We've quit trying to understand or explain the effect that Old Smokey has on people. We don't know how it does what it does, but we know it's doing something good.
Old Smokey grills make people happy. You have no idea how great it is to make things that make people happy. One of our owners used to be a downtown, suit-wearing lawyer. It wasn‘t his job to make people happy. Now he helps run our company, and as the boxes get loaded on the trucks. he thinks "more happy people." And every now & then, we let him drive the forklift and honk the horn.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
Old smokey has been around for some time so and we sold nationally, however our online store was limited and was costing us money. We have some crafty customers that would find ways to get free shipping by adding and removing products. We also wanted to make it so users could enjoy more with their grill by buying accessories, Everyone Needs A Big Long Mop and we wanted to make sure that was going happen.
Tell us about the back-end of your business. What tools and apps do you use to run your store? How do you handle shipping and fulfillment?
We use very few apps, or developers at CKO Designs sat down and went through our treasure trove of demands and they seemed to either find or build a solution one by one. We wanted certain items to be shown on certain products, we wanted the front page to be have the OLD SMOKEY look and feel. We especially wanted to make sure that clients could buy our grill, scroll down and then buy more without leaving the page.
Again, our developers had to custom build something magical that would add products to cart, alert the user and then allow them to browse our amazing selection of Accessories.
Our main goal though was to be create an easier shipping process for our shipping staff which consists of one awsome receptionist and a really old cat who make sure dust stays off anything warm. Since we ship through Amazon, Ebay, and our own store, we wanted a centralized solution which after a little trial an error and the understanding that label printing is not a strong suit of the OS X operating system, we found Order Cup. We able to pull in, fulfill sales and clients, and print shipping labels all from one spot.
Other than that we are pretty much setup by our developers with just mailchimp, fruadcheck, and template app to customize packing slips and invoices for our clients. For the amount of sales we do, shopify has been an amazing solution saving us money from crafty clients while at the same time getting them to buy A Big Long Mop they desperately needed.
What are your top recommendations for new ecommerce entrepreneurs?
When you want something done, find an expert. Our developers where able to find solutions and fix problems while boosting sales.