Quick Shopping Cart® Success Stories: ArmadilloPepper.com and 3SistersChocolate.com

ArmadilloPepper.com specializes in barbecue sauces, pepper jellies, chow-chow relish, hot sauces, fresh honeys, and other gourmet items.

3SistersChocolate.com specializes in gourmet chocolate gifts in a variety of price ranges, including chocolate pizza, chocolate-covered pretzels, potato chips and truffles.

We caught up with Jeff Guy, owner/operator of both stores, to learn his secrets for creating and managing a successful web store.

How did ArmadilloPepper.com get started?

I have always been a foodie. There are always a dozen different bottles of hot sauce in my refrigerator. We live in Florida and in the spring and fall of the year there are festivals almost every weekend. My daughter likes to shop for the handmade jewelry and purses. My son is a teenager, so he likes to eat something from every booth.

I noticed that people would stand in line to purchase the jellies, jams, honeys, hot sauces and BBQ sauces from the small producers. Because the producers are small, many of them use fresh ingredients and make the product in low volumes in order to control the quality. You would hear their customers say things like, “I’m so glad we found you. We had some of your jelly last year and have not been able to find it”.

Some of the small producers had websites and some did not. It seemed that those that had websites had very low traffic. It was obvious from standing there at the festival and listening to repeat customers that the product was very good and there was a market. As a result, ArmadilloPepper.com was born to provide a channel for these producers.

We are actually the exclusive online retailer now for some small producers. Now, it is not uncommon for our site to appear higher on a Google Search than the actual producers of a product.

Do you have a brick-and-mortar presence?

We have a retail location for our 3 Sisters Chocolate Company at 9965 San Jose Blvd, Jacksonville, FL. In April, one year after ArmadilloPepper.com was launched we started offering our ArmadilloPepper.com BBQ Sauces and Hot Sauces at this retail location.

How has your business grown as a result of using Quick Shopping Cart and other GoDaddy.com products?

I had limited start-up capital and wanted to minimize my website development cost. I’m not a “techie,” so I was looking for three key factors in my search for web hosting and development products.

• I wanted to do the website development myself to save on the investment and at the same time, I knew the site must look professional.
• The website would always need to be up and running. There are hundreds of competitors out there. A customer may return once if your website is down, but not twice.
• Just like my personal insurance needs where I only call a single agent for my auto, house, etc., I valued having a single point of contact for all of my website-related needs.

Go Daddy offered tools and services that met all these needs at a very competitive price. I don’t have to call multiple companies for each tool. I just call a single number, anytime of day and can ask questions or resolve issues.

The bottom line is that because the Go Daddy products enabled us to develop ArmadilloPepper.com on our own and then continue to optimize it; we have not had to spend investment dollars on outside web developers. As a result, we have taken those dollars and expanded our product line, which provides our customers with more choices and helps to grow our revenues.

We experienced so much success with ArmadilloPepper.com that we decided to migrate 3SistersChocolate.com to the GoDaddy.com® suite of Website Tonight®, Quick Shopping Cart, Email and Site Analytics products.

How does Site Analytics help you run your Web store?

I know of several small businesses that paid money to build websites and then were disappointed when their investment was not recovered. They don’t know why they aren’t getting sales. They don’t even know how visitors find their site or how many visitors find their site. Site Analytics is the most important tool that you can have with Quick Shopping Cart. You’ll find it running on one of my computers at all times.

A successful website has to be monitored and improved. Site Analytics tells me the sources of our traffic (how many from Google®, Yahoo®, etc.). It tells me keywords that visitors are using to find ArmadilloPepper.com. I can see specific pages that visitors land on. I can see where visitors leave my website. Having this information helps me identify patterns and make very specific improvements to the website.

How does Go Daddy Marketplace help your sales?

We saw our Go Daddy Marketplace sales ramp up in the fourth quarter of 2009. We also noticed that for some organic searches, our Go Daddy Marketplace product pages displayed higher on Google than the same product page on our ArmadilloPepper.com website. We have certainly recovered our start-up investment in the Go Daddy Marketplace.

Do you think accepting credit cards with your Merchant Account influences customers to place orders on your store?

I know this is emphatically true. When I originally launched ArmadilloPepper.com, I was trying to minimize investment cost and as a result only offered PayPal. I was concerned that I might be losing customers by only offering this single service. When I started accepting traditional credit cards such as Visa®, MasterCard®, and American Express®, our sales jumped immediately. We still offer PayPal® because a portion of the market uses this vehicle. Many of us have grown up with PayPal and it is part of our everyday life. PayPal does accept credit cards, but at least for our business, we learned immediately that there is a large market that still uses the credit card in their wallet or purse.

Do you think having an SSL certificate increases customer confidence?

We know through interviews that some shoppers don’t know anything about SSL. We also know that some shoppers specifically look to make sure the site is secure before they consider shopping. So, an SSL certificate is important for a portion of the market. We also know that the merchant service we use requires and validates that the website has SSL before they will provide a merchant account. It’s smart business.

Do you think using Google Product Feed increases your traffic? Your sales?

Yes, we know it increases our traffic and we know specifically how much it increases our sales. The Quick Shopping Cart tool tracks the number of sales from visitors that found our website using the Google Product Feed. Anyone who is using Quick Shopping Cart should definitely use this feature. It requires minimal effort to set-up.

How have you used Express Email Marketing®?

I value having all of the tools I need at one location with a single point of contact. Express Email Marketing is another Go Daddy tool that easily integrates with our ArmadilloPepper.com website and helps us reach out to our customers through the use of a monthly newsletter.

The newsletter sign-up is on our ArmadilloPepper.com site. Anytime a visitor clicks the link, they are launched to the Express Email Marketing tool to sign-up. The tool has our logo and similar color scheme. As a result, when the customer clicks on the link to sign-up for our newsletter, everything looks like it is integrated and the customer is not being shipped off to some other third-party site.

We use Express Email Marketing to send a monthly newsletter, occasional sales and new product announcements. Everyone gets bombarded by email, so we are very selective in how often we send newsletters. With Express Email Marketing, we continue to see our newsletter subscription increase over time and it’s simply another great tool to reach out to customers.

How have you used Site Surveys?

Site Surveys were a pleasant surprise for us. When it was released, we immediately took advantage of this tool to find out if customers found ArmadilloPepper.com easy to use.

We wanted answers to questions like “Are the fonts large enough?” “Is there enough contrast?” “Is the design pleasing to the eye?” “Is the site easy to navigate and does it enable customers to easily find what they want?” It is easier for a customer to leave your site than to stay, so all of these factors must be optimized.

We used Site Surveys to develop a survey that asked customers some of these questions. We included a link to the Site Survey in each invoice when it was sent to the customer. We offered a discount on their next purchase by completing the survey.

By using the Site Survey tool, we quickly obtained direct customer feedback with their opinions about our website design, our products, our pricing and other information. The information we collected was priceless. At the time, we were also investing in some third-party content for our website. Through Site Surveys, we learned that none of our customers were utilizing this feature and as a result, we were able to reduce that monthly cost.

As we move forward, we plan to continue using Site Surveys as a mechanism to obtain feedback about website improvements, new products and to attract the all-important repeat customer.

What is the number one piece of advice you would give to merchants setting up their first online store?

In the movie The Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is walking through the cornfield and hears a voice whisper “If you build it, he will come.” I would tell anyone starting out to build a website that this advice does not work in the online e-commerce world.

People have to find your website and there are millions of websites that you are competing for their attention. You can have the “best looking” site in your market, but unfortunately visitors can’t find your site by how it looks. They find your site by plugging a search term into Google, Yahoo or Bing. Building is just the first step.

After you build your website, you must optimize it, monitor it and the re-optimize it. You do not have to be an engineer or a technical genius. I have no formal engineering or software training. As the business owner, you know your business better than anyone. You must take an active role in identifying your markets, the keywords in the markets and how you want to reach those markets.

Go Daddy provides a great suite of tools and professional templates to help you build your site efficiently and economically, how to monitor your visitor traffic and sources of visitor traffic and then to easily make improvements to your site to further improve your search standings. The name of the game is to constantly move-up in organic search results. Be persistent and be patient.

Ready to open a web store? Buy Quick Shopping Cart today!