Setting the Table for E-Commerce Success

One night, when Jennifer Findlay was searching for home décor items online, she was frustrated to realize that almost every site she visited charged exorbitant rates to ship to Canada. The reason: items were sent from the United States. Figuring she wasn’t the only Canadian who wanted to buy home décor items online, she decided to launch a Canadian online home décor store with selection and pricing to rival those available to US shoppers. In that moment, Nicole Jane Home (http://www.NicoleJane.com) was born.

Creating a successful business requires passion, commitment – and a great idea. But when the entrepreneur behind the business is a technophobe like Findlay, and the great idea involves an online store, it also requires some help from an e-commerce partner with a solid understanding of how small business works.

With loads of ideas about what she wanted to sell, but no clue how to launch a website or find customers, Findlay knew she needed an e-commerce provider that could offer her more than just a shopping cart.

After a meeting with Rob Stocks, President of ideaLEVER – a Vancouver- and Kamloops-based company that specializes in professional content management and e-commerce systems for small-to-medium businesses – Findlay knew she had found an e-commerce partner who could help her achieve her business goals.

“I don’t know anything about technology, so I brought my husband to the meeting with me,” Findlay says. “But Rob never talked over my head to my husband. He was wonderful in walking me through everything. I would ask the same questions 10 times, but he understood that I needed to really understand what he could do for my business.”

While ideaLEVER’s solution was not the cheapest, Findlay knew she was looking for more than just technology. Stocks’s understanding of the challenges Findlay faced as a new entrepreneur, and his eagerness to dig in and understand her business ideas and goals, convinced her that ideaLEVER’s SiteCM and CommerceCM products would be the best fit for her business. Findlay launched NicoleJane.com with ideaLEVER in October 2008, and her business has grown 50 percent every month. She’s now processing 30-40 orders from her site every week.

That ability to work directly with entrepreneurs is the part of his business Stocks loves most. He describes himself as a “terminal compulsive entrepreneur.” Nothing gets him more excited than talking to a businessperson about how he can help make their company successful.

“I love sharing that enthusiasm,” Stocks says. “It gives me a tremendous amount of energy.”

Stocks ensures that the sites clients build with ideaLEVER facilitate business growth. Robeez Footwear, which signed on with ideaLEVER when they were still a small business, used to process 100 orders a month and grew to over 500 orders per day. Other large clients include Hatley Nature, based in Montreal (www.hatleystore.com) and local retailers Quilts Etc. & Daniadown. They have also worked with Sport Mart and Rogers Video.

To help make that growth happen, CommerceCM has built-in SEO-optimization tools that allow users to create search-friendly product and department descriptions and meta-data. For Findlay, this means high search engine rankings and visibility for the brand names and individual products in her store.

Stocks has been coming up with unique ways to achieve business growth since he was 14 years old. Back then, he was operating an ice cream cart. While selling at an event, he hired another kid as a runner to resupply his cart with ice cream. That way, he never had to leave the cart and stop selling. The strategy meant his sales outstripped all the other drivers’. Over the years Stocks has done everything from promoting punk rock bands to booking juggling acts for West Edmonton Mall. When he first started ideaLEVER, it was a one-man business operating out of his daughter’s bedroom.

Having been an entrepreneur all his life, Stocks understands that when a new entrepreneur invests in an e-commerce system, they need a clear return on investment. He focuses on what key features people need to help achieve their business goals, then offers the support they need to get the most out of that system.

All of this, plus a degree in business rather than technology, means that Stocks has a great store of business knowledge and experience that allows him and his team to come up with creative solutions.

“We’re pretty unique in the e-commerce industry in that we’ve been doing this for 14 years,” Stocks says. “We know what a business needs to do to grow from three to four orders a day to 100 orders a day, and our systems allow their website to grow alongside their business.”

That’s not a typo – ideaLEVER really has been working in web development and e-commerce for 14 years. That puts their start date back to 1995, before most people even had Internet connections. Even then, Stocks was designing websites. By 1997 he was developing e-commerce systems. After the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, Stocks had one of the few e-commerce companies left standing, and customers flocked to him when their other providers went under.

In the intervening years, taking over clients whose previous e-commerce service providers have failed to live up their needs has become a theme for Stocks.

“We are frequently the second e-commerce provider for a client,” Stocks says. “People outgrow their previous solutions, or they’re dissatisfied with the services they’re receiving. Other companies sell a shopping cart and offer no support, but we approach software as a service.”

One such client is Jacqueline De’Ath, whose original choice of a “cheap” e-commerce solution meant that her website spent a full year online without being able to process a single order.

De’Ath’s company, Homeworks, Etc. (http://www.HomeworksEtc.ca) designs and manufactures kids’ furniture and accessories. She’s been creating her products since 2002, but in 2007 she decided she was ready to quit her job and run the business full-time. While she sells some products to retail stores, the online store was a big part of her business plan. Unfortunately, De’Ath’s original service provider never managed to get her online store up and running. De’Ath’s new online store, now running on ideaLEVER’s SiteCM and CommerceCM, will just be coming online as this issue goes to press. For a website that started in 2007, that’s an awfully long wait.

“With my first provider, I purchased content and e-commerce systems,” De’Ath says. “But once I had all my products uploaded to the site, I realized something wasn’t working – you couldn’t actually buy anything. After trying to get a hold of my provider for a week, they finally called me back to say they were downsizing and they were no longer supporting the services I had purchased.”

With a website online but no way for visitors to buy her products, De’Ath has been missing out on a ton of sales.

“I get about three phone orders from the site every week,” De’Ath says. “Every one of those people first tried to order online, and they all tell me the site’s not working. I know most people wouldn’t call in, and would just abandon the sale.”

With the new ideaLEVER-supported site coming online, De’Ath is once more excited about the growth of her business.

“I’m anticipating immediate sales,” De’Ath says. “I already get the visitors.”

Stocks and his team have created a plan to help De’Ath get even more visitors, including targeted keywords and search engine optimization strategies. And while her original site is on a .ca domain, Stocks prompted De’Ath to secure the HomeworksEtcDesigns.com name so she can market her products in the United States.

“Canada is a small player in the global economy,” Stocks says. “You need to sell to the US and internationally.”

For Findlay, whose original vision was a Canadian-based store, Stocks’s understanding of the global market has been key. She uses CommerceCM’s multi-currency feature to list her products in both Canadian and US dollars, allowing her to stay true to offering Canadian prices to Canadian customers while still tapping into the much larger US market. Listing prices in US dollars and taking advantage of CommerceCM’s shopping portal data feeds has also allowed Nicole Jane Home to be listed in big shopping portals like Shopping.com and Google Product Search, which are a big source of traffic.

“The big shopping portals won’t list you unless you sell in US dollars,” Stocks says. “That’s why dual currency is set as the default on CommerceCM.”

That US traffic means Findlay is meeting the goals she outlined in her business plan, even though Canadian orders are still slow, and despite having launched just as the world economy crashed.

For both Findlay and De’Ath, confidence in ideaLEVER as a real e-commerce partner means they can focus on growing their businesses rather than worrying about the technology that makes those businesses work. Because, in the end, e-commerce is what makes or breaks an online business – and it’s about much more than just having a shopping cart.

“You have to go beyond the basket,” Stocks says. “You can buy a point of sale system for a retail store, but that doesn’t give you a business. You need a partner who will take the time to work with you, who has the experience you need.”