NorthAmericanKnives.com: An E-commerce Case Study

For Bonnie and Kirk McCormick, of Baker City, Oregon, it all started with koi. Koi are those colorful Japanese breeds of carp that people put in aquariums and outdoor fish ponds. Bonnie and Kirk sold them on the side. He was in law enforcement and she handled most of the koi business. Bonnie was unable to work outside her home after suffering a serious injury in a car accident.

Bonnie and Kirk thought it might be a good idea to sell their koi on the Internet. So when they got a mailer inviting them to a StoresOnline Internet Success conference, they decided to go check it out. That was in the spring of 2006.

“We didn’t know much about the Internet at the time and StoresOnline had the training we knew we’d need to be able to sell our koi online,” said Kirk.

At the training conference Bonnie and Kirk learned about keyword research, among many other things. That meant they’d be able to research their idea for an online business before spending the time and effort to build and launch it. That, along with the other training they got that day was enough to convince them to buy the multiple-site package.

A Hard Truth

“Yeah, we jumped in with both feet. Once we bought in and started doing the research we wanted to do, we found that koi might not be the best idea after all,” said Kirk. They found that there was a lot of competition and not many people were searching online for koi to buy. Still determined to have an online business, they began to research other possibilities.

Bonnie said, “We started making a long list of things we knew about.” They began researching each item on their list and crossing off the ones that seemed less promising. Eventually, they narrowed it down to just a few. All told, it took them about a month to decide what they wanted to sell. She decided she wanted to try selling rifle scopes and he decided he wanted to sell knives. The rifle scopes idea didn’t quite pan out. But between the training they got on finding suppliers and just word-of-mouth, they found a good knife supplier they could work with. It took some serious time and effort but they finally launched their first site in October of 2006; NorthAmericanKnives.com.

Building and Promoting

“In the beginning, I think I used customer support four or five times a day,” laughed Kirk. They used the online chat function most.

As with any new website, once it was live they had to make it so people could find it. When asked what technique worked best for them Kirk said, “We just tried everything they (StoresOnline) told us to in the training. It took a while but it worked. We tried other things—local advertising and so forth—that didn’t work. And we’ve done things like sports promotion but basically the best things have been in the training—link-building, pay-per-click, etc.”

“We tried getting more training from other companies, too, but never really learned anything new,” Bonnie said.

Results

They didn’t start seeing sales until December of 2006; the holiday season. Sales started slowly and increased gradually. Eventually, they built other websites, each specializing in different types of knives. At this writing they have five active sites with others in the works.

Today, the McCormick’s websites routinely rank on page one for several search terms on both Google™ and Yahoo!™. Their busiest site now averages over 500 visitors a day.

Kirk found the Store Builder (StoresOnline’s site building tool) to be so user friendly that he now builds sites for other businesses in his area. Now that he has experience, he rarely needs to contact customer support.

“Before, I was known at work as the guy who killed a computer with a paperclip,” said Kirk. “I still don’t know anything about computer programming but I’ve learned enough to build and promote a website with StoresOnline.” (The paperclip incident happened when he tried to free a disk stuck in a drive and fried the motherboard. Lesson learned.)

Bonnie and Kirk admit they still have a lot to learn about all the tools available to them. It took them about a year and half to get on the first page of any search engine but now it’s just a matter of staying there. Staying there is a lot easier than getting there the first time because Google and other search engines factor site age into their ranking algorithms.

Today Bonnie spends about 30 hours a week running all their websites, including providing customer service, taking phone orders, stocking, and shipping. It’s her only job. Kirk still works full time in law enforcement but isn’t too stressed about money these days.

“Without StoresOnline,” said Bonnie, “We might have had a website but it wouldn’t have any visitors. Not all our sites have been successful. We try a site and if it doesn’t work after a while, we take it down and put up another one.” Four of their sites have been profitable so far. Their fifth site isn’t doing so well and they’re planning to take it down and replace it. It doesn’t cost them anything extra through StoresOnline because they already own the sites. StoresOnline doesn’t charge for the customer to replace the contents of a website. The site belongs to the customer, who can change its contents at will.

“One of the things I like best about it,” said Bonnie, “is that we can pick up and go anywhere and still carry on our business. All we need is a computer and an Internet connection.”

Perhaps the best part is that when Kirk retires from law enforcement, the income from their websites won’t diminish. They’ll be able to keep running and growing their businesses or sell them off, whichever they choose.