Ecommerce Intern Case Study – Month 4 – 76% Increase in Sales

Several months back I had the plan to hire someone with ZERO experience give them 2 of my ecommernce businesses to grow and have them document the entire journey.

The ECommerce Intern Case Study was born. Annie was hired and while attending school she worked part time to learn and grow a couple of projects. She did a great job and has documented everything in Weekly VLogs and Monthly Updates.

Previous Updates:

Introducing the Ecommerce Intern Case Study

ECommerce Intern Case Study – Month 2 – Day in the Life – Goal Setting and Website Improvements

ECommerce Intern Case Study – Month 3 – Stamps.com Review Learnings and Growth

You can view her entire playlist of VLog updates here

VLog 9

VLog 10

VLog 11

VLog 12

Hi guys and welcome to my final blog post!

My contract is coming to an end and so this will be my last post documenting my journey. I have learned so much over the past four months and it has been a really great journey. 

Personal Update: First of all Merry Christmas (if you celebrate Christmas) and happy new year, the last few weeks while I was at home I took some time off from work and spent most of my time with my family. I also had my first white Christmas in many years. I took advantage of the snow by learning how to cross country ski and by going snowshoeing. Unfortunately we were in lockdown in Ontario the whole time I was there so the downhill ski clubs had to close. I was really disappointed as I was really looking forward to downhill skiing.

I am now back in Birmingham, AL, after a nice break in Canada. We are back to full on training for volleyball and have two weeks before school starts to really focus on tuning our skills back up. It’s weird to be back in the United States again after being in Canada for awhile. When I left Collingwood most of the province was in Lockdown and here there are barely any restrictions. I am hoping that I will be able to receive the vaccine when I am down here and can continue to avoid getting Covid-19. Fingers crossed. 

This post will serve as a conclusion for the project; I’ll show you guys the sales results, my thoughts on the project and the grand successes and failures of the project. 

Business A: 

General Thoughts: 

The total sales for Business A over this time frame were just over $16 thousand. While some Ecommerce stores can do that in a few days I think it is a big win for Business A. When I first took over the business we hit a major lull but recently it has been doing a lot better. As I talk about in my vlog quite often this business does not exactly follow the Drop Ship Lifestyle model and it also has a very specific niche market. The niche that it’s in while they are typically loyal customers and interested in new products, as a group the customer demographic had an unpredictable response to sales. I ran a few 4 day only flash sales and some sales that were run were VERY successful whereas others that were basically the exact same sale but just at a different had a completely different reaction. So it was a challenge to put my finger on what exactly consumers would want when it came to marketing. 

Another Challenge: Paid Trafficking was not profitable!

Another issue that I ran across with this niche market and the online store was being able to use paid trafficking to the point where it was profitable. So far the best form of advertising for this niche market has been email marketing and nothing else. I tried Facebook Ads and Google Ads and neither were successful. Jon and I actually made the decision a few weeks ago to shut off paid trafficking for this business due to it just draining money from the store and not increasing any sales. 

Conversion Rate: 

This conversion rate is still really low. A goal for this site is to get it to 1% but a challenge with this site is figuring out which changes will actually make an impact since the usual improvements such as updating the look of the website to be cleaner and more modern might actually be counterintuitive. 

Ideas for future: 

• Affiliate Linking: A big goal for the future will be increasing the ranking of the site and therefore that will lead to more people finding the site and making purchases. A big measure to improve the site that will be the next step for this website is affiliate linking. Which will involve sending out inquiries and getting other websites to link back to our product and blog pages. I have already done this a few times due to other sites reaching out to us and exchanging links with them. The idea behind this business affiliate linking plan would be to offer a link exchange or to provide them with a product that is relatively inexpensive in exchange for a link to our website and a review/testimonial that we could share on our site. 
• Add to cart reminder: As you can see on the image the conversion rate for “Adding to Cart” is closer to our goal of a conversion rate of 1%. I think a big improvement to be made after seeing that is setting up a reminder email service for people who have products in their cart that way they will have another contact with us and be reminded to make a purchase if they simply got side tracked or just forgot. 

Business B: I’d say that Business B has been kind of like my baby for this time. In comparison to Business A it did not have a lot set up and was very unestablished as a business. I feel as if the work I’ve put in now has turned it from a good idea to an actual existing business. While the numbers for this Business are still not super impressive they are a grand improvement from how they were when I initially started. 

Wins: 

1. New Product Line: During the course of my work on this project I looked into sourcing many different new products but nailed down two new products that are both selling pretty well. It’s been awesome to be a part of the whole journey of sourcing a product and then watching it getting a sale for the first time. 
2. New Website: We completely redesigned the website for this Business and it has been a huge contributing factor to the increase in sales and increase in conversion rate
3. Large Increase in Sales: As previously mentioned the sales have drastically increased. In the past two weeks we are having a sale every day which is a huge increase compared to barely getting a sale every two weeks before all the changes. 
4. Launch of eBook: A big success of this project was a monster how to article finally being completed and then turning that monster article into an eBook. 

Conversion Rate: 

Sometimes looking at this number without any other context makes me feel a bit dejected but as you can see it is also a 66% improvement from the previous time period. The conversion rate is still quite low but due to our website ranking well and the Google Ads that are running we are still able to get good sales numbers. 

Future Ideas: 

1. Improved Social Recognition: I think increasing the social media presence will be key to improving the conversion rate. Having real customers writing reviews and posts will increase customers’ desire to make purchases. 
2. Improvements to website: While the website went through a great improvement process there is always room for more improvement. I think there should be ongoing research on what the top landing pages are with the highest conversion rates and to continue to model the site after those super successful sites. 
3. Research on Competitors: During this process I have been mainly looking internally and figuring out the website in order to get it to a point where it could even be considered a competitor but now that it is making sales I think a good idea would be to start doing competitive research and figuring out what other similar companies are doing better or worse than our business and what changes we should make. 
4. Expanding the product line: Any website with multiple products seems more legitimate and I think a good idea for the future for this product would be to source a few more high quality products that fit in with the current product line. 

In conclusion, it has been great to see both businesses improve over the time that I’ve been running them and putting a lot of work into them. I’m excited to see how big Business B can become and watch Business A grow more consistently and slowly over time. Overall I feel as if I am very well versed when it comes to Ecommerce and feel very competent handling all different types of situations. I hope that you guys enjoyed reading my blog. Until next time!