The Gift Ship – Store Review

by Bill H.

By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
August 22nd, 1998

Ahoy there, shipmates!

One of the oft-quoted benefits of the ‘Net is the ability to work from any geographic location, as long as you can arrange access to a telephone socket. I take advantage of this myself, writing and editing Sell It! from my home on the West coast of Scotland.

However, Captain Beverley Wood has taken this to extremes. She runs her Web store – the aptly named Gift Ship – from a boat moored on the Pacific Northwest. She is assisted by her partner – First Officer Mike – a landlubber who lives 3000 miles away and whom she has met only once.

Mike and Beverley are self-taught, and did all the work in the store themselves, both front-end and back-end. So how did they do it? Read on and find out….

Lang: How did you and Mike get together?

Wood: Mike and I both had been on the Internet for a couple of years when we met. He has an ezine (http://www.sideroad.com) and I have a dog site (http://www.patsyann.com). I wrote a series for his ezine, then we started designing web pages together for other companies (http://www.mediacollision.com).

By the way, he lives 3,000 miles away from me and we’ve only met once, for a three-hour meeting. We email all the time and phone occasionally. And we have considered chatting online, but I’m an IRC fan and he’s an ICQ guy so we never seem to get around to it.

We were old Internet hands by the time we started the store, each spending minimum 200 hours online per month for several years, each having built pages for hire separately and together and each maintaining our own sites.

Lang: So what attracted you to open a Web store?

Wood: Quite frankly, it’s the new frontier. It’s a global selling field. I was in publishing in previous incarnations. Do you know what a joy the web is compared to print? Being able to change things on the fly, at no cost, …it opens up so many new levels.

A web store is a catalogue, without the printing. Without the mailing. And its instant shipping. Out of stock? Take it down the second you are, no problem. Add something that’s in the warehouse. The costs are low, if you’re willing to do a lot of the work yourself. The market is global. And growing by leaps and bounds. It seemed the most logical thing in the world to do, what can I say?

Lang: You’ve chosen Yahoo! to host your store – what were your reasons?

Wood: We went with Viaweb (now Yahoo! Store) primarily for the software and tracking capability. Whether or not we were in a mall was of little consequence in our opinion, it is the search engine listings that matter. So the choice was made purely for their systems. As we were constructing the store, Viaweb was bought by Yahoo!, which pleased us although again, the location is irrelevant in our opinion — the search engines are what will drive your traffic. Their security and back end systems for tracking visitors was the reason we chose this vendor. Also, you rent the software and space from them…so we did not have huge up-front costs this way.

Also, first impressions are so important, so you need to have a reliable location. We have not had one problem, not 10 seconds of down time since we started. This should be a major concern to anyone thinking about opening a store – the quality of their ISP — because when your server is down, so is your store and we firmly believe that you won’t get a second chance with a customer.

Lang: And did you find it as easy to set up as Yahoo! claim?

Wood: The building was done by myself and my partner, First Officer Mike. We thought it would be easy…as we also build web pages and have our own web design company, Media Collision.

However, the learning curve was brutal. They claim you can “build a store and start taking orders in 10 minutes”. While this is technically true, you can also set up a card table on the corner and start selling your wares in 10 minutes too! The Gift Ship store took two of us 32 days to build, working 12 – 14 hours a day, 7 days a week each. This includes all scans, writing all copy and the huge learning curve to understand how to manipulate their software, which is brilliant…but still required a lot of learning. Now that we know it, updates and changes are a snap. In fact, we advertise that we will build your Internet store at Yahoo! Store, with up to 50 items for $5,000 US. If we were to build the equivalent store using HTML coding, we would need to charge $15,000.

Lang: What were the major problems you incurred?

Wood: It was tough to get the merchant cards for an Internet only business. It was tough to build it on a short deadline, using unfamiliar software. We haven’t had any other major hardships, but we were well researched and had all back end systems in place before we started. We’re finding that we’re on the road to gaining people’s trust, but that is a major hurdle that needs to be overcome. We’ve received several nice comments on our products and service and of course, immediately added a page called “Customer Kudos” and posted them (with the writer’s permission). It’s not as instant as most people think. I think the waiting is tough, but it will be well worth it. We each have had experience watching Patsy Ann and Sideroad grow as Web sites as well, so we are aware of the time it takes.

Lang: Are you happy with the store? Is their anything you’d like to alter?

Wood: I think we are both extremely pleased with the design in general and particularly the collections. We’d like to get some more serious “theme” shots up, showing the home decor products in use in actual homes. We have major improvements planned and we’re implementing them as we go. I think there must always be something that you “could have done better” and thankfully with the web, you can do it better, constantly. We’re always improving it. At least one major thing every week, lots of text changes and additions every day. People comment on that all the time, so we know that its a good thing.

Lang: What are your future plans?

Wood: After about a year, we’d like to consider opening other stores that have little or nothing to do with home decor. We’re researching different segments of the market and checking out our options along several different lines. The Gift Ship will continue to grow and change as we analyse our customers needs and as we talk to them more and work with their input. Our manufacturers are constantly introducing new lines and we’ll keep rotating our collections, choosing only the best of the best.

Lang: What tips do you have for other Web merchants?

Wood:Something to watch carefully is the patterns of visitors and then to react to any changes. For example, we recently changed our front page. About 10 – 15% of our visitors were arriving on the front page and going no further. So we surfed. We checked out (once again) stores who we consider to be our competition…then we checked out stores we know do big volume…and we adapted. It’s much easier to find your way to the ship cabin you want from the front page now. I’ll know in a week or so how well it worked. And if it didn’t work, we’ll figure out what else we can try.

Even if you have to hire someone to build your pages (most people do) you MUST learn how to update and maintain them yourself, unless you’ve got enough money to hire a full time person for that. Don’t think you can just put it up and sell it. You have to be a real person, you have to be responsive, you have change your products, you have to update your site, you have to be dedicated. Eat, breathe and sleep online. If you’re going to hire someone to build it and walk away, give your money to a registered charity instead, please.

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