James Wall has extensive business experience.  For fifteen years, he worked as a retail manager for a fairly large company in northern California.  When he could go no further with that company, he teamed up with his brother in the San Diego area to start a consulting business.  One of the most challenging parts of James’ consulting business was helping these business owners develop an effective website using independent web designers.  “For the most part, web designers or web masters had no idea of how to create marketing strategies or even merchandise in the store itself, online,” James says. 

While many of the storeowners had websites, few had the financing to make them fully functional or profitable. “Most of the small business people were taking their own Kodak pictures or their own Polaroid pictures and trying to convert those to digital,” James says, “and it just looks like you did that.”  The websites had broken shopping carts, poor content, and no e-mail marketing campaigns. 

Most of these problems stemmed from outsourcing the website to an independent designer or web masters who were less concerned about business principles than the look of their website.  “They were trying to show us what they knew,” James says.  “They were bringing in graphics.  They were bringing in digital imaging.  They were bringing in a lot of motion.  There were a lot of crawlers on the bottom.  There were flashing things going on the side.  Everything detracted from what we were trying to do.”

Making changes to these websites took a great deal of time, most of it lost on ineffective communication between the store owner and the web designer.  “In a lot of cases, it was taking three, four, five, six weeks before what we requested was actually done,” James says.  “It was costly for the retailer, too,” he continues, “because every time we went to have a change made from the web designer or the web master, they charge by the hour, by the change. So we went through several hundred dollars just making very basic changes.” 

James looked at several store builder programs on the Internet, but found that their claims were deceiving.  “‘Start your own website for $25’” he gives as an example. “After doing some research into it, after actually looking at what you get for $25, it’s a page.  If you want anything besides a home page, then it costs.”  James mentions additional charges for images, extra text, or auto-responder functions.  “Most of the programs we looked at, by the time we were done adding up all of the expenses for the shopping cart,” he says, “we were well over $5,000, just for a basic program.  And that didn’t count the hours it was going to take to put the store together.”

When one of James’ business partners went to the StoresOnline seminar, he immediately passed the word along.  With James’ familiarity with merchandising and his brother’s skills as a photographer, the StoresOnline platform was a perfect fit. 

“With the StoresOnline program, everything is right here,” James says. “You can go to the individual pages.  You can go to the shipping section, the auto responder.  Everything is so easy to navigate and to work on, and it’s immediately online.”  James recognizes the advantages of rapid change.  “If the price was wrong,” he says, “you can make the change and, five minutes later, that change is online.  You don’t have to wait for programmers and you don’t have to wait for somebody else to approve what you’ve submitted to them before it can actually be right online and ready to sell again.”

James applied StoresOnline’s principles to a long-time customer who owned a barbeque company.  “It was a friend of ours that did not have a website that was functional at all,” James says.  “They were getting about 1,500 hits a day and only getting about three sales a month.”  After focusing the marketing on the site, James brought the company new life.  “Right now, our hits on the website are about 150 to 200 a day.  However, we average six to eight sales a day coming off of that site.” 

Along with sales revenue, the new Internet presence has influenced other aspects of the business.  “Potential customers…call us and say, ‘I’m thinking about putting some barbeque sauce in our store.  Send me a catalog.’  We say, ‘go to a website.  Take a look at what’s there.”  These customers tend to give lucrative contracts.  “In fact,” James says, “Cracker Barrel just put us in all of their stores throughout the country. And that lead came from our website.”

James can’t say enough about the StoresOnline support team.  “The fun part for me is that they don’t do it for you,” he says.  “They walk you through the process of making the change yourself, or overcoming whatever the challenge is that you have, so that you’re prepared.  The next time you build another store, you already know how to incorporate that function.”

James encourages future entrepreneurs to try StoresOnline.  “If you’re thinking about starting your own business, if you’re living the American dream to get your own business, this is the perfect opportunity.”

Visit James’ website at

http://www.smokinjoejones.com/

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