We had a client who had a successful e-commerce built with us a couple of years back which had a fantastic turnover and very profitable margins. The website was increasing in orders and turnover as brand awareness increased following exposure in the search engines.
The website, as is the case with most new websites, was building up exposure through the organic search results which concentrated most of its efforts for capturing targeted traffic through the Pay Per Click system of Google Adwords. After a while the website started to reach the first page of Google for its target keyword and the orders kept flooding in. In fact, so much that it was a management problem sorting all the orders out and delivering throughout the UK.
Lessons were learnt and we as a design agency learned much about marketing and e-commerce from this one project. The client sold the e-commerce site on as the orders were coming in so fast it was too time consuming fulfilling the orders. The client didn’t want to employ staff and wanted to keep things simple. What did they do? They changed their business model.
We have recently designed a new website for the client who has changed their business model which is proving even more successful. They are still producing exactly the same product but instead of marketing towards the general public they are targeting retailers. Therefore, they still produce the product at about the same price with the same mark-up but with less overheads (and therefore increased profitability) and they no longer need to work weekends!
Sometimes just changing one small thing can have massive benefits.