February 2013 – heartsmith.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.heartsmith.com/

Description: Heartsmith’s web site primarily features lockets in all shapes and sizes and in all metals. Lauren from Heartsmith states, “We carry the best quality lockets that can be found to offer our customers the best value/quality ratio. What separates us from the pack, in the world of locket sales, is that we source not only from the mainstream consumer manufacturers, but we lean toward the small artisan owned companies that keep our inventory fresh and unique in the eyes of our customers. Thus, we provide a unique service, our niche.

Heartsmith also provides the opportunity for our customers to engrave and personalize their lockets or other jewelry items. They can even have us insert photos for them, creating an added incentive to purchase from us, and added value to their purchase.”

Technologies Used: Lauren continued, “We have been using ShopSite for our backend since our inception, circa 1998. Our first webhost proved to be inept technically (it was the early years) and we lost valuable business hours by being down. We switched to LexiConn in early 2001 and it has been smooth sailing ever since. LexiConn is amazingly knowledgeable and fast to respond to any question or emergency. They helped our developers a lot last summer when we went through a full web redesign. LexiConn was on top of their game with their awesome technical crew.

Monsoon StoneEdge order processing software has enabled us to streamline the process from receiving to shipping and subsequent follow up and reporting. Our new website has employed the Reviews module, cart abandonment, google analytics, a blog, and social media integration. We send email newsletters, use Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. Each of these has their own merits and honestly we need every one of them. Our web developers also scripted a simple way to integrate an engraving feature onto the product information page, making the process as simple as possible for our customers to add this to their orders.”

Advice / Tips: Lauren finished, “Advice that we would endorse would be:

- Keep your website easy to use with a simple design and let your products speak for themselves. Clutter is very annoying to most customers. They want to find their product and will leave if they have to jump through too many hoops or are accosted with too much visual noise.

- Customer Service is king! Always be available and listen to the customers. They will come back, and they will tell their friends.

- Keep an eye on FedEx charges. We have discovered inequities in their live online prices and their actual costs. We don’t use FedEx ground anymore for this reason.”

[Author]

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