Doug Martin

Doug Martin

Doug Martin of St. Louis, Missouri didn’t find StoresOnline the way most people do. He never went to a Preview Conference or a Training Workshop. Doug is a serial entrepreneur. He used to own a company that did cancer diagnostics. He grew it over 10 years and sold it off. Then he took some time off with his family.

He decided his next venture would be in the pet industry. The small company he wanted to buy was already using the StoresOnline platform for its website. The fact that the company was using StoresOnline wasn’t what enticed him to buy the company but Doug says it turned out to be a great advantage.

“I was looking for an online business with an easy platform that we could expand, something that employees could easily adapt to that we could quickly make changes to without having to pay a lot of money. The StoresOnline platform allowed us to move quickly and implement a lot of changes,” said Doug. “I’ve built and owned four or five other websites before and it was always very costly to make changes. It was nice to be able to make changes ourselves without having to pay someone $150 an hour to do it for us.”

Great Flexibility

One of the things Doug liked most about working with the StoresOnline platform was the fact that he could easily teach his employees to use it. Once he showed them how to add products and update images, he didn’t have to take much of an active role in maintaining his websites. He was free to concentrate on strategy.

“We made quite a few changes in the beginning, mostly updating products. We quickly realized that the nice thing about StoresOnline is you can set up multiple websites using the same product base. We used that to try some different pricing strategies in different markets. It would have been difficult to do using only one website,” Doug said. “We targeted different markets with a different look and feel. Now we’re able to target specific demographics with different pricing and different graphics.”

Doug says the StoresOnline support has been easy to work with and the more they get to know the platform, the less they have to use it. They use the chat line more than phone or email support. With the new V.6 they’ve even been able to embed videos, newsletter links, and more custom graphics.

Secrets To Success

“If not for StoresOnline we’d definitely have had a much slower startup,” said Doug. “For our latest web effort we looked at doing a custom website but in the end decided it just didn’t make sense not to utilize the StoresOnline platform.”

Because of the time and effort he’s spent on SEO and Web marketing, Doug’s sites get 5-6,000 visitors a week with about a four percent conversion rate. He finds his best strategy is to steer clear of general search terms and concentrate on more specialized market niches instead. It keeps his marketing costs down and still drives high traffic.

Doug said, “It doesn’t matter if you have 10 buildings and 6,000 employees, if you can market a great product at a great price with a good-looking website that’s easy to use, you’re going to be on equal footing with those big guys, and that’s where the Internet really gives you an advantage.”

This is a testimonial of a customer reporting their experience using the StoresOnline tools. The experience is not typical, your results will vary. They are a “STAR” because they have worked hard at their business, they took the time and effort necessary to find the right product (including if necessary the time to find and develop a relationship with a drop shipper), the effort necessary to set up their website, optimize the web site and making it relevant. STARS spend the time and effort necessary on their business every day or week. STARS had or learned the necessary computer skills. Results in business and on the Internet depend on your product, price, promotion, work, skills, time and effort.