June 2019 – quinnviolins.com
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June 14, 2019 at 5:05 pm #49545
Website: https://www.quinnviolins.com/
Description: Chris from Quinn Violins states, “I started Quinn Violins in my bedroom over thirty years ago in 1986, while still in high school. The business began by offering strings and accessories for instruments like violin, viola, cello, and bass. I soon opened a small brick-and-mortar shop in downtown Minneapolis. There I expanded to provide instrument repair services, rentals, and sales.
In the late 1990’s I retooled for Internet sales and began beta testing ShopSite. And in 1998, a full three years ahead of the industry-leading retailers, quinnviolins.com launched as a secure e-commerce platform. It was a significant disruption to the music products industry, and it allowed us to capture a significant market share with no marketing budget.
Now we have six employees and 4,500 square feet of showroom, repair, and performance space. We’ve expanded into fretted instruments like guitar, mandolin, ukulele, banjo, and related products. This new division is “Fret Central” and will soon spin off into its own domain and site, so we’re well-positioned for this next round of growth.
You can watch a brief video about us here:
The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently covered our Fret Central expansion here:
Technologies Used: Chris continued, “The foundation of quinnviolins.com is on ShopSite Pro, which gives us many of the features we need as an online store. We use MySQL for vendor inventory data and for managing a mailing list of professional musicians who use a special coupon code. Active Campaign powers our email list. We have thousands of subscribers and they’re particularly responsive to our string promotions. Google Product Feed is a new tool for us, launched with our website revamp in 2018. I recently completed the SEO part of that project and it currently includes about a third of our products. We are not planning to budget for Google AdWords, because of the high cost, and lack of clarity regarding the value in generating additional revenue.
Security is important to us, so we use GeoTrust to protect user data and website pages.
We also use Comm100 to provide value to our website visitors. For example, when a customer is on a product page with big-ticket items, we reach out and tell them about current promotions that aren’t listed on the site. This ensures they get the lowest price on the products they’re interested in. Many are just shopping, but when they’re ready to buy they’ll come back knowing that we have a discount offer waiting for them.”
Advice / Tips: Chris finished, “Until a few years ago, our website was struggling with legacy technical issues. We had old static HTML pages with embedded product order links. The site wasn’t mobile-friendly, it was cumbersome to manage, and prices needed manual updating on hundreds of pages.
To help bring the site up-to-date, we asked LexiConn to recommend ShopSite developers to us. We chose David Pringle of Vortex Web Design. David was able to overcome technical challenges other developers said would be impossible. He also empowered us to do the heavy lifting of building hundreds of pages by using his templates. This saved us tremendous amounts of time and money. I’d recommend David to any ShopSite store looking for skilled yet affordable help.
You know, in the music products world, we learned a long time ago not to ignore the culture in which our customers live and work. Selling music products requires a connection to the market that honors and supports what’s important to customers. These are not just products. We give people a reason to buy from us because we communicate our sincere belief that Quinn Violins provides a valuable and needed role in the arts community.”
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