larger affiliate sites (Amazon comes to mind). They'd have to really be aggressive if they want to make sure that they're not bidding against themselves too often. I guess that's why I work for a smaller company and don't have much interest in working for those huge companies that have seemingly unlimited marketing funds. I can handle our 50,000 key phrases on Google, but getting much larger than that really gets frustrating. I suppose that's why it's easy to beat them on some phrases, but they have the budget to make it more difficult on the very popular phrases. If they were smarter about the less frequent searches, they'd be tough to stop. Good thing they're not.
The other question I have is this: would they be seeing enough traffic for it to pay off? Granted, these keywords are mostly under 20 cents per click, but even a 20% conversion rate means they need to make almost $1.00 per sale (if people are following their links in the first place). They don't rank in any of the 3 major search engines, so we aren't competing in that market yet, but they originally copied most of our homepage as their homepage and now they're paying for traffic that we normally buy. Sure, we can afford to get the #1 position back from them, but the real question is why should I have to buy traffic back from our affiliates?
I guess I should start thinking about putting something into our affiliate program about purchasing traffic on keywords we bid on, but that seems like it could cause issues with obtaining affiliates at all. With the way our affiliate program is structured, they do have to create at minimum a landing page so that it'll properly track. It still doesn't make me happy that I have to buy traffic back from them.
Obviously, if they insist on a bidding war I'll just revoke their affiliate status. I don't mean to create an unfair playing field, but this is our primary source of revenue that they're dipping into. Had I not attended SES in NY, I wouldn't have been thinking about my Overture account as much and probably wouldn't have even noticed what they were doing. However, now that I know, I need to make sure to address it before I'm in a bidding war with 100 of our own affiliates.
I really feel for the larger affiliate sites (Amazon comes to mind). They'd have to really be aggressive if they want to make sure that they're not bidding against themselves too often. I guess that's why I work for a smaller company and don't have much interest in working for those huge companies that have seemingly unlimited marketing funds. I can handle our 50,000 key phrases on Google, but getting much larger than that really gets frustrating. I suppose that's why it's easy to beat them on some phrases, but they have the budget to make it more difficult on the very popular phrases. If they were smarter about the less frequent searches, they'd be tough to stop. Good thing they're not.
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Spreading our online marketing eggs into many baskets
Being the CTO of an online company, I am aware that we don't want to keep our eggs in one virtual basket. I've done a lot of things to broaden our reach, including PPC advertising on Google, Overture, and Kanoodle. Shopping engines have become an integral part of our marketing mix as well. I've also worked on our organic search rankings in MSN, Yahoo, and Google. Ask Jeeves is on our radar as well, but the whole Hubs and Authorities makes it very important to have a lot of content, which we just don't have anyone to write currently.
When the Google update "Florida" hit us back in 2003, we realized we had a problem. Our sales were pretty well gone overnight. That's not a good feeling. At that point, I started looking to see what we could do, and I attended my first "Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo" in New York. After some trial and error, we are diverse enough that we totally missed a problem recently, which is a problem.
While it's great that we didn't even notice by our sales numbers that we lost our rankings within Google (due to a spidering problem), it's also alarming that we don't have any sort of technology in place to tell me that there is a problem. We have no way of knowing how long our products haven't been listed in Google.
The fact is, though, that many online businesses could be wiped out by not having most of their website listed in Google's index. I have heard of very few people in online businesses that wouldn't be totally distraught at the idea of not having their products listed. I feel so fortunate to have such a wide range of ways to get business now that it isn't a huge problem when we don't have our products listed there, but it also brings in the question: How much business did we miss out on? It also makes me wonder what we can do to put some sort of monitoring system in place to let me know when there is a problem.
One of the biggest obstacles for most of the "Monitoring Tools" is that they violate the Google terms and conditions by doing automated queries. There are a few that use the Google API, but most of the pages that talk about their great tools don't say if they're using legitimate means of getting the data or not. I feel like we really need to get some sort of an industry guideline in place so that it is easy to tell what technologies are used to do monitoring, and maybe even have Google themselves certify some of the tools as "TOS Compliant". I'd hate to get blocked from using their service just because I chose the wrong tool.
That being said, if I had more time I could use the Google API myself to do some monitoring. However, time is a luxury that I don't really have at the moment. As an ecommerce business growing at a rate well above any of our wildest expectations, there is a lot of content to create, a lot of pages to optimize for search rankings, a lot of new compliance directives to follow, new security concerns to address regularly, and a whole melting pot of marketing ideas to consider and implement. At some point I'm going to need to hire an assistant, but until then I'll just hold on and enjoy the ride.
When the Google update "Florida" hit us back in 2003, we realized we had a problem. Our sales were pretty well gone overnight. That's not a good feeling. At that point, I started looking to see what we could do, and I attended my first "Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo" in New York. After some trial and error, we are diverse enough that we totally missed a problem recently, which is a problem.
While it's great that we didn't even notice by our sales numbers that we lost our rankings within Google (due to a spidering problem), it's also alarming that we don't have any sort of technology in place to tell me that there is a problem. We have no way of knowing how long our products haven't been listed in Google.
The fact is, though, that many online businesses could be wiped out by not having most of their website listed in Google's index. I have heard of very few people in online businesses that wouldn't be totally distraught at the idea of not having their products listed. I feel so fortunate to have such a wide range of ways to get business now that it isn't a huge problem when we don't have our products listed there, but it also brings in the question: How much business did we miss out on? It also makes me wonder what we can do to put some sort of monitoring system in place to let me know when there is a problem.
One of the biggest obstacles for most of the "Monitoring Tools" is that they violate the Google terms and conditions by doing automated queries. There are a few that use the Google API, but most of the pages that talk about their great tools don't say if they're using legitimate means of getting the data or not. I feel like we really need to get some sort of an industry guideline in place so that it is easy to tell what technologies are used to do monitoring, and maybe even have Google themselves certify some of the tools as "TOS Compliant". I'd hate to get blocked from using their service just because I chose the wrong tool.
That being said, if I had more time I could use the Google API myself to do some monitoring. However, time is a luxury that I don't really have at the moment. As an ecommerce business growing at a rate well above any of our wildest expectations, there is a lot of content to create, a lot of pages to optimize for search rankings, a lot of new compliance directives to follow, new security concerns to address regularly, and a whole melting pot of marketing ideas to consider and implement. At some point I'm going to need to hire an assistant, but until then I'll just hold on and enjoy the ride.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)