Katrina Back in Biz Followup

On the year anniversary of Katrina, Yahoo Small Business’ resident Louisiana native reflects on the year that has passed and the challenges that lie ahead for the Gulf Coast’s residents, including their many small business owners. Last April Yahoo! Small Business hosted an event to help facilitate small business recovery in the Gulf Coast, and today we look at where some of those small businesses are today with their recovery efforts. Here are stories on three Gulf Coast entrepreneurs we were privileged to meet in April:

Robert Turner is a New Orleans antiques dealer specializing in Chinese furniture, much of which he personally selected on visits to China. Though luckily his shop did not experience physical damage from Katrina, the economic hit has nonetheless been severe. Post-Katrina, their reliable tourist business has dropped off significantly, while many local shoppers are waiting to buy, pending progress on rebuilding. Their new e-commerce Web site, www.silkroadcollection.com, with free services from Yahoo! Small Business and e-commerce developers Solid Cactus, is central to their business survival strategy.

Before Katrina, jewelry designer Sommer L’Hoste was researching getting her business online, but did not consider it to be an urgent priority. After the storm, she lost many of her local customers, and so she needed a Web site more than ever. The Yahoo! Back in Business Event provided Syble Fine Jewelry with a customizable online store, domain name, and support, and with that, the ability to begin receiving orders from national customers. This event “gave life to my business at a time that it would have surely failed,” says L’Hoste.

Authorized Optics CEO Chris Wisecarver worked for 23 years running the family industrial chemical company just west of New Orleans. He didn’t want to get “left in the dust” by technologies such as e-commerce, so he dipped his toe in e-commerce and opened an optics store. After Katrina, he took a step back to reconsider his life decisions and decided he wanted to be in a business that is independent from physical dangers such as hurricanes. He is handing over the reigns of the chemical business to his brothers, and he is planning to go into e-commerce full-time. With e-commerce, his customer base is national, and he is not at risk from weather or other physical dangers. He decided to open a second e-commerce store and found himself at our Back in Business event for some guidance. At the event he decided to go with Yahoo! and Solid Cactus. He’s excited to announce the launch of his new store.

Collectively, the small business community across the region is doing what it can to help spark economic recovery. We wish the entire region much luck and success on the challenging but important road ahead.

Kristen Wareham,
Yahoo! Small Business

RetailVision

Conference Information:

Date: August 28 - 31, 2006
Location: The Hyatt Regency at the Convention Center,Denver, CO
Registration Fee: Retailers: Free.
Description: RetailVision is the Event where new consumer IT products and channel programs are unveiled, Retailer-Vendor relationships are forged, and critical retail merchandising decisions are made.
For more information, please visit http://www.retailvision.com/us.

Everyone Loves Free

My grandfather always used to say “For free you take, for pay you hesitate.” Well merchants it’s time to start taking. The nice folks over at Wiley, publishers of the Dummies guides, have graciously provided a FREE chapter of Rob Snell’s Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies.

The chapter, Converting Browsers Into Buyers, (PDF) includes:

• Ten tips for increasing customer confidence (and likelihood to purchase)

• Eleven tips for customizing product pages

• Over a dozen tips for improvements to your checkout pages

• Usability pointers such as monitoring the user’s of your site and increasing the page loading speed.

So now’s your chance to get a free taste of all the good advice Rob has to offer in his book. And if you like what you are reading, you can purchase Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies from Amazon.com.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

More Thoughts about SES

I attended a bunch of sessions last Tuesday and Wednesday at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I came away with a lot of information and insights to share, but these topics are so important that it’s going to take me a while to get to them.

However, I wanted to share one quote from one of the presenters, Brian Mark, CTO of Toolbarn.com. During the SEM Retailer session, Brian was showing screenshots of various search marketing ads his company ran and how subtle tweaks to the wording saw dramatic increases in conversion rates. He was trying to explain how his company really wanted to emphasize the value proposition of the products they sell (mainly tools). What was it he said?

Our customers don’t want [to buy] a drill, they want a hole.

If a big light bulb didn’t go off in your head, re-read that sentence. Customers are not so much interested in the products themselves, but rather how the product or some aspect of how you will fulfill the order is a solution to a problem or a need. (Of course there may be exceptions to this so feel free to take issue with my interpretation of his comment.)

What This Means to You

• Consider carefully how your search marketing ads (or any copy on your site) are speaking to the needs of the customer. Are you solving their problem be it by offering more variety, a better value, or unmatched service?
• Anyone can likely come along and match you on price. You can gain a competitive advantage by solving other problems such as shipping orders sooner than the mega merchants, offering phone support, or building a community of visitors.
• As soon as you know what your value proposition is, make sure your customers know as well. Use this test: Show your store to a stranger for 5 seconds and then ask them if they can tell you what you sell and why they would buy from you. If they can’t do this, you’re not making it clear enough to them.

So tool merchants, start selling those “holes”, and non-tool merchants, start figuring out what the “holes” are for your market.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business