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(voiceover) Our first website was the typical brother-in-law or relative website, and that’s a good place to start for a lot of people, you start to develop a online presence.

JIM MARKEL: Financially speaking, probably one of the bigger “ouches” I felt was that first initial website. We were new, we were right on the leading, bleeding edge of the internet, and that first site cost over $30,000, and that hurt, and it took a few years to recover from that, but you know I just kept going with it, because I knew it was right. Your website has to communicate the brand, and it’s all about, you know, Red Oxx, when you look at what you see online, it’s what you get, it is what it is. We have lots of pictures from all around the world, our customers tend to travel a lot, and even if they don’t travel a lot they live very active lifestyles.

PATRICK PITTMAN: Having that willingness to let your company’s true nature come through, it just speaks to the kind of the authenticity and integrity that web shoppers crave. Let’s talk about a ten-second acid test that you can put your e-commerce website though. Pull up the website, take ten seconds to imagine what kinds of customers shop at this website. Can you recognize yourself in those customers? The combination of security, programming expertise, and focus on the shopping and customer experience are all things that e-commerce firms ought to bring to the table in a way that a web design firm who does all kinds of websites many not have that focus.

JIM MARKEL: You need to be involved with your website directly. And that’s one of the things that I really like about my site. I am in the backend of my site every day. I need to change the price, I need to change description, I need to turn it off when it sells out. If you can’t do those things yourself these days, forget it.

PATRICK PITTMAN: One of the things that if you are trying to evaluate your webmaster or trying to find a web partner to work with, an important criteria is, do they have that attitude of test, test again, test again and succeed, test again and succeed wildly. So, that opportunity to learn from your mistakes, to learn from what didn’t work as well and do it better the next time I think is integral to the web, because it does have that ongoing nature to it.

JIM MARKEL: The web is the ultimate niche tool. I mean, it allows you to position your niche, and then, because of the connectivity of it all, your friend or your customer who lives in Minneapolis e-mails a page to Holland, to somebody he knew from grad school. All of a sudden you’re shipping packages to Holland. And then the guy in Holland e-mails a gentleman in London, and it just starts to move. It is a web, it’s all connected.

PATRICK PITTMAN: A business owner who wants to make friends with search engines, you look at them as an opportunity to introduce your company to hundreds of would-be shoppers a day. Search engines are focused, again, on a page, not just a site, so people say “How does your site rank?” when no, it’s “How does this page rank?” We have tapped into a database that shows what kind of words people use to search out products that are relevant to the Red Oxx company. Red Oxx came back and put together an informative page on how you can get the maximum amount in your bag, how to pack the carry on to fit within the size requirements of the airlines, and within a matter of five days after releasing that article they ranked #3 on Google. The difference for most business owners is they put in a page search or a pay per click ad and they’re right their on the top and their link is there but every click through debits their credit card and it becomes this case of trying to figure out how much it costs every click coming through. Red Oxx is an example of a company that has put in place a system where every click through the article is bringing dollars in the door. So a limited analysis of that maximum carry on luggage size article, and on a per visit basis of people coming through, discovering the company, There’s a dollar sales that translates to five dollars for every visit in sales.

JIM MARKEL: Obviously, you know, we look like we are a lot bigger than we are on the internet, and that’s another plus that the internet will give you is that you can project the image that looks like you are a $20 million dollar a year business, and still be running, you know, a million dollar a year business.