ShopSite Case Study: Premium Knives
ShopSite's ease-of-use and search engine-friendly pages bring double-digit growth, while its reliability and great support meet business needs.
Company Profile
PremiumKnives.com is recognized for catering to individual tastes that range from superior kitchen cutlery to fine gift giving. A December 2002 Inc. Magazine Web Award Winner, PremiumKnives.com bases its philosophy of Customer Care on how they would like to be treated in an online shopping experience. PremiumKnives.com has been a ShopSite Pro retailer since their inception, and is re-launching its second online venture, PremiumHG.com using ShopSite Pro in Spring 2003.
Company Background
A Web-marketing and e-commerce expert since 1996, Anthony Arnold and his wife, Aimee, launched PremiumKnives.com using ShopSite in 1999. Two weeks after the site launched, with no advertising, PremiumKnives.com had its first customers. Within three months the Arnolds had sold $50,000 worth of knives.
"We are pleasantly surprised at the growth of PremiumKnives.com. ShopSite's easy set-up and clean design with good META and keyword tagging capabilities were definitely keys to our success," says Anthony.
The Arnolds experience, hard work, and determination have maintained double digit growth for their company. So far the Arnolds are happy with their company's growth. But Anthony can't help making the imaginative leap from accident to empire. "I've got great respect for Restoration Hardware, Crate and Barrel, and Williams-Sonoma," he says. "I aspire to that scale and I know they started exactly the same place I have."
Key ShopSite Features
"E-commerce has been around since the mid 1990s; the first sites were crude but operational. I launched one of the first multi-national Fortune 500 e-commerce sites in 1996. There were no e-commerce packages and absolutely everything had to be custom coded. Today there are a myriad of out-of-the-box solutions that require less technical expertise than running your average spreadsheet program. However, there are now so many solutions that it has become hard to choose which one is right for your business.
"Our criteria when looking at e-commerce software is: absolute dependability, pages that can be indexed by search engines, ease of use and installation, long-term support, scalability, manageability, and most importantly ROI.
"After looking at a lot of solutions, it was clear most were strictly set up for one purpose: to be cheap e-commerce solutions. Almost all of these solutions limited the number of products to under fifty, offered no support, were literally invisible to search engines, and were not moveable to different hosting providers (a very important issue if your hosting provider becomes unreliable or goes out of business).
"We felt ShopSite was robust and built for real world business applications. ShopSite delivered an exactly-as-advertised solution that was easy to manage, generated hard coded HTML pages with individual and complete meta and keyword tagging, great support, reliability, and has scaled beautifully to meet our business' needs. Another factor was usability from a consumer perspective. ShopSite has developed a very clean shopping process that encourages cross-selling and decreases abandoned shopping carts. ShopSite Pro has given PremiumKnives.com the power, features, and customization capabilities to compete against competitors' multi-million dollar solutions, all within our small business budget. Because of ShopSite's features, reliability, and significant ROI, I feel very comfortable saying that ShopSite is a key asset to our business.
"Managing ShopSite is easy - that's a good thing. Some people sway toward more complexity in products -- which I call the "geek factor" -- to hopefully gain some competitive, more sophisticated edge. Having been in this same situation with our initial launch of our PremiumHG.com web site, far too much time, energy, and money is spent "managing the site" rather than using it as a tool to increase revenue and profits. ShopSite can still deliver all the sophisticated custom look, feel, and functionality of the expensive solutions, however it is far easier for the non-technical person (i.e. your average employee) to manage and has a less expensive total cost of ownership.
"ShopSite is developed on solid code that generates static HTML pages, versus less reliable JAVA, Shockwave, or other dynamic content solutions. The ability to deliver changes on the fly from a dynamic content solution is appealing, however from my experience the disadvantages of poor indexibility, slower speed, and inter-operability problems greatly outweigh the advantage of real-time site updates. ShopSite has listened to its customers and has always been very open minded about upgrades and improvements. Since 1999, I have upgraded through every release of ShopSite and have always been pleased with the new features.
"Unlike many other solutions that are still trying to get their latest release to deliver as advertised, ShopSite's longevity and attention to detail is reflective in their software, now a highly refined and reliable e-commerce solution that is being improved by customer feedback. I feel comfortable in recommending ShopSite's suite of products whether you are a serious home business or a mid-sized corporation with an IT budget.
- Anthony Arnold, President, PremiumKnives.com
www.premiumknives.com
