The store that I’m reviewing today is Scarfu.com, an indie clothing store that is run by someone who I will refer to as P in this article. P initially contacted me through email with the following dilemma.

I just wanted to let you know that your blog has been a tremendous resource for me. I just began my online business selling indie womens clothing at www.scarfu.com. The site has only been live for about 2 months but a few more months have gone into the preparation before we launched.

Much like your online store, my store is run by my boyfriend and I and we both hold full time jobs while working on the website at night. It’s been very time consuming and frustrating, especially when sales are very slow at the moment.

I want to thank you for your blog because I find a lot of useful and relevant information and as you are probably guessing, am feeling lots of frustration at things like site design, traffic, taking 1 month for a sale to come in etc. Your blog is on my RSS feed and your experience has definitely helped me with every part of the business.

Since opening my store about 3 months ago, we’ve had about 13 sales or so, but that is much slower than what we we would wish. There’s a blog post on your site about if you want $100,000 a year, you just have to make 3 sales a day. There are many days we have no sales at all so I’m kind of worried. So far, I’ve advertised on a couple of blogs for design and hosted a giveaway that was quite successful (couple of sales came from there) but we are not getting the organic growth we would like and have quite a hard time getting followers/fans on social media.

I just wanted to ask how you got your site to start taking off. What kinds of advertising did you use and is what I’m going through with my indie clothing store similar to your experience in the 1st 6 months?

Other Background Information

After our initial correspondence, I asked P a series of follow up questions regarding how she markets her store and her answers are summarized below..

• She uses various social media to interact with customers which include Facebook and Twitter. She tweets and posts on the wall regularly.
• She uses monthly paid advertising on specialized blogs
• She uses pay per click advertising on Facebook
• She hosts gift voucher giveaways on other blogs
• She has a testimonials page and an RSS feed for new products

In a nutshell, she’s having a hard time gaining fans and followers organically and getting organic growth.

SEO Problems

The first thing I always do when evaluating any website is I type in a few keywords to see where the site stands in the search engines and to get an idea of the competitive landscape. Sure enough, scarfu.com is nowhere to be found for indie clothing. In fact, scarfu.com doesn’t match at all for indie clothing period. Typing in “scarfu” into Google yields the following result. As you can tell below, the search result reveals absolutely nothing about what P sells. This is what customers are seeing…

Scarfu.com
… Tops · Bottoms · Outerwear · Sale · Newest. Mailing List. Copyright 2009-2010 Scarfu, LLC. All Rights Reserved. about contact faq facebook twitter.
www.scarfu.com/

Turns out, P has some serious SEO problems with her website. The title tags are not descriptive and the meta descriptions don’t even exist for most pages. As a result, P’s site will never get indexed for any of her products in the search engines.

First Impressions

The other impression that my wife had was that P sells really nice clothing in her store, but her store design and pictures don’t do them justice. I’m not an expert on aesthetics, but perhaps she could make her products stand out more by using real human models or using more contrasting colors or borders surrounding her photos, especially on the splash page. She should look at competing websites like modcloth.com to get an idea of what a successful indie clothing store looks like and what she’s missing. Overall though, there’s nothing wrong with P’s offerings as she sells attractive and unique products which is a big plus.

That being said, when I think of an indie developer of clothing, I have this mental picture of a person who bucks the trend. Someone who is tired of the mainstream. Someone creative and daring. She sells Brooklyn clothing but I see no sense of Brooklyn anywhere on the site. On first impression, I receive very little personality from P’s website. Even her ‘about’ page offers very little information about her and why she sells the clothes that she does. What inspires her? Why should I buy her clothes? If I want to buy indie clothing, I want to know who the designer is and why they are special.

Action Items

Most of P’s questions had to do with marketing so I will address them below. Most of P’s marketing efforts thus far have been through blog ads and social media as far as I can tell. Looks like she ran a few promotions on modishblog.com and designformankind.com which are both small-medium sized fashion blogs. Not a bad strategy, but most of these efforts have been one off events. P needs both a short term and a long term strategy. Here’s my take on what she should do.

• She needs to fix all of her SEO problems ASAP. Unique title and meta descriptions are a must for every single page of her site. I wrote an article in the past entitled SEO:10 ways to optimize your online store for the search engines. that she should definitely check out. Without these changes, she will never experience organic growth through search.
• As a designer of clothing, she especially needs to show off her personality. Perhaps she should run a personal design blog on her website, something that allows customers to get to know her better and why she sells ‘indie’ clothing. If the content is interesting enough, she can then go on to promote these articles on social media or start a newsletter of loyal followers. Clothing is just clothing until there’s a brand or personality attached to it. In addition, people might want to know what indie clothing is all about before they buy.
• I noticed that Adwords was missing from her list of marketing choices. Adwords is probably the most effective way to get visitors to her store because people are actively searching for something to buy. As a result, the conversion rate is much higher than other advertising mediums. P’s store is a bit tricky however since there are a million places that sell dresses. However if she can describe something very distinguishing about her clothing, she could probably run an effective adwords campaign. Who knows? Find a free $100 Adwords credit voucher and give it shot
• To improve long term organic traffic, P will need to add written content to her site. In addition, she might want to try doing some guests posts or interviews on fashion blogs or give article marketing a shot. A great example is what the owner of fashionscarvesandshawls.com does with her store. The store ranks in the top 5 in the search engines for scarves which is a pretty competitive keyword. And she did it through a combination of writing for ezinearticles.com and being featured on various publications
• A few other things P is missing on her site is a phone number, a privacy policy, security badges or a mention of SSL and encryption, and a shipping and returns page. Adding these pages are required to improve conversion rate.

Wrapping It Up

While it’s difficult to address everything in a short review, P’s store is still relatively new so traffic is always going to be slow in the beginning. The key is to constantly add more written content and to obtain backlinks from various sources, either through article marketing or guest posting on fashion blogs. But none of this is any good if her SEO issues are not addressed.

I also think that the site needs some more attention grabbing oomph. P should try to emulate her competitors to a certain extent and then add her own flair and personality to her site.

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