The Urban Worm Blowing Up

Okay, so not really but I picked up a good number of orders March-May and had enough money in profits to completely upgrade the site over the last few weeks (check out the new Urban Worm). Originally, as I described last year, I built the site with Jimdo and though there were a lot of great things about that platform and I’d still have no problem recommending it to anyone, there were also a number of pretty big disadvantages to it.

Besides the site designs that Jimdo offers being pretty limiting, my main gripes were related to shipping, website tracking, and the blog feature. The shipping in Jimdo is set at the product level and will always charge a customer the shipping associated with each product in his shopping cart. For example, if a customer orders two t-shirts and the shipping amount set for that t-shirt is $5, then the shopping cart would charge that customer $10 for shipping (2 t-shirts x 5 shipping per t-shirt) even though the shipping charge for two t-shirts should be just $5. In other words, there was no way to intelligently make shipping calculations based on the products in the shopping cart (if total shopping cart weight is less than x, then charge y for shipping; if shopping cart total greater than x, then don’t charge for shipping). This was especially frustrating in the Urban Worm case because most of the products I sell offer a high enough margin to absorb shipping charges and therefore, allow me to come up with and run creative shipping promotions if the ecommerce platform has the functionality. Jimdo doesn’t, unfortunately.

My second gripe, and maybe the most important one, was related to tracking the behaviour of visitors to the site. Although you can easily install Google Analytics to any Jimdo site, unless you put each product on its own page, you will never have much insight into the products that your customers are clicking on, an obviously valuable piece of information, and you can’t track site conversions, meaning you’ll never automatically know how the customers that ultimately make a purchase reached the site and can’t make any informed decisions about how to best divide up your marketing dollars if your interest is in driving sales. Corny but true, information is power and though a Jimdo site set up with Google Analytics still reveals quite a bit of important data, you’re often left asking a lot of questions that are easily answered with a more robust website.

And finally, the Jimdo blogging tool is not very user friendly or capable. If you’re not posting very much or don’t intend to use your blog as a way to attract site visitors, this doesn’t matter too much, but based on my Google Analytics account, I knew that a better blog could generate a good amount of traffic (visitors would land on my site after searching on topics related to my blog posts – composting in the classroom, for example). So, in February, I set up the blog portion of the site on WordPress, a good way to test what kind of traffic I could get to the blog, but bad in that the Urban Worm was split into two different sites.

Ultimately, all of these small annoyances made me wish for something better. If I hadn’t gotten too many orders during March-May, I probably would have left the site on Jimdo, but the number of orders that came through gave me enough confidence and motivation to try something new and more powerful. So, I decided to transfer the site hosting to BlueHost and use WordPress as the main tool to build the site and the WP Ecommerce plugin as my shopping cart/store. BlueHost and Wordpress are used by a lot of major websites and offer all the capability you could ask for in a site. So far, I’d say it’s definitely been a big improvement. The site design is major upgrade in both looks and ease of navigation, I have the ability to run promotions, the blog is now integrated with the site, and the tracking is fully set up to give me all the information available. But, I’ve also spent a lot more time and effort and had to learn a lot to get it all up and running. I’ve actually really enjoyed learning about the tools but it certainly hasn’t been without its frustrations, and for anyone without the time, motivation, or interest in learning, it’s definitely best to either stick with Jimdo or simply hire someone to just do it for you (I’ll give you a good rate ;) ). Then again, the time and effort has already paid off – 3 orders this week alone, a significant improvement in conversion rate over the Jimdo version of the site, and enough profit to have already recouped my investment in the site upgrade!

Next up, search engine optimization. I want the Urban Worm to be the first link you see on Google when you search for “worm bins,” a keyword that is searched for on Google 14,800 times/month in the US. If I can convert just 0.05% of those searches to orders, I’ll be one happy Urban Worm.

Want to create an online store?

Last year I started to think about trying to create an online store. I didn't really have a specific product in mind, but I wanted it to be a niche market to avoid a lot of competition, and I wanted it to have a price point of at least $50 to make it more feasible to maintain a margin. That seemed simple enough until I realized that since the eighth grade I've bought every piece of clothing I've owned at The Gap, J.Crew, or Banana Republic. I'm not exactly "niche," and it was a challenge to come up with product that met that criteria. Last spring though, I was thinking about trying worm composting again and came across Nature's Footprint. They offered a drop-ship reseller program, and their product seemed to be the perfect match. I looked into it a little more. The bins were certainly "niche" and the prices/markups were high enough to feasibly make a solid profit on a few sales. All I had to do, it seemed, was become an official reseller, build a site, and market the bins. But any time I spent trying to create the site, I became pretty frustrated with my lack of web development experience. There were some pretty cool tools available to create a fairly nice website but nothing seemed to offer enough to create a real online store.

I played around with Weebly a lot. I had used it in Nicaragua to create the beginnings of a website for our Peace Corps class, La Empresa Creativa, and it was pretty useful to quickly build a functioning site, but their online store features were pretty inadequate. I didn't get very far and ended up just kind of shelving the idea for awhile.

A few months ago though, Simon sent me a link to Jimdo. It works a lot like Weebly but makes it very easy to set up a store. You can set prices, shipping rates, pictures, and product variations all by just dragging and dropping preset site elements from the toolbar. You can then link a PayPal account to your Jimdo account and within 30 minutes have the basics of an online store set up. I was excited and decided to give the worm bins a shot.

I applied and became a reseller, bought a URL for $8 from GoDaddy, had Luke Emeott create a logo, and used Jimdo to build the site. I shelled out $60 to Jimdo to have a little more freedom in the site design, and had it all up and ready within about two weeks. $68, little web development experience, and no product inventory, and the Urban Worm was born. I had created a "business."

I use quotation marks because it's not much of a "business" if it doesn't actually sell anything or if it sells something but doesn't turn a profit. Quite frankly, it'll be hard to do both for some pretty clear reasons I'll get into in an upcoming post. But, for anyone interested in creating an online store, I'd encourage you to check out Jimdo.

Urban Worm

Blogs are washed up and slow moving. Or so it seems after launching a new project this week and before having a chance to reveal it here, it was unleashed on Google Buzz and I got quick responses in emails, IMs, and phone calls from roughly 90% of this blog's readership. The digital world, apparently, does not wait. At least not as much as what I had grown accustomed to in Nicaragua where, I learned, there was more time than life.

For those that haven't yet seen it, take a look at my new site The Urban Worm. It's pretty cool what you can create online, mostly for free, with very little actual web development experience.

I'll write a little more about the actual process of creating this and what I plan on testing, but for right now, go to the site and send me your suggestions (new pages, new copy, other products, promotions, blog entries). Better yet, buy a worm bin. $10 spent on AdWords so far hasn't yielded any orders. Be the first!