March 2012 – chinasprout.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.chinasprout.com/

Description: ChinaSprout is the largest online retailer for Chinese cultural and educational products. Joachim from ChinaSprout states, “We started our business at the nineties (in our living room) and have grown many fold over the years. The idea for the company came from experiences Xiaoning Wang, the founder of ChinaSprout, had during outings around Park Slope in Brooklyn, where she met many American families who had adopted children from China.

Our mission was to reconnect and reintroduce these children to China, to keep the heritage alive and to bring American parents closer to the Chinese culture. When ChinaSprout expanded over the years, we’ve expanded our mission (and our inventory, which now has more than 10,000 items) to include anyone with an interest in or connection to China. Today, we are serving the needs of educational institutions (libraries, schools, universities) across the U.S. and abroad to provide the best available materials for Chinese and other languages.”

Technologies Used: Joachim continued, “As with many online retailers, we have changed the appearance of our website many times. I still recall our very first website iterations created with NetObjects Fusion (which was a great web design tool at that time), followed by Macromedia Dreamweaver and finally custom template code using Smarty, which gave us the most flexibility. We also moved from php to Ruby on Rails and back to php, which was an interesting journey in itself. Interestingly, the back end database and the front end shopping cart software remained constant over the years. Since we started the business, we have relied heavily on MySQL and ShopSite, both platforms held up steadily over the years and were continuously upgraded and maintained by LexiConn.

ChinaSprout has consistently received high search rankings due to our many search engine optimizations (SEO), which helped to keep our online marketing budget in check (we only advertise for seasonal events on Google and for product ads on Amazon). Our main online marketing is focused on sending out our weekly newsletter to 40,000 recipients. Thanks to the folks at Octeth, we were able to automate the campaign management process using their OEMPro tool. Like many retailers, we are also active in social media marketing (using FB and Twitter), but surprisingly, the results for the traditional channels (newsletters, conferences, and NPR radio) remain more profitable.”

Advice / Tips: Joachim continued, “One of the things we’ve experimented with is running our own virtual private server. While this gives you a lot of flexibility and cpu power, it also comes with a lot of responsibility. You are the point person if anything goes wrong on the server. For this reason, we have decided to stay with LexiConn’s dedicated server solution, which gives you much needed peace of mind during stormy internet times.

We had also piloted other order management software solutions (including a fully hosted vendor) but came to the conclusion that the StoneEdge Order Manager perfectly fulfilled our needs. Other critical office network pieces are Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices (we are using two dual raid ReadyNAS drives) and redundant internet connections using inexpensive DSL and cable providers (rather than a T1 line).

On the shipping side, we rely on UPS and USPS (for international orders and priority main) which can integrate nicely with StoneEdge (using Endicia for USPS). Some of the challenges we (and probably many small to mid size businesses) are facing are with the accounting software (we are using Quickbooks) and inventory management (including our physical storage space, which is always a premium in New York City).”

[Author]

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