Hi Steve,

I really like your videos and blogs as they are very informative. My question is: I have an opportunity to purchase an existing website that is currently offline. This website is a pet supply store and uses two drop shippers.

I am talking with the broker about it. He is not sure of the reason for the sale but he did say the drop shippers have a good reputation and usually keep the items in stock. He said one of them had been in business for 50 years and the other for about 5.

The price of the website is $2,000 although he said it is negotiable. I am putting the information below and would really appreciate it if you would tell me what you think. Thank you.

In addition to the website, the vendor has also mentioned that this store has a customer email list that contains about 2000 contacts. Here’s a screenshot of the website below. Should Randy purchase this site for $2000?

What Do Dropshipping Websites Typically Sell For?

While the selling price of a dropshipped ecommerce store varies from shop to shop, the general rule of thumb is anywhere from 1-2 years of income or between 8-12X monthly profits. In addition to the numbers, it also depends on whether the income is sustainable or not in the long run and whether there’s room to grow in the current niche.

In Randy’s case, he didn’t get a chance to ask the owner of the website for any numbers just yet before he emailed me for my opinion. But fortunately, I didn’t need to see any numbers at all in order to give him my answer.

After doing some very basic research, I determined that this site probably isn’t making any money at all and that Randy should probably stay away. Here’s how I broke things down.

How Much Is The Website Design Worth?

Many people want to jumpstart their online businesses by purchasing a ready made site. Randy’s first question was whether the website design in itself was worth the $2000.

As soon as I saw the website, I instantly knew that the site was based on the popular open source shopping cart Open Cart. How did I know right away? Even though the designer tried really hard to hide all traces of the open source shopping cart, anyone who has seen or used Open Cart would be able to tell right away.

Related: How To Install An Open Source Shopping Cart Without Any Technical Knowledge In Under 5 Minutes

In addition, the template that is being used is very close to the vanilla out of the box template. Therefore, the cost of creating a website design similar to this pet supply shop would be next to nothing or $50 at most. Because Open Cart is open source, the source code for the website is completely free.

There’s nothing particularly special about the look and feel of the website either. The logo is just ok and the images and product descriptions seem to be taken straight from the dropship vendors. Therefore, I would place very little value on the website itself.

What About The Value Of The Dropship Vendors?

Under normal circumstances, there is value in having an established relationship with vendors that supply an online store with goods to sell. In this case however, I doubt that this store has made very many if any sales at all (more on this later). Therefore, I can probably assume that there hasn’t been any long term relationship established with the vendor at this point.

In addition, if you take a look at any of the products for sale, it becomes immediately obvious who the 2 dropship vendors are. See the example below.



So if you really wanted to create an identical replica of this store complete with the same vendors, all you would have to do is install Open Cart and contact the vendors circled in the picture above. It would be as simple as that.

How Does The Store Rank in Search?

The next question is whether this store already gets any traffic organically through search and whether it ranks for any keyword terms. Thanks to tools like www.spyfu.com and SEMRush, this is relatively easy to do.

By bringing up this online store in SpyFu below, it becomes immediately obvious that this site probably doesn’t make many sales or garners much traffic at all.

First off, the owner of this site has not used any PPC marketing services at all to generate any traffic. Second, this shop has zero keyword terms on the front page of the search engines.

Third, this shop doesn’t even show up in various traffic ranking sites like Compete, Quantcast etc… You put the three things together and that probably means the site gets very little traffic and makes very little sales. In other words, the site probably doesn’t make any money.

What Does The Backlink Profile Look Like?

But just for good measure, let’s take a closer look at this Pet Supply shop’s backlink profile using Open Site Explorer. If look you look closely, this website is very weak and the only backlinks to the site are from some crappy website directories. No wonder this site is not ranking in search!

Breaking Down The Value

So I’ve already established that the site is definitely not worth $2000 but how much would it cost a normal person to make an exact replica of the site? Here’s the breakdown of costs. As you can see, the total cost of creating a similar website would only be about $70.

• Create an account at BlueHost for $4.95
• Follow the directions in this video to install Open Cart for free
• Follow the directions in this video and install an SSL certificate and credit card processing. Approximate cost for an SSL certificate is about $13.
• Follow the directions in this video and install a shopping cart template. Approximate cost $20-$50
• Contact the two vendors mentioned above and establish dropshipping accounts with them.
• Using the vendor’s spreadsheet and photos, upload the products and product descriptions onto your website

Thank You

To sum it all up, I just wanted to thank Randy for submitting this question to the blog. Remember, I’m going to start featuring questions like Randy’s on a regular basis now so please send me whatever problems you may be facing. But please be specific.

If your question is too broad or too open ended, you will most likely not get an answer. Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you.

What Do I Do For A Living?

In order to understand why I still work, you have to know what I do for a living. First off, I’m proud to say that I work in technology as an electrical engineer.

In a nutshell, I’m one of a handful of people at my company that designs low level computer hardware that is used in a wide variety of consumer devices today. In fact, our technology powers digital cameras, cell phones, digital printers etc… You name it and our technology is probably inside in some form or another.

I absolutely love what I do for a living and there’s no way that I’d be able to continue designing computer hardware without the infrastructure that my company provides. I also have the luxury of working as an engineer knowing that I do not need the money at all. As a result, I can be a little more picky in deciding what I want to work on and why.

The other aspect about my job that I enjoy is that my company is very flexible about where I physically do my work. Because I can login to my computer from anywhere there’s an internet connection, I can work from home if I have to in case there’s an family matter that requires my attention.

The World Is Becoming Dominated By Tech

Besides loving what I do for a living, I also work at my day job so I don’t become obsolete. The world of technology moves very fast and if you stop to take a breath, then it can easily pass you by.

So while selling wedding linens online, running my blog and running my online store course is fun and very lucrative, it doesn’t really exercise my brain to the same extent that my hardware design job does. In fact, my day job allows me to stay on top of technology trends in both computer hardware and software that would be difficult to follow otherwise.

But why do I care? After all, if I don’t really need the money, then why work? Why should I bother keeping up with technology?

If you stop and think about it, more and more service professions are being taken over by technology every single day. For example, I just did my taxes last month. But instead of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to an accountant, I filed my taxes using a computer program for only about 50 bucks.

Instead of hiring a graphic design artist to create logos or manipulate graphics for my blog, I now use Adobe Photoshop. Instead of opening a brick and mortar store and hiring workers, I now have a computer server take orders for me online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The other day, I shopped at my local grocery store and noticed that 90% of the checkout aisles were now populated with self-checkout machines. These new self-checkout machines enable just one human worker to oversee 8 or more checkout lines simultaneously! And I’m willing to bet that some supermarket workers got laid off as a result!

If you take a moment and look around, you’ll realize that technology is creeping its way into every part of our lives. And if you are not careful, your profession or business could be replaced by a piece of technology as well if you stop paying attention.

Don’t Underestimate Technology

So how do you stop this from happening to you? In a nutshell, you have only 2 choices. You can continue to ignore everything that is happening around you, or you can embrace it!

A byproduct of running my blog is that I receive emails from readers every single day asking for business advice.

“Steve, I want to make money online with an online store but I don’t know anything about websites or computers. Can you help me?”

“Steve, I just want someone to set everything up for me and focus on the business. Would you be willing to do it?”

Much to my dismay, the majority of emails that I receive are from readers who are either afraid of or want absolutely nothing to do with technology. In fact, the most common question I get asked is…

I just want to sell things online and make money. Where can I find someone to do all of the computer stuff?

Wanting to focus on the business is all fine and good, but if you are opening an “online” business, shouldn’t you at least understand the basics about how the “online” portion works?

Here’s what usually happens next.

• Entrepreneur pays a lot of money to a developer or service to create a website for them along with some custom features.
• Entrepreneur has very little grasp about the extent and work involved in making certain changes. He or she ends up wasting a lot of money on features that are not well thought out
• Entrepreneur’s lack of knowledge leads to a major delay in launching website.
• Entrepreneur finds some bugs and has to contact the developer each time there’s a problem. Meanwhile, potential business is lost
• Entrepreneur contacts developer for every little change that needs to be made. The costs start to add up and the turnaround time is extremely long

I have a friend that found someone on Elance to make some small edits to his online store. And while the developer implemented the features he requested properly, he did it in such a way that the code was extremely fragile and unmaintainable. Therefore, every time he needed to make any minor change, he was forced to pay the developer’s hourly fee.

How To Stay Relevant

So how can you avoid this situation? The answer is that you need to invest some time to learn the basics! After all, if you want to run a business online, you should at least understand how things work! That is why I always advise the students of my class to read up on the fundamentals of html/css and how websites work so they get a feel for what is going on.

You don’t have to become an expert, you just need to possess a working knowledge of how to read the language of the web! Most importantly, you must have the right attitude. It’s never too late to learn new things and you have to be willing to try.

Money Now Is Not Money Later

So where am I going with all of this? While my wife and I make a good deal of money selling linens online, we both realize that our business could become obsolete if we are not careful. If we don’t keep up with the trends, we can be overtaken at a moments notice.

So by living and breathing technology on a day to day basis, we hope to stay on top of things and anticipate the next set of changes we need to make in our business and daily lives.

Is there anything truly special about my day job? Probably not. But my day job is my hedge against the future. After all, technology can’t replace me if I’m the one creating the technology right?

• How We Doubled Our Mobile Sales By Designing A Mobile Version Of Our Website
• How To Design A Killer Mobile Ecommerce Website That Will Boost Sales
• 3 Ways To Design A Mobile Optimized Ecommerce Website And The Tradeoffs You Must Make

In today’s article, I’m going to discuss the most important elements of mobile website design. One of the hardest parts of designing a mobile optimized website is that the screen is so darn tiny. In most cases, you have as little as one-tenth of the screen real estate compared to that of a desktop or a laptop, yet you still need to convey the same level of information to your potential customers.

Because the discrepancy in screen real estate is so large, you need to make some hard choices when designing the pages and navigation on your mobile site. And it becomes even more crucial that you utilize each and every pixel on the screen to its full advantage. Here’s how I made some of the design decisions with our online store website.

Designing The Header And Footer

The header and footers for your mobile website are probably the most important parts of your entire design. Why? It’s because the header and the footer is shown on every single page of your website. And since they both take up valuable screen real estate, it’s crucial that you use this space wisely.

If you’ve been running your shop for long enough, you should already have an idea of how your customers navigate through your shop. In my case, I used Crazy Egg to tell me which links and navigational elements were used the most. Below is a heat map of the customer activity on my online store.



First off, what is heat map? A heat map is a graphical representation of how a customer interacts with a website. The brighter the spot, the more customers clicked on that particular link. Looking at the heat map for my online store, it becomes pretty obvious what the hottest navigation points are.

The most glaring hotspot that I see is the search bar. Most customers are not willing to randomly navigate through your shop and as a result, they go straight for search. And if they don’t find what they are looking for on the current page and they can’t find the search bar, they are going to abandon your website. It’s that simple.

The other hotspots that stand out are the “About Us” page, the “Contact Us” page, the “View Cart” page, the “My Account” page and the various other content pages that I have on my online store.

How I Decided To Organize My Header/Footer

So based on this information, I came up with the following header and footer design.

Due to constraints on screen real estate, I obviously couldn’t just shove everything into the header.

So what I decided to do was split these links between both the header and the footer.

Ultimately, I placed all of the shopping and checkout related navigation in the header and included all of the informational content about our store in the footer.

This turned out to be a good compromise because all of the most visited links for my shop can still be found on every single page of the site without too much trouble and it doesn’t look too cluttered.

Designing The Product Pages

How you choose to organize your product pages on your mobile website is extremely important as well. Why? People on mobile phones don’t like scrolling down very far in order to add something to their shopping cart.

So while it’s all fine and good that you have very detailed product descriptions, chances are most customers will not want to read a lot of text on their tiny phone screens.

Therefore, it’s essential that you make all of the content elements on your product pages collapsible.

When a customer first arrives on a product page, by default they should see nothing but a high level description. And if they choose, they can click on a collapsible link to see the rest of the information.

In my mobile design, the picture to the right shows what a customer sees when they first land on a product page. If they click on “Description”, the paragraph will expand and they will get a more in depth description of the product.

However by default, if all they want to do is see a picture of the item, they can add it to their shopping cart without scrolling down at all.

The other key element of my product page to make a note of is the breadcrumb navigation at the top. At any point in time, the customer can backtrack through the exact path that they took to arrive at the current product.

A breadcrumb makes navigation through the website much more convenient.

Optimizing General Navigation

Overall, one of the main differences between a desktop and a mobile site is that there should be as few text based links as possible on a mobile site. Text links aren’t necessarily bad as long as you keep them well spaced apart but in general, you want to use more substantial navigational elements.

The key is to think of someone you know with fat fingers and pretend that you are optimizing your website for that person. In a nutshell, all links should be large buttons or images.

In the picture to the right, all of my category and product level navigation links are large buttons that contain a picture of the product or the category and the name.

As a result, there is very little chance of someone tapping on the wrong link by mistake.

Optimizing Checkout

The checkout process for a mobile customer is much more tedious than a desktop customer because mobile users don’t have full mechanical keyboards. As a result, you need to make life easier for them by minimizing typing as much as possible. Here are some general guidelines on how to design your checkout pages.

• Use pull down menus instead of text fields – For example, instead of making a customer type out their state of residence, use a pull down menu instead.
• Limit forms to just the bare essentials – Don’t ask for any more information than you need in order to complete the sale.
• Use checkboxes and pre-populate fields if possible – For example, instead of making a customer type in their city and state, you can infer this information from their zip code.
• Offer Paypal Express – What’s nice about Paypal Express is that a customer’s address information can automatically be loaded when they log in to their account which reduces the amount of typing during checkout

All of the practices above also apply to a regular desktop ecommerce site but become even more crucial on a cell phone.

Conclusion

There are many tradeoffs and design changes that you need to make if you want to convert a mobile customer. And unfortunately no matter what, the mobile shopping experience is always going to be worse than shopping on your desktop.

Your goal as a mobile web designer is to minimize the negative impact of a small screen and a slower internet connection. Fortunately, every design element that I’ve described above can be easily implemented using JQuery Mobile. And the best part is that the JQuery Mobile framework is completely free.

To be honest, I’ve only scratched the surface of what JQuery mobile can do. So if you are interested in creating a mobile optimized website for your online store, you should definitely check out their website. The world is moving towards mobile whether you like it or not and you can either jump on that wave or miss the boat.

My Implementation Goals

To understand what was going on in my head through this whole process, I’m going to start off by talking about some of my goals and priorities. After all, you can’t discuss tradeoffs unless you know the priorities. Here were my main criteria for designing the mobile site.

• I wanted a highly usable site with an emphasis on great navigation and usability.
• I did not want to have to write or edit any complicated code.
• I wanted the mobile site to be easily maintainable and upgradable.
• I didn’t want to touch the functionality of the main site. As many of you probably already know, our store is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and we make money constantly. Therefore, I didn’t want to take the chance of accidentally breaking my desktop site during the mobile development process.
• I wanted both my main site and my mobile site to share the same database and images. In other words, both the mobile and desktop versions of my site had to share product and category data from the same source.
• I didn’t want to have to deal with cross browser and cross phone compatibility. I had a nightmare dealing with IE6 during the early days and I didn’t want to relive that experience.
• I wanted to reuse as much of the product descriptions and verbiage as possible without affecting the mobile experience.
• I wanted to complete this project within a month. At some point, I debated whether to outsource this whole project but decided against it after assessing the complexity. It would easily take a month in itself to write a detailed design spec and find a competent developer.

To sum everything up in the list above in plain language, I wanted to get a good mobile site up and running relatively quickly without requiring a lot of maintenance and without disrupting sales. In a nutshell, I had 3 choices on how to proceed.

Choice #1: Keep Everything The Same And Change The Stylesheet

I can’t tell you how badly I wanted this solution to work. In most cases, when you run a content heavy site or a blog, you can make your site mobile by simply modifying your CSS style sheet and changing the way your site is displayed on a mobile phone without touching the source files.

For example, I could easily optimize MyWifeQuitHerJob.com for mobile by removing the menus and ads altogether and displaying all of the content in one skinny column. In fact, there are several free WordPress plugins out on the market that do precisely that.

The beauty of the “stylesheet only” solution is that very few lines of php code need to change. You can simply modify the CSS, have your content wrap and the user never has to scroll sideways on their cell phone. If I were to adopt this methodology, I could easily finish up my mobile site in a week or less.

But the big problem here is that ecommerce stores require extremely efficient navigation. You can’t just wrap everything up in a skinny column and hope that a customer will buy from you. The layout of a desktop site and mobile site is completely different in that you have to make much more efficient use of your screen real estate!

Even still, I messed around with the stylesheet of my online store for a few hours before I decided that this methodology was not going to work without heavy modification of the source code.

In reality, I probably could have forced things by conditionalizing certain parts of the code to display differently for mobile but it would have violated several of my main criteria.

• No touching of the main site source. Might break the desktop site
• Doesn’t address cross browser compatibility
• Not easily upgradable as new mobile standards are introduced
• Pain in the butt to maintain

Choice #2: Use A Mobile Plugin For My Shopping Cart

Once I shot down choice #1, I started scouring the net for good mobile plugins for my shopping cart. Under most circumstances, buying a mobile plugin is the best of both worlds. One, you get a website that is mobile ready that works out of the box. And two, you don’t have to do that much work except for customizing the plugin.

There were several plugins for my particular shopping cart that were available for download, but after playing around with them for awhile, I realized that there was no single plugin that matched exactly with what I wanted to do. In other words, I was too anal retentive and couldn’t find anything I liked.

I thought about making custom changes to the source code for the plugins I tested but the code was very hard to read and probably would have taken me a good amount of time to modify correctly.

Plus, there was a risk of inadvertently breaking other features. Here were some of the things that I didn’t like about the mobile plugins I tried.

• I wanted the option to display an abridged version of the descriptions to mobile users and full descriptions to desktop users
• I wanted full control over how products and categories were displayed. In particular, our store sells personalized items so I wanted the user interface for that category to behave differently from the rest.
• I wanted full control over all aspects of the navigation. In other words, I was very particular about where I wanted certain elements to be placed such as the search bar and breadcrumbs.

The problem with using a shopping cart plugin is that the mobile experience is very cookie cutter. Because the plugin developers have to cater to the general public, you will rarely find all of the necessary features that pertain to your specific shop.

Overall though, it was an extremely tough decision. On one hand, I could get up and running right away. But on the other hand, the mobile experience wouldn’t be quite what I wanted. The real question was whether it was good enough…

Choice #3: Design My Own Mobile Site

I’ll stop the suspense here and tell you that this was the choice that I ultimately made. But to be honest, everything about this choice didn’t make sense in the beginning.

For one thing, I didn’t know jack about how to design a mobile website. Two, I wanted to finish my mobile site within a month. With two kids, a full time job, an online store, a blog and an online store course, my time was extremely limited.

And three, I didn’t know jack about how to design a mobile website. By the way, did I mention that I didn’t know jack about how to design a mobile website?

Thankfully, while I was doing my research, I came across a mobile design framework called JQuery mobile. If you’ve never heard of JQuery Mobile before, I recommend that you check out their website.

In a nutshell, the JQuery mobile framework allows you use pre-built constructs that are guaranteed to work across multiple mobile platforms in designing your website.

In other words, by using the framework I didn’t have to worry about my mobile site being compatible on different phones. The maintenance of my mobile site would be minimal because I could simply upgrade the JQuery framework files and not my source code when new features were available.

In my next article, I’ll go over the exact features that JQuery mobile offers and how I used these elements with my mobile site. What’s nice is that JQuery mobile allows you to be a competent mobile web designer without having to deal with a lot of extra overhead. Since I knew my shopping cart extremely well, I was able to easily adapt my website to the JQuery mobile framework.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I managed to design a fully custom mobile website in 3 solid weekends of hard work. Just to illustrate the tradeoffs that I ultimately made, here’s a list of things that I had to concede.

• I ended up with 2 completely different sets of source code, one for mobile and one for desktop. Once I started, I knew that this was inevitable. However both websites use the same exact database and the exact same images so maintenance is minimal. I also ended up modifying the database slightly to optionally include separate product and category descriptions.
• I ended up having to write a lot of code. The bright side of all this is that I now know the ins and outs of how to create a mobile site. Plus, I finished it in under a month!

If I were to do this all over again, I would still go with Choice #3 for my online store. However, most shop owners can probably get by with a mobile plugin as long as the shop does not require too much customization. The main thing is to decide up front which aspects of mobile design are important to you and to decide on the tradeoffs.

One of my greatest weaknesses is that I like everything the way I want which sometimes ends up being a lot more work. But in this case however, I still managed to meet my scheduled goals thanks to JQuery Mobile. In my next article, I’ll go into more detail about specific design choices that I made with my mobile site. Stay tuned!

Tailor Your Mobile Design For People With Fat Fingers

The first problem that mobile users face is that clicking on links using a finger is much less accurate than with a mouse.

And in order to create an effective mobile website, you have to understand the difference between “tapping” and “clicking”.

I’m not going to lie. I didn’t really fully comprehend the concept either until I watched my little 4 year old daughter shop on our site.

One day, I decided to show her what Mommy did during the day by directing her to our online store website on my iPad. So I handed her the tablet and watched closely as she navigated around the site.

Me: So if you touch right there, you can see our “About Us” page. And if you click there, you can see some really pretty products that we sell in our store

Daughter: I want to see some pretty products Daddy.

Me: Okay, go ahead and touch “Bestsellers”

(Daughter taps the wrong link)

Me: You have to pinch to zoom in first and then touch it

Daughter: I’m sorry Daddy, my fingers must be too big.

Big FLASHING RED light! How the heck could my 4 year old daughter’s fingers be too big? In fact, she found the first problem with our desktop website. Our text links were too hard to tap!

The main problem with mobile users is that they don’t use mice so they can’t tap on links very precisely. Therefore, all text based links must be converted into large buttons that can easily be pressed without accidentally hitting an adjacent link.

Never Make A Customer Scroll Sideways

This one is actually pretty obvious, but for some reason I never saw the big deal until I actually tried to shop at my online store on my cell phone. Having to zoom in to click on links followed by zooming out to see the pictures was a major pain in the butt.

Therefore, creating a single column website that automatically adjusts to the width of a cell phone screen was my number 1 criteria. In addition, I also discovered some areas on my desktop site where I used mouse hovers to enlarge pictures from a thumbnail. Because there’s no mouse on a phone, these images were either not getting blown up properly or taking up the entire screen when someone accidentally did tap on it.

Make Crucial Navigation Elements Accessible

This is probably one of the hardest parts of mobile website design and I’ll go over all of the tradeoffs that I dealt with in a future article. But in a nutshell, you have about one eighth of the screen real estate as you do on a desktop and you still have to manage to cram all of the important navigation elements onto a 4 inch screen.

In order to figure out the most important elements of your site, you have to rely heavily on your analytics. Figure out which pages a customer looks at the most and make those pages the most easily accessible on your site. Any filler pages or non-crucial content should either be pushed all the way down to the bottom or removed in its entirety.

If you thought that the search bar was important for your desktop site, it becomes even more crucial that your mobile site has a search bar present at all times. People get frustrated easily on a phone so the easier it is to find a product, the better.

Mobile Sites Need To Load Quickly

With mobile connection speeds and mobile processors getting faster and faster, this will probably become less of a factor as time goes on. However, right now phones are largely limited by processing speed and connection speed. Therefore, it’s important to create a mobile website design that is leaner and faster to load than your desktop site.

According to the Gomez Group, mobile customers expect their page to load in under 5 seconds or they are outta there.


Right now, my desktop site loads in a little under 2 seconds on a cable modem connection. Since phones have much higher latencies and slower bandwidths, that means I need to cut down on the image sizes for my mobile site. Phone screens are only 4-5 inches anyways, so there’s no reason to send a customer a high res photo when a small photo will work just fine. Here are some other ways to make your website load faster.

Too Much Text Will Overwhelm A Customer

When I first designed my desktop site, I made sure that I wrote a decent amount of verbiage for every category and product description.

Not only was this good for providing a customer with more information about my products but it was also beneficial for SEO as well. On mobile however, the problem is that when you take a whole lot of text and compress it into one skinny column, you get a ton of pages to scroll through.

When shopping on a phone, pictures are much more important than text and you absolutely don’t want to have someone scroll through pages and pages of verbiage just to get to the “Add To Cart” button. The best way to deal with this problem is to use “collapsible” elements in your design.

Give a customer the choice of whether they want to read the descriptions or not. Provide as little information as possible up front, and let the customer explore your products on their own volition.

Conclusion

What I described above pretty much outlines most of the goals that I wanted to achieve with the mobile version of my online store website. In my next article, I’m going to talk about some of the many tradeoffs that I had to make in order to complete this mobile project within a reasonable time frame.

Unfortunately in the real world, it is not always possible to get everything you want without a lot of sacrifice. As with any task, you have to weigh the development costs with the potential gain. My next post should be interesting so stay tuned!

Click on the picture above to check out my mobile site!

Now my mobile ecommerce site has been up for a few months now and the reason I haven’t mentioned anything about it until this point was because I wanted to gather at least 2 months worth of data before reporting the results.

So while I’m going to show you some actual data taken from my mobile ecommerce site along with some of my observations, today’s article is actually just part 1 of a multi-part series about my experiences in the world of mobile website creation.

In my next few articles, I’m going to describe to you all of the thought processes and tradeoffs that were involved in creating my mobile ecommerce site along with a description of exactly how I approached the problem. Now on to the results!

On Site Engagement Metrics

Before I begin talking about my data, I wanted to give you a brief outline of what is being compared in the tables below. First off, all of the data being presented below is for the iPhone only.

Personally, I don’t consider the iPad a mobile device since it performs the same or better than a desktop device. Therefore, it’s usually better to show iPad users the full version of your website.

The reason I’m not showing you any Android phone data is because the number of iPhone shoppers far exceeds Android users according to my stats.

The data for the “full site” vs the “mobile site” was gathered at different times. For example, the “full site” numbers were taken during November and December of last year which represents our store’s busiest time of the year.

The numbers for our “mobile site” were taken during the latter part of February and all of March. Of course a better test would have been to do A/B testing on the two versions of the site, but I didn’t really see a benefit to doing that since I already had a gut feeling that the mobile site would perform better. In any case, here are the numbers

Full Site Engagement Metrics


Mobile Site Engagement Metrics


Overall, the numbers weren’t exactly what I was expecting. The bounce rate for the mobile site was actually slightly higher than the regular site and the time on site metrics were roughly similar.

However, one metric that did stand out was that mobile site users browsed 4.86 pages per visit as opposed to only 2.97 on the full site for cost-per-click(cpc) users.

Note: Comparing the cost per click data in the tables above is a better apples to apples comparison since all of the traffic is completely targeted to what I sell on my online store.

So what does this tell me? Because our mobile site is faster and easier to browse, customers are more likely to browse more products and take a more in depth look into our store. The more pages a customer browses, the more likely that he or she will make a purchase.

The Conversion Numbers

What’s the point in having a separate mobile site unless it improves the conversion rate? Let’s take a closer look at the conversion numbers for both versions of my store.

Full Site Conversion Metrics


Mobile Site Conversion Metrics


As you can see in the data above, the mobile site has a 2X advantage over the full site in terms of the conversion rate. This is exactly what I was hoping for!

While a 2.11% conversion rate isn’t nearly as good as what I get for iPad and desktop users, this is much better than what I had before. Personally, I think that mobile phone shopping is still at its infancy.

Experts are projecting that in just a few years, mobile ecommerce traffic will exceed that of desktop computers which means that my percentage of revenue from mobile devices will continue to grow.

Why The Data Doesn’t Surprise Me

Have you ever tried shopping on your mobile phone? Have you ever tried browsing a full blown desktop website on a tiny touch screen? The experience pretty much sucks. Here’s why you are shedding customers by displaying your full website to mobile visitors.

• Any time a customer has to scroll horizontally, you’re probably going to lose that customer
• Any time a customer has to pinch to zoom, you’re probably going to lose that customer
• Any time a customer miss clicks on a hyper link because they have fat fingers, you’re probably going to lose that customer

If you’ve ever tried to shop on your phone (which is something I spent a lot of time doing while designing my mobile site), the experience is bad enough as it is without having to scroll around. The more user friendly your site is, the more likely a customer will shop and actually make a purchase.

With the number of mobile shoppers increasing exponentially every year, this is an issue that you can no longer avoid. In my next article, I’m going to talk about some of the design decisions that I made in creating my mobile site.

Unfortunately, it’s not a cake walk and there are many tradeoffs that you have to make upfront depending on how well you want your site to perform versus the amount of work and maintenance involved. Stay tuned!

The Traffic Numbers

First off, I just want to say that I was absolutely shocked to find out that within just a few months, Pinterest has already cracked the top 10 traffic sources for our online store. Below is a Google Analytics report that shows some metrics for Pinterest. Note: This is just one months worth of data.



As you can see in the table above, Pinterest is sitting nicely as my 7th highest traffic source. The results are somewhat misleading however since our store just recently got linked to by baby.about.com which sent us an unusual surge of traffic. In reality, PInterest should be sitting at #6.

What has really surprised me has been the bounce rate and the average time on site. You would think that people clicking on pretty pictures online would have a very short attention span. But the numbers seem to indicate that a good number of Pinterest visitors actually stop to look around. I was actually expecting to see bounce rates in the 80′s or 90′s and a much shorter visit duration.

Overall, the boost in Pinterest visitors has caused our traffic numbers to be the highest they have ever been which can’t be a bad thing.

Do Pinterest Visitors Buy Anything?

So getting extra traffic and awareness for your company is all fine and good but do these people actually buy anything? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Most of the pins we have on Pinterest are for our content pages and not our actual products so I was shocked to learn that a decent number of people actually are in the buying mood after clicking on a Pinterest pin.

Here are some of our conversion numbers for last month organized by revenue.



As you can see above, Pinterest visitors are actually converting at a little over 1%. This isn’t bad at all, especially since Pinterest is a completely free traffic source that tends to grow virally on its own.

The per visit value is kind of on the low end at 51 cents per visitor but if you think about it, making 51 cents per visitor isn’t too shabby when you aren’t expecting anything at all.

Remember, this table is sorted by revenue which means that PInterest has already cracked the top ten in terms of earnings. Pinterest traffic has even managed to overtake Facebook in just a short period of time!

Some Observations

After playing around with Pinterest for the past several months, my wife and I have discovered that the better looking or more informative your pictures are, the more likely that people will repin your stuff. Duh! So here are a few things that we’ve done to help encourage repins.

First off, we’ve added “Pin It” buttons to all of our wedding handkerchiefs, our linen guest towels, our table linens and all of our content pages. This is important because not everyone will have the toolbar installed. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to share your pictures.

Second, we started pinning more intricate versions of our existing photos. Here’s an example of exactly what we mean by “intricate”. On our online store, we provide free arts and crafts tutorials that utilize our products as the raw materials. In other words, we use the content on our online store to educate the customer about cool projects that can be made with our products.

But instead of pinning a single picture of the final result of a craft project, my wife had a great idea to try and pin the entire tutorial within a single picture that could be posted online. Here’s is an example of our Pillowcase Dress craft that has received a large amount of repins and Facebook likes as a result of this photo.



Posting our craft photo this way serves a couple purposes. For one thing, arranging a group of photos this way in a tutorial really makes the photo stand out on a Pinterest board. Because it’s made up of multiple pictures, the resulting shot is really long and narrow which takes up more board space.

The second benefit is that the photo actually conveys information to the viewer which entices him/her to actually click on the photo itself.

Conclusion

In any case, this article is not meant to be a Pinterest tutorial. After all you can find a million of those types of articles online. The key point here is that Pinterest is actually an excellent form of social media traffic that actually converts at a decent percentage. So if you have an online store, you should at a minimum place a Pinterest “pin it” button on every page of your site. It’s really simple to do!

Follow Our Store On Pinterest!

Running A Business Is Like Raising A Child

The best analogy that I can come up with that even compares to starting an online business is raising a child. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, I went out and read every single parenting blog, magazine and advice column that I could find. Not only was I a regular on the parenting forums but I also purchased a series of books on raising children which covered everything from how to sooth a crying baby all the way to how to raise a teenager. Yes, you read that right. I was so gung-ho that I skipped ahead to the teenage years!!!

One of my greatest fears as a new parent was that I would not be able to sooth my daughter and stop her from crying. So as I was doing my research, I focused a lot of my attention on articles which taught me how to calm a new born baby. I read about swaddling. I read about the patented “Happiest Baby On The Block” technique. Hell I even watched a video about how to interpret baby sounds so that I could understand the “language” that my baby would speak. (Incidentally, trying to understand “baby language” is both fun and hilarious. Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward.)

Anyways up until my daughter was born, I felt so confident and cocky that I knew everything there was to know about calming a child that I started to scoff at some of my friends who weren’t sleeping at night because their children wouldn’t stop crying. If only they knew what I knew! If only they had done the impeccable research that I’d done!

My Daughter Is Born And All Hell Breaks Loose

All of my confidence and training went out the window when my little daughter was born. Once we took her home from the hospital, she was absolutely inconsolable. Every night, she would cry uncontrollably and I couldn’t get her to stop. I tried everything that I learned from my vast research. I tried swaddling her. I tried burping her. I tried bouncing her. Nothing worked at all! I tried interpreting her body movements and her “baby language” to no avail. All of my book training went out the window and all I could do was panic.

After 3 sleepless nights, I did what any desperate parent would do. I drove like a madman to Babies R Us and purchased every single baby soothing contraption on the market. The cashiers chuckled behind the cash register as they watched me scramble and grab everything they had on their shelves. MAKE WAY! CLUELESS DAD ON AISLE 5!!!

Despite blowing a large amount of cash, still nothing worked. I was tired, frustrated and all I could think of was that those books were full of s$&^. All of those blogs and forums that I participated in were completely useless in the wake of my newborn daughter! All of that time and training had gone to waste!

Finally in one last act of desperation, my wife and I decided to pay the extra money and went to see a specialist…and she helped us out immediately. By showing us the proper techniques on how to hold our baby girl and how to sooth her first hand really opened our eyes. There was no book that could teach this!! After receiving some more personal instruction, we finally settled on our own unique method of soothing our daughter that no book or website ever mentioned.

It turned out that our daughter liked to be swaddled, inserted into a sling and bounced up and down in a precise cadence that matched the theme song of the 80′s cartoon “The Gummy Bears”. Go figure!

What Does This Have To Do With Online Business?

So what is the point of telling you my crazy newborn story? It’s to illustrate that like raising a child, every business is different. Even though there’s a lot of free general information out there, there are many subtleties to running a business that can only be learned through experience and guidance. Just because you read about something online does not mean that you’ll know how to apply it correctly.

After all, when was the last time you read a generic business book or blog post and found that all of the material exactly applied to your business? Every business is going to be different and every business will face its own unique set of obstacles. That is why when it comes to running a business, general information is not enough!

So why do so many would be entrepreneurs invest large amounts of money and time on a business based on general information they’ve found online for free? Why do so many people place such large bets on conceptual knowledge they read about from a book or blog post? The truth is that this is the wrong way to go about it.

The right way is to get formal training and advice tailored specifically to the type of business you want to start. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have someone who is experienced show you all of the ropes. It will save you time, money and a lot of heart ache.

Formal Training Tailored To You

So why am I telling you all of this? If you are interested in dipping your toe in the world of ecommerce, then take my free mini course. But if you want to learn the ins and outs of running a successful online store, you need to checkout my course on how to create a profitable online store.

In addition to the course materials and over 35 hours of video that you’ll receive, you’ll have access to my expertise. I will be here to answer your emails and I will hold weekly office hours where you can ask me specific questions that pertain directly to your business. And since I run an online store of my own, it is my job to stay on top of the latest ecommerce trends.

As I mentioned above, every business venture is different so why waste time wading through tons of generic info that might not apply to you? Do you want to struggle through many sleepless nights with your business? Or would you rather find someone who can actually help. The choice is up to you.

Photo By Auswandem Malaysia

Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t web designers. Most of us aren’t very artistic and most of us are not well versed in the art of writing html or php.

The good news is that you don’t really have to be an expert in any of those things in order to put up a good looking online store.

The Beauty Of Open Source

One of the best aspects of using an open source shopping cart such as Open Cart is that it is a standard platform. As a result, many 3rd party developers actively create themes, templates and plugins for Open Cart and many of them are free or can be purchased at a very low cost.

For example, many of the templates for Open Cart are free or can be had for as little as $25. A template is a theme for your shopping cart that completely transforms the look and feel of your online store. While your products and your database remain the same, the aesthetics for your shop can be instantly changed to suit your tastes.

In addition, you can purchase a wide variety of 3rd party plugins that add additional functionality to your online store at little or no cost as well.

Installing A Shopping Cart Template

Today’s video will give you a brief overview about shopping cart templates and themes and provide you with a complete walkthrough on how to install your theme once you make a purchase.

Once again, there is no technical experience required to follow along. Enjoy the video!

Want To Learn More?

Have you enjoyed my videos so far? If you are itching to start your own online store, you definitely need to check out my full blown course on how to create a profitable online store.

I will teach you everything you need to know in order to run a successful online shop.

No Technical Experience Necessary

In an informal poll that I conducted with my newsletter readers a while back, most entrepreneurs want to start an online store but don’t want to be bogged down with technical details. They just want to start selling right away which is precisely why sites like Ebay and Etsy continue to prosper.

But what most people don’t know is that there are many open source options out there that are completely free. And the best part is that all of these carts support SSL and a plethora of credit card gateways out of the box.

What this means is that everything you need to run a fully functional shop that accepts credit cards and other forms of payment has already been created for you. You just need to know how to set things up and I’m going to show you exactly how to do it.

Video Tutorial

Today’s video is double the length of the last one at 28 minutes. However, I promise you that it is extremely detailed and shows you every single step that is required to start selling including…

• How to get a dedicated IP address for your website
• How to setup and purchase an SSL certificate
• How to enable SSL with Open Cart
• How to setup your merchant account and gateway
• How to setup Open Cart to accept credit cards

Enjoy the video!

Want To Learn More?

Have you enjoyed my videos so far? If so, there’s more where that came from if you sign up for my full blown course on how to create a profitable online store.

My course offers over 35+ hours of video and includes live office hours where you can ask me questions directly.

If you want to learn everything there is to know about ecommerce, be sure to check it out!