April 2011 – backscratcherworld.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.BackScratcherWorld.com/

Description: BackScratcherWorld.com, a member of the ITIWebStores collection of niche market web stores, went live in May of 2008 as a specialty retailer focusing on quality back scratcher products. Tim from BackScratcherWorld.com stated, “The site was an expansion of an original craft product site (http://www.HardwoodBackScratchers.com) which sold five different handmade hardwood back scratchers. Since that time, the site has expanded to over 120 products including back scratchers and other back care products.”

“BackScratcherWorld.com offers the world’s largest selection of high quality back scratchers. Useful and personal, but not too intimate, these are not the plastic and bamboo ‘junk’ you typically find at the dollar store. Hand made, exotic woods, plastic, telescopic – this store has them all and continually adds new designs. Many of the back scratcher designs are proprietary and available exclusively from BackScratcherWorld.com. With prices ranging from $10 to over $30, quality back scratchers make great gifts for everything from stocking stuffers to high end corporate promotional items at a very reasonable cost. All of them can be gift wrapped and/or priority shipped.”

“In addition to the online retail business, BackScratcherWorld.com also sells back scratchers wholesale to companies across the country. ITI has complete custom laser engraving and pad printing services available in-house for many of the back scratchers, making them ideal as personal or corporate gifts.”

Technologies Used: BackScratcherWorld.com uses ShopSite Pro as its ecommerce application, having moved to that system from the FrontPage/HTML design of the original HardwoodBackScratcher.com store. Tim continued, “ShopSite has proven to be a very flexible platform for us and allowed us to easily add new products and update existing products. It gives us a lot more flexibility to cross promote products within the store while keeping the store up to date for customers.

The custom ShopSite templates used at BackscratcherWorld.com and other ITIWebStores were developed by Merchant Corner, a leading developer of ShopSite ecommerce solutions.

BackScratcherWorld.com is hosted at LexiConn under a shared hosting plan. The fast response and expert level support of the LexiConn team is unequaled. The site is secured using a GeoTrust True Business ID SSL certificate and the company also carries an A+ BBB online business rating.

As per sales and marketing, BackScratcherWorld.com is highly SEO optimized, resulting in page one, top of page organic Google and Bing search results for most primary search terms, e.g. walnut back scratcher, quality back scratcher, etc. SEO is complimented by extensive Pay-Per-Click advertising on all major search engines. The site has its own Facebook page and does periodic customer email promotions via Constant Contact. In 2011, selected products from the store are being added to the ASI promotional product category to increase wholesale sales.

BackScratcherWorld.com tries to add back scratchers that are topical and timely. For example, we went to the creator of the Star Trek Klingon language to coin the Klingon word for ‘back scratcher’ just for us for our Klingon back scratcher. We also have our all black “Darth Scratcher” for those Star Wars fans and our new organic blue/green “Navi Scratcher” for all those Avatar fans.

Another example is our collection of pink back scratchers that is unique and only available from us. They are available in a variety of styles, make great gifts, and 10% of all sales proceeds from the sale of pink back scratchers goes directly to support breast cancer research.

Advice / Tips: Tim continued “Pick a narrow niche where you can become dominant. Once you get that position, opportunities will automatically come to you. For example, we’ve gotten several free product placements on the CBS TV hit ‘NCIS’, on NBC’s ‘Outsourced’ and several upcoming movies we can’t talk about yet. Also, our back scratchers are always featured on numerous TV, blog and print gift guides and product features around Christmas.”

[Author]

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