Blog

It is Friday Dec 26th and I am just starting to look at numbers for the ecommerce sales figures for 2008 holiday season. They look better the we originally projected. About 10-12 days ago we were 10% under last years numbers for the companies I track closely. That was depressing. I firmly believe that an ecommerce store profits should ever move backwards, even in this economy.

Overall we expected to sell about the same number of units as last year, which would have meant less profit. For most of our own companies like www.swankmartini.com and www.anchorsfoodfinds.com we did not raise the prices and had higher COGS (costs of goods sold) and shipping costs. So our profit levels would have declined for the same amount of unit sales/orders.

What saved us? A few things come to mind.

• We started using Facebook and Myspace advertising which proved to have a good customer acquisition cost.  (I highly recommend doing a pilot program for your ecommerce venture if you are not already)
• We sent an extra mass email to our clients just before the end of the shipping season and we dropped large discount coupons (I am not convinced that coupons really work and may even hurt sales in some cases).
• We cleaned up the descriptions of the products and created very clear holiday ordering information. So basically we made the ordering procedure easier to understand.

I will be discussing each one of these points separately in upcoming posts.

Thanks,

Ian Hartten
Toledo.com