Unleashing a Pet Project on the Web
Steven Kirsch has practiced dentistry in Lake Forest for the last dozen years. About 18 months ago, he and his wife decided to start a home-based business for supplemental income. They chose to operate their pet business over the Internet. From selecting a Web site designer to marketing his virtual business, Kirsch has already learned a bundle about e-commerce. He was interviewed by freelance writer Karen E. Klein.
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We love animals and we knew that pet products were one of the fastest-growing retail sectors. We started from scratch, spending months going to trade shows, visiting pet stores, talking to people everywhere to learn about this industry. Finally, we took $20,000 in savings and got ready to have our mail-order catalog printed.
Then I had an epiphany: Here was the Internet, a new frontier. I thought about how I’d feel later if I’d had the chance to be a part of something at its basic inception but didn’t participate.
I didn’t have enough money to do both the hard-copy catalog and go online, so we changed our plans, decided to do six more months of research and operate the catalog strictly on the Web.
Initially we knew nothing about e-commerce or Web sites and we’d spent very little time on the Internet ourselves. We started to get to know the Internet, searched for Web designers by region and then reviewed the sites of the local programmers, talking to many of their previous customers.
We settled on one designer who bid about $10,000 for a shopping cart site with the ability to do secure transactions online.
I’ve found that being online is like direct marketing. You’re going into people’s homes, yet you’re unobtrusive because in most cases you’re invited in. You have a representative--your Web site--working for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s always accessible--we’ve gotten orders that come in at 2 in the morning--and you’re not limited by a facility to a particular community.
But getting people to your site requires marketing. I compare a start-up Web site to a business that has just taken office space in a 200-story building with no directory listing.
We paid our programmer to place us on 500 search engines initially. It took us months to get listed in the top five or 10, which we were most interested in.
In the meantime, we found other ways of marketing, mainly by making friends. We look for related sites, like animal rights groups, pet product manufacturers and dog and cat lovers groups. Every day we go out on the Internet and make contacts at 10 to 20 related sites. We review the sites and comment on them. We never post intrusive messages “advertising” our Web site. That’s crass and turns people off. Instead, we develop a rapport with people and eventually invite them to look at our site. When it comes time for them to buy something for their pet, they think of us. They’d rather purchase from someone they know than from a stranger.
The approach is time-consuming, but it costs almost nothing. We also put small ads in consumer magazines letting people know that we are online. When we started out, we registered five “hits” or visits to our site each day. We quickly went to 25 a day. By last month, we averaged 350 hits a day and we’re still growing.
We check the Web site a few times every day and download the orders we’ve received and print out the invoices. About 25% of our products are drop-shipped and the remainder of the orders we fulfill ourselves. We have gotten orders from Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Canada and several other countries just in our first seven months of operation.
AT A GLANCE
Company: CoolPetStuff.com
Owner: Steven Kirsch
Nature of business: Online sales of pet products
Location: P.O. Box 9091, Newport Beach, CA 92658
Web site: https://www.coolpetstuff.com
E-mail address: info@coolpetstuff.com
Founded: 1998
Employees: 1
First seven months’ revenue: $40,000
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If your business can provide a lesson to other entrepreneurs, contact Karen E. Klein at the Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016, or send e-mail to kklein6349@aol.com. Include your name, address and telephone number.
