Household-décor seller boosts sales over 400% in a year
We always dreamed of owning our own business. We looked at opening a brick-and-mortar store, but ProStores had much lower start-up costs!
K. Drake, Owner of www.drakehousegifts.com
ProStores beats out all the competition
The Drakes wanted to expand their business beyond eBay, but the high cost of opening up a brick-and-mortar shop seemed daunting. They learned about ProStores through eBay, and opened one in November 2005 at minimal expense.
"We always dreamed of owning our own business. We looked at opening a brick-and-mortar store, but ProStores had much lower start-up costs. It took us just four months to break even, instead of the 18 months it would have taken with a brick-and-mortar. We like selling on eBay, and have lots of customers in our eBay Store, but not everyone shops on eBay. Our ProStores Web store lets us sell to everyone.
"We looked at other hosting and e-commerce providers, but ProStores gave us everything we wanted in one easy package. The WYSIWYG interface was a huge advantage–it saved a lot of time and money not having to learn and buy Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or any other software to edit our website. No one else could offer the ease of design. Two things that drove our decision to choose ProStores were the strength of the shopping cart and the seamless interface with eBay and PayPal. After looking at other options starting from scratch, it became clear that ProStores was the easiest solution for us.
"Our overhead is relatively low. There are cheaper alternatives, but when you start to add in all the extra features ProStores includes for free, it's the best value for the money. Recently we shopped around again, as we were looking at starting some other websites. We even opened another store with a different hosting company, but it was just so difficult to navigate–just getting the template to work–that we gave up. I guess we're spoiled by the simplicity of ProStores."
ProStores boosted sales over 400% in a year
Their ProStores Web store has been an incredible source of sales growth. "We increased business 400% in one year! We can't disclose our company's finances, but there is a steady income, which is getting better all the time.
"Our business picks up a lot over the holidays: we sell about 1,200 items a month during the 3rd and 4th quarters. During the first half of the year, most orders have one-to-three items. This buying pattern changes during the holiday season, with many more multi-item orders and lots of gift wrapping!
"ProStores has helped us be successful in so many ways. We love the automation for setting up email notifications and shipping with UPS. It lets us do things we wouldn't have time to do ourselves and it makes for a much better customer experience. ProStores helps us advertise, too. The interface with Google Base and Shopping.com automates our product upload and helps us get new customers. It's a huge time saver: we have over 1,000 products and our ProStore automatically updates the feeds to the shopping sites every two weeks."
Room to grow
The Drakes are happy with the success they've achieved so far, but they hope to be able to expand their business in the future. "There's still some features we have yet to take advantage of. There's plenty of room for us to grow from an administrative perspective, such as drop shipping and automated integration with vendors. We're not doing it yet, but it's nice to know that ProStores can help us grow as big as we can be."
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