GerberKnivesDirect.com: An E-commerce Case Study

Like most of us, Jody McCormack of Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, started buying things on the Internet long ago. But in Jody’s case, it wasn’t long before his “inner entrepreneur” told him he should be making more money from the Internet than he was spending.

“I was an insurance agent, bartender, and mortgage broker,” Jody explained. “I knew I wanted to do something profitable on the Internet, I just didn’t know what.”

When he got the invitation from StoresOnline, Jody figured it couldn’t hurt to go see what it was all about. He knew very little about the Internet beyond email and Web surfing. He thought he might learn a bit more by attending first the Preview conference and then the Workshop.

“Once I was there I had light bulbs going off in my head,” said Jody. “It was exactly what I’d been looking for: a place to start, with some help. Having that support was a huge factor for me because I just didn’t know anything about running a business online and knew I would have a lot of questions.”

The Leap of Faith

At the Workshop, Jody went with his gut and bought a multiple-site package. “I could barely afford it but I did it anyway,” said Jody. “I financed it, paid it off, and I’ve never looked back.”

Jody dove in as soon as he got the software. He took it home and started reading and playing with the site-building tools. It took him about three weeks to decide what to sell on his first website.

“I gave up on two or three different ideas before I finally nailed it down,” Jody said. “I would call suppliers trying to find one I could work with, get discouraged and switch to another idea. But once I got that nailed down I immediately got a logo made. It cost me something like $40.”

It took Jody two months to build and publish his first site and it’s a fairly substantial one. It has about 250 products on it. For the first year, he worked his two jobs during the day, then came home and worked on his website at night, adding one product at a time, calling or chatting with customer support whenever he got stuck.

“I used phone support whenever I could just because I talk faster than I type,” said Jody. “But if I was working on it late at night it was nice to be able to click open the live chat feature and get an answer right away.”

Jody figures he contacted customer support two or three times a day in the beginning. “Some of those support people even got to know me by name,” Jody laughed. “Even when it was something they fixed on their end, I always had them tell me what they were doing so I knew how everything worked.”

The Fun Part

Within the first couple of days after publishing his site, Jody had his first order. Remembering the experience, Jody said “It was very exciting! I got an email that said ‘You’ve got cash!’”

It took him about 7 months to rank on the first page in Google™. Now, for most of his search terms, he hovers somewhere between number 3 and number 6 on that first page of search results. He’s been busy building other sites and hasn’t bothered to try to get it up past number 3. He says he tries to spend at least an hour every day doing some kind of marketing. The rest of the time he spends building his websites and trying to grow his business.

“I don’t think I would be in business without the customer support and help from StoresOnline,” said Jody. “I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to handle finding a supplier, setting up customer support on my own websites, getting the sites out there, I didn’t know any of that and I probably would have given up a long time ago. I never would have made it past building my first site.”

“I always dreamed of having an office I could take my dogs to,” said Jody. “They’re there every day now.”