We Get the thumbs up!

Mini Sport

Thankyou Ezimerchant,

After going on to eBay and realizing the amazing success of ecommerce we soon found ourselves expanding and the costs and fees to be really biting into our profit and value we could offer to customers.

We then (from very strong word of mouth) came across Ezimerchant; we had a browse and were hooked! It was very simple and a more cost effective tool to promote our business and our products.

We have now been running Ezimerchant for 2 years and it is now a major part of our promotion and marketing tools, with constant compliments from our customers on the ease to use and easy layout design.

The backup support is also fantastic with constant updates and version releases that continually raise the bar in website design and features.

I would like to thank Ezimerchant for making me look so good, keep up the good work!

StampStore

After using ezimerchant for around three years, I just wanted to thank all the ezimerchant staff on their brilliant job of making such a great program. I first started with only a handful of products, and this has now grown to several hundred. The ease of use, along with the extreme flexibility makes ezimerchant a complete package.

By combining user friendliness, with the ability to have many different types of custom fields, run automated promotions and be able to customise your own templates to suit your individual needs, plus the security of a secure checkout with all the payment options that web shoppers expects. This has given my business the ability to grow at a faster rate than ever anticipated. The other great thing I have found about ezimerchant is the search engine friendliness of the software. By simply choosing your content and keywords correctly, it is quite simple to get some good listings on all the popular search engines.

In closing, the last but in no way the least point that I would like to mention, is the fact that the support from the team at ezimerchant is nothing short of outstanding. You guys are always easy to get through to on the phone when needed, and always ready to help with all my questions. So thanks again for making and supporting such a great product. I would without hesitation, recommend ezimerchant to anyone who wants a fast, efficient & and cost effective solution to get an ecommerce business on the web.

Garrison Communications

The hardest part of our decision to go with the excellent EziMerchant Professional software was accepting that the success of our e-commerce web-site would now depend on yet another server outside of our immediate control.

But some seven months after completely replacing our former web-site with a modified EziMerchant template, we can’t get over how flexible, professional-looking and useful this program has been to set up and implement. We have transformed – for the better – our Internet presence and it continues to pay us dividends.

My name is Peter Collins, the manager – corporate services, of Garrison Communications Family History Research Services, at www.garrisonau.com.

Our firm prides itself on being a pioneer in terms of commercial genealogy services on-line in Australia. We first posted a site in November 1995 and persevered with a self-taught HTML-editing learning curve until we ran out of puff trying to get our head around JAVA and its successors.

Having never been completely satisfied with the foibles of FrontPage 98 as an e-commerce web-site design tool, the one key goal of our on-line shopping mall strategy was to achieve a simple, but tailored shopping basket experience for our customers.

A lot of e-commerce hyperbole insists it’s essential to expend a fortune to achieve a lavish web-site that will successfully attract paying customers. For those with a big IT budget to play around with, perhaps this is true. But we haven’t yet figured out what else any self-respecting on-line business really needs to be successful, that hasn’t already been included with EziMerchant professional.

EziMerchant has a brilliant shopping basket interface and our customers obtain instantaneous and comprehensive feedback about what they have ordered. Transactions are secure and both we and our customers can be sure of what is expected.

The design versatility of EziMerchant Professional is well demonstrated in the way we have been able to craft various on-line Birth, Death and Marriage Certificate order forms that our customers can fill in.

Having these pages work so elegantly in conjunction with the underlying shopping basket motif has been quite a revelation for us…and our customers as well!

Family history research – genealogy – is one of the world’s fastest growing hobbies. Our specialist area of expertise is in relation to helping Australians whose ancestral roots can be traced to England, Scotland and Wales.

Our customers get a great kick out of piecing together the branches of their family tree and to find an express service for purchasing British Birth, Death and Marriage Certificates is a bonus…especially one with whom you can do business on-line, in Aussie dollars!

The feedback our long-established customers have provided since our EziMerchant web-site revamp took place has been extremely encouraging and the additional on-line security and responsiveness is now attracting repeat business from new customers from as far away as Spain!

We have also meshed our on-line range of products with our accounting package requirements and now notice economies in processing sales and tracking our inventory.

EziMerchant professional deserves its success because it has been helping our small business to grow exponentially and to succeed on-line.

Aussie Sheep and Wool

Designer: Daniel Vidoni

Introduction

My name is Daniel Vidoni. I have worked as a graphic designer for many years and over the last few years my company, Vidoni Studios, has specialised in eCommerce web design for small to medium businesses.

Jim Farrell of Aussie Sheep and Wool recently asked me to rebuild his outmoded web site with a brand-new SSL secure eCommerce shopping site. Not only would the new web site need to look good and be easy to use, but it was essential that he be able to maintain the stock lists himself and administer the site autonomously.

The Options

There are many content management systems available to accomplish this feat. The most obvious which sprang to mind was using a database driven dynamic web site. Unfortunately, this would prove an expensive exercise for Jim, who runs a small business on a tight budget. I also thought it was an unnecessarily complex solution as Aussie Sheep and Wool's site has a relatively small line of products totaling about 120 items.

Some History

Aussie Sheep and Wool have been in the business of producing and selling quality sheepskin products for over 15 years. At their peak they operated five stores, employing 23 people with an annual turnover of over a million dollars. They have an extensive range of Ugg boots, slippers and scuffs, and wide variety of bedroom and baby products.

A couple of years ago their conventional retail operation made its first foray into eCommerce. They began with a basic web site; just enough to give them a web presence and some basic shopping functionality. Recently, they decided to make the web site a more serious part of the business. They saw and liked the sites which I had created for other clients and decided to give me the task of creating theirs.

The top four points which had to be addressed were:

• Organise and build the site in such a way that it's a pleasure for clients to use
• Add a size, gender and colour option to the stock items (custom fields)
• Allow full and easy access to online shopping cart so that Jim can add, delete and change stock items as required
• Improve the shopping cart and make it secure

The Solution

Reinventing the wheel is rarely a good way to spend a client’s money, and I had a certain amount of time pressure on me to deliver the web site before the Aussie winter arrived. So I began the project by looking at the different shopping carts already available. After exhaustive research, I selected ezimerchant Professional as it is quite flexible, accepts templates made with Dream weaver and Microsoft Front Page, and most importantly, it offers a very friendly user interface for those administering the web site stock items. It’s also significantly cheaper than the competition.

The Process

It took about a weekend to craft the templates for the site. I had never worked with ezimerchant before, so there was a little bit of trial and error while I learnt the system. I am also very particular about how I want the designs to appear so I put in extra hours to make sure the final product accurately reflected my original concept art. It took another few days to create the graphics for inclusion and to perfect the CSS style sheets that would be used in the final product. To cut a long story short, I had 70% of the web site complete in a week and the result was beautiful. All that was left to do was the put in the stock items, set up the freight handling, and upload the site.

Entering the Data

Putting in the stock items was easy and intuitive. It still took some doing as I had to collate verbiage and photographs and create custom fields for each item. ezimerchant has an import feature, which in theory should accelerate this process, however, the older web site I was using to source the data was incompatible with the system, and so I had to re-enter all the data by hand.

The image resizer built into ezimerchant was a terrific feature which made processing the many stock items photographs a breeze. It was simple to use and produced consistent results.

As is often the case, the quality of the input is reflected in the quality of the output. It is important to start with a good image otherwise you'll end up with a muddy mess. I hope future versions of the image resizer will offer some kind of auto-levels feature to automatically cleanup 'dirty' images.

Training the Client

At about halfway through the data entry I called Jim and asked him to spend some time with me to learn the system by typing in some of the data himself. He learnt the system in a few hours and was able to finish the data entry himself, thus saving himself a considerable amount of money and allowing me to work on some other jobs. The site went live a couple of days later.

In Jim's Words

"As soon as I spoke to Daniel and saw some of his designs I knew he was the man to create my eCommerce web site. He quickly understood my needs and ideas and translated them into a fresh, consistent and polished result. It is more functional than I thought was possible and I can now see it will become a core part of my business. Clients from all over the World are raving about the site and business is steadily improving."

The Outcome

Aussie Sheep and Wool average 60 visitors per day on their web site (As at August 2004) and the number is increasing constantly. With a steady stream of orders the web site has already paid for itself. The major search engines have had no trouble indexing every corner of the web site and during a recent 'Google dance' (the index update of the Google search engine - during an index update there is often significant movement in search results (page rank) for pages) Aussie Sheep and Wool's page rank increased to 4 out of 10. There is a lot to be said for static HTML pages as compiled by ezimerchant.

Conclusion

ezimerchant offers web developers a serious alternative to complex data driven dynamic web sites. It is easy to learn, compatible with Dream weaver and Front Page, and flexible enough for most applications.

If you don't have time or enough artistic ability to create your own fancy eCommerce web site, hiring a professional artist to use ezimerchant to create the foundation and then entering the data yourself is a very cost-effective option.

ezimerchant generates efficient, search engine friendly code and provides the user a simple interface with which to administer their web site. Its security features are transparent and top-grade.

My only suggestions would be that the built-in e-mail system could use further evolution. The ability to send promotional attachments would be a valuable addition, and the ability to automatically cater to multiple world currencies I think is essential considering the Internet is a global system.

ezimerchant gets 8 out of 10 in my books. Great job, great product.

Country Brewer

Shawn Miles

This site typifies what any Bricks business should be doing. Frankly any Bricks business that does not have an online presence is nuts.

The Country Brewer supplies all the ingredients and necessaries to assist home brewers to produce some pretty useful home beverages.

With five traditional stores Shawn views the website as the sixth store “but without any where near the over heads of the other five!”

Since Nov 2001 Shawn has sold just over $500,000 online. This has improved the profitability of our business dramatically. We run at a 45 -47% G.P and have this growth in sales without the growth in overheads, has really helped.

We also consider the site to be an invaluable resource of information for our customers.

Interestingly he has a substantial customer database and is only just about to launch an email campaign to that.

Notes: country Brewer maintains a substantial customer database that has not yet been communicated with! Keep tuned and lets see how he does.

Lessons:

It can take time.

Pay Per click advertising is working

Shawn

Hibermate

- Chris Thomas

When I made myself a sound reducing sleep mask during a period of nightshift back in 1993, little did I realize that 10 years later my invention would be selling on the internet to worldwide customers.

After a stint of world travel in 1999 I really missed my mask. Trying to sleep on planes, trains and buses was nearly impossible. I began to think about how other travelers and shift workers might also need a mask like mine. Trying to think of how best to get the idea to the customer I thought about "selling on the web" which was just getting started at that time. As soon as I arrived home I found a manufacturer, got a bunch of masks made and packaged professionally. I then shopped around the net for a good shopping cart system and selected ezimerchant Professional to build and upload the site. It helped enormously because it submitted my site to all the major search engines automatically.

One of the great things about the net is being able to change things around almost instantly. ezimerchant Professional allowed me to tweak pages, correct mistakes and re-upload pages on to the net in seconds. The more I got into it, the more I realized just powerful it actually was.

Like most businesses starting out, sales were slow. I released that there were several factors that I needed to look at and learn about.

I was able to experiment with the pages for a few months before improving the conversion rates, at the same time researching more about internet marketing and implementing new strategies. Those three things really helped sales along and after twelve months I was able to deal with increased competition and pinpoint seasonal factors affecting sales. I'm in a position now to incorporate into my planning the boom months and leaner times. The site now has a conversion rate of about 4% (four in 100 visitors make a purchase) which is about 3% higher than the industry standard.

Since the marketing strategy is vital and there's no point in building a site if it can't be found, I read as much as I could about how the global search engines work, how they rank pages, and the importance of pay-per-click advertising. The best tool I found to check the demand of my product on the net was Overture's, "search term suggestion tool". It allowed me to see how many times a certain key word or phrase is searched for on their website every month. Today, it also really helps me find more markets, and find out what my competitors are up to!

Initially I began advertising on Overture (which is absolutely enormous in the United States). It really helped generate sales and helped me learn about matching and beating competitors through bidding for rankings. If you can afford to bid high enough for a keyword and get to the "top three" you'll be seen by nearly everybody world-wide. Overture partners with msn.com (America's most popular search engine!) and they supply their top three results to MSN and Yahoo (as well as many others). You can be ranking worldwide, in the top three, in a matter of minutes!

To capture more potential sales I began advertising on Google, using their ad-words select program. That allowed me to 'be seen' for keywords directly and indirectly related to my product and also helped me generate traffic straight away. Sadly the days of free advertising on the net have nearly gone as the search engines try and create revenue for themselves. I spend about 10% of my turnover on internet advertising.

I've found that it's very important to build a website that "sells". By this I mean writing compelling sales copy! Grab your potential customer's attention immediately, make them curious, build trust and likeability into your words. Features are important, but it's best to describe the benefits of your product or service for them. Always make a sentence or paragraph you write interesting to them, not you. Customer service is vital. I make it a policy to answer everyone's email as soon as I see it, or at least within 24 hours. I often use ezimerchant Profesional's group 'emailer' to tell my customers if I have a special on one of my products. That really helps sales too!

Lastly, if your website is performing well, have a customised template built to your own specifications. It helps your business's brand to be instantly recognized and will add that extra bit of 'cred' to your website.

In summary, the internet is absolutely perfect for niche products and exporting. The added bonus of selling world-wide is the fact that you don't have to collect GST and I get the 10% GST I spend on manufacturing back every three months! Couple that with an extremely competitive exchange rate and I think you'd be mad not to try exporting to the world. The business turns over $120,000p/a and I still have a full time job working for Lonely Planet! I spend only an hour or so on the business every day, but it's not really a job, its fun!

Chris

Anixi Jewelry

- Mary

Ok, so here is my story….

My background was in business administration, far from what I’m doing today. During those early years I traveled quite a bit and entertained an obsessive habit of mine – collecting unusual and unique jewelry pieces. Unfortunately, the Australian market didn’t have enough of a variety to satisfy my hunger.

I continued traveling, and by chance or fate, I happened to meet a silver smith whose craftsmanship impressed me so much that I knew a partnership could be formed. So I put pen to paper and started designing silver jewelry that I had envisioned, and searched for, for several years.

When the first pieces were made, I was beside myself. I was proud of the designs that I had put down on paper but when I saw the finished products, I was speechless. I had found my calling. The first lines produced an overwhelming response and the idea came to mind to sell the jewelry online.

The problem was I knew nothing about website design, nor did I want to spend a fortune for some one to do design it for me. So I looked around, experimented with several website programs, and chose ezimerchant Professional. Why did I choose it? Their program was easy to use, it had templates that I could utilise, it was simple to modify and customise their templates to develop the image I wanted for my website, and most importantly their customer support centre was always there to assist.

During this development I had to come up with a name that best typified my designs. Coming from a Greek heritage, the name ‘Anixi’ was chosen. It means spring and symbolises birth and new growth. I thought it was appropriate for my company.

In partnership with two other people, a great deal of work went into designing and creating the jewelry, the photography, and the website. The other creative influence in Anixi is Dimi, a talented and successful graphic designer. She joined the team in 2001, and her artistic flair has been successfully infused in many of Anixi’s designs. Anixi came on line in August 2001.

Since then it has surpassed all the goals that I envisioned and is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. So much so, that it has become my full time job. We have projected that in 2003, the total turnover for Anixi Jewelry will be $350,000 with a high profit margin.

Mary

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