Tommy McGuire, a small business owner for over 25 years, knew his products would sell if they could be marketed on the Internet. Given the right platform, Tommy and wife, Mary proved that to be true in a relatively short amount of time.

Tommy and Mary live in North Carolina, where, for the last 25 plus years, they have been in the industrial air compressor business. As the U.S. textile industry has slowly diminished, Tommy found his air compressor sales diminish as well—a 40 percent decrease.

To make up the decreased sales, Tommy looked around for venues and opportunities to make up what had been lost. It was then that he decided the Internet could be a good avenue to offer his line of products.

Tommy hired a local Web site designer and began to build a nice Web site. After over 500 hours of work on the Web site, it was going to be nothing more than “an online brochure.”

Then one day, Mary called Tommy and said, “We need to go to a seminar—a workshop.”

“We went to the seminar and, I saw I was headed in the wrong direction,” Tommy said.  After listening to the seminar presenter, Mary and Tommy decided to attend the workshop.

Tommy and Mary bought six Web site licenses and immediately began to build the first Web site. “I bought the licenses from StoresOnline because what I’d been doing before was basically making a brochure that would not bring income in unless someone saw the number and called me,” Tommy said.

Plus, StoresOnline’s Merchant Services also provided value to their purchase. “I liked all the marketing tools,” Tommy says. “It was really very, very wonderful to have the Merchant Services tools always there,” Mary says.

Within several months of building and marketing their first Web site, Tommy saw great benefits. He found a drop shopper and increased his sales 33%. “The sweetest part is,” Tommy says, “the money’s in the bank before I ship the product. That’s what I like.”

Just one website brought in about 30 percent of sales for Tommy’s company, much more than his original brochurestyle website would have generated. Combining the advantages of drop shipping and website traffic with a very specific industrial market has paid off. “I have repeats on the internet,” Tommy says. “It surprised me.”

Mary has been working on several site promotion strategies, including linking, payperclick advertising, printing business cards with their sites’ web addresses, and adding the website addresses in other places, such as at Tommy’s brickandmortar store.

Tommy emphasizes the difference between his experiences on the internet before and after StoresOnline. “From my experience, trying to start my own…website and talk to the local computer gurus and website builders,” he says, “and wasting money with them, I finally came to the point, you know, I need…real professionals.” And Tommy feels that he has found those professionals with StoresOnline. “They had the complete package.”

Visit the Tommy and Mary’s websites at
http://www.industrialaircompressors.biz
http://www.airdryers.biz
http://www.hosereels.biz

*Testimonial results are not typical and your individual results will vary. Your success depends on having the right price, product, and marketing efforts.