Home, Garden Gifts Online Business Plan

Our website (www.countrycrockery.com) is currently producing the largest revenue stream of all Country Crockery and J-J Enterprises’ endeavors. After initial difficulties with payment processing, we enabled offline payments (phone, fax, money orders, and checks) and saw immediate and dramatic changes in completed sales. We will continue to offer these multiple payment options while highlighting the website as our online showroom/catalogue. Our website offers the flexibility of changing our listings as soon as our suppliers release new products. There is no time waster waiting for printing, and no expense to absorb for obsolete catalogues.

We will expand awareness of our Web store with increased online marketing. We will place banner ads on sites popular with our target market, and “pay-per-click” advertising with sites hosted by our suppliers (Spoontiques, Artistic Glass, etc.).

6.1 Website Marketing Strategy

Since our primary sales are from the Web store, fundamental efforts will be concentrated on drawing buying visitors to the website. Special enticements to convert the general browser to purchase will be implemented. Some of these strategies include:

1. Executing a simple and quick exit survey when no purchase occurs, to determine what deterred a potential customer from purchasing.
2. Offering e-mail sign-up notification, where e-mail address is never shared with any third party for any reason, of new products and special offers or seasonal savings.
3. Offering first-time customers a coupon discount on their next online (including phone or fax) order for referring a friend who makes a purchase online.
4. Shipping free or breaks on purchases over $50.
5. Listing the Web store on specific shopping sites (pay-per-click) for shopper leads.

6.2 Development Requirements

The Web store is established and in the process of functional upgrade. Payment processing options are in place and working efficiently. The shopping cart, which costs $200 per year, is upgraded for more benefits and is probably one of the easiest carts to navigate on the Internet.  Cooperative linking will be increased and is currently effective in producing additional indexing by search engines.  We have set up our own web host service which is paid for by current web design customers.  We have joined a linkshare program that earns a commission on purchases made by customers clicking through our site.  All our web design customer sites have links to our store, many have other external reciprocal links with other sites.