FEATURE ARTICLE

Determining your target market

Knowing your customer base is critical to running a successful online business. Can you be certain that the customers you are currently getting are the best possible visitors you could be getting? What if there is a segment out there that you are not yet marketing to? Having a full understanding of your site’s target market can help you to design and promote your site more effectively.

Clean up your site for the Fall rush
Summer and early Fall are great times to start updating your site for the holiday shopping season. Take this opportunity to remove discontinued products, add new products and update existing product information. MonsterCommerce offers a full suite of technical services that will allow you to enjoy the summer months while keeping your site up to date at the same time.

New search engine optimization tool available
Looking for an affordable way to check your site's search engine rankings, research keyword phrases, ensure your site's search engine friendliness and submit regularly to the search engines? MonsterCommerce and Network Solutions have been working together to create Search Engine Visibility, a service that offers all of these things and more.

New Do It For Me Website Design Available
MonsterCommerce has partnered with Network Solutions to offer affordable, professional web design services for non e-commerce websites. These new Do It For Me Web Site solutions offer professional design consultation with ongoing maintenance.

Congratulations to May's MonsterSellers
The MonsterSeller Award medal is given to merchants who sell a specified number of products through their MonsterMarketplace store listing within the month. Listings are marked with a Platinum, Gold or Silver medallion. MonsterSellers for May.

MonsterMarketplace Merchant Spotlight Award
Congratulations to Curt Anderson for his site, AFloral.com. Curt was chosen to be recognized as June ’s Merchant of the Month.

Take Five

Each month, we ask a different MonsterCommerce merchant the same five questions regarding their online business and its success.

This month's featured merchant is WitVac.com. WitVac.com offers Dyson vacuums and IQAir purifiers.

Owner: Matt Witbeck

MonsterCommerce merchant since: October, 2004

Best-Selling Product:
Dyson Vacuums

1. What is your favorite feature about your site right now?
   Ease of use. I have no programming knowledge so the ability to add links, pictures and edit the website almost all by myself is the most important feature for me. It allows me to keep the site current and easy for my customers to use and makes it simple to train other employees. I love the fact that I can change things and even play around to get the right layout and look for the site.
   
   
2. What was one major obstacle to your store's success, and how did you overcome it?
   My first website was a $5000 custom site that was completely rigid. Nothing could be changed and there was no functionality. It made every sale a burden. The irony is that I almost signed up with MonsterCommerce but instead employed a local programmer. After a year I realized that if selling online was ever to be manageable, we had to make drastic changes to our website and use software that helped us instead of hindered us.
   
   
3. To what do you attribute most of your site's success?
   Our main focus is always the customers. Right now we could increase sales but we are focused on customer service first with sustained and manageable growth. With strong customer experiences we have been able to decrease our advertising expense by a significant amount by always asking for referrals.
   
   
4. What is the best or most rewarding experience you've had so far selling online?
   In 2001, we were planning on opening another retail location when I was in a meeting with a vendor and they had a graph that showed where their products were sold. Online only accounted for 1-2% and was deemed by the vendor as being insignificant. To me 1-2% nationally was an enormous part of the population to reach. Even better was the fact that it could be accomplished at only a fraction of the cost of opening a new store. A properly done e-commerce website is the most cost effective way to reach new consumers.
   
   
5. What web sites or online tools or resources would you not be able to live without?
   Forums have been a great source of information, and I have learned more from other helpful merchants than anywhere else. MonsterCommerce’s shopping cart software is the backbone of our business online. Besides MonsterCommerce's shopping cart, we do not use any other software.
   

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