August 2010 – historicalemporium.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.historicalemporium.com/

Description: Historical Emporium, Inc. (HEI) is a group of online retail stores that sell reproduction Victorian, Edwardian and Old West clothing and accessories to theatres, performing arts groups, museums, and individual enthusiasts. “HEI’s products have been seen in major movies such as 3:10 to Yuma and television shows such as Heroes and Ugly Betty as well as theatre productions with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Cirque du Soleil”, states Chris of HEI.

HEI focuses on maintaining inventory of high quality clothing items that are available for immediate delivery. Customer service is available by phone to consult with customers to create the ideal look for any event, such as weddings and theater productions.

HEI’s primary store is Gentleman’s Emporium, which features entire outfits for men ranging from fancy tailcoats to business wear for the Edwardian gentleman. The Western Department features more rustic wear suitable for Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) Reenactors as well as more modern western leather items. The latest addition is the Steampunk department, which features historically inspired items reminiscent of Jules Verne, such as brass goggles, leather aviator helmets and other fine furnishings.

Technologies Used: Chris continued, “Our key technologies are webhosting (LexiConn), the shopping cart software ShopSite, in-house order management software (Stone Edge Order Manager), and customer service email management (CerberusWeb Helpdesk). Great uptime and rock solid support makes all of these vendors critical partners in our success. We also use Jungledisk for online backups of all our key systems.

Our website is made of custom ShopSite templates, and it is highly customized to achieve a distinct look and feel. We also use a number of custom written PHP scripts, including ones that shows product thumbnails on product detail pages, as well as showing random customer testimonials on certain pages, and a customer contact form for customers to reach us by email.

For marketing, we use Google, Yahoo, and MSN pay per click advertising, which is a primary source of traffic for us. We do not do any outbound email marketing, but we do use SurveyMonkey and MailChimp for customer satisfaction surveying, and Ratepoint for website product ratings.

One of our goals is to answer as many questions as possible for customers on the website, so we make product images, customer reviews and testimonials as obvious as we can, and we offer multiple touch points (800 number, email, fax, etc.) to make it easy for a customer to get their questions asked and to buy from us. We lean hard on technology to get the word out, but we want customers to know there’s a human voice to our company that’s only an email or phone call away.”

Advice / Tips: “Once you have an online customer’s attention, the biggest challenge is to create trust with the customer. Do everything you can to communicate trust, including your web design, product images and descriptions, up-front pricing, and store sales and return policies.

When on the phone with a customer, listen! If a customer calls or emails, get right back to them and listen to their questions or concerns. Even if you can’t help them, you may come away with great ideas for new products or service improvements.

Most importantly, meet your promises. Make absolutely sure you have the right people and systems in place to back up your commitments, and you’ll get the return business and word of mouth that you need to grow.”

[Author]

Posts