September 2012 – dancesupplies.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.dancesupplies.com/

Description: DanceSupplies.com is a national supplier of discount dance products, including dance shoes, dancewear, liturgical apparel, and accessories. Kory from DanceSupplies.com states, “We support many forms of dance, such as ballet, tap, jazz, liturgical, lyrical, modern, and others. Our customers range from the mom or dad looking for their child’s first pair of ballet slippers to a dance company needing tap shoes for their group’s performance, or a church group wanting outfits for an upcoming celebration.

Being in a very specialized industry, it’s paramount that our staff knows our products and understands our customers’ needs. We pride ourselves in this regard, employing not only a number of very serious dancers, but many of our staff are also dance teachers as well. There is no substitute for this expertise, and our customers can always feel confident that when they contact us for support, they are getting honest and accurate information.

While our retail location has been in business for more than twenty years, and we have had an internet presence for almost half of that time, it was only a year ago that we got serious about selling online. After reviewing other shopping cart packages out there, it became clear that ShopSite Pro was the solution we were looking for. We found it offered the perfect mix of being easy to understand while offering powerful features that would grow with our business and allow us to immediately compete with other, more established sites in our industry.”

Technologies Used: Kory continued, “One of the best things about ShopSite is its feature set. This includes not only those that are self-contained, but also its built-in integration with third party services, as well as its expandability through add-on modules. We take advantage of many of these, including Constant Contact for email marketing, Google Services (Product Search, Adwords, and Analytics), and the Product Review and Declined Credit Card Modules that LexiConn offers. We also utilize custom templates that give our store the look and feel we desired when we first built it.

One outside tool that we recommend is ShipWorks, which we use for all our order management and shipping functions. With the click of a button, all our ShopSite orders are downloaded into ShipWorks, where we can manage their status, download shipping labels in batches, print packing slips, automatically email customers their tracking number, etc.”

Advice / Tips: Kory finished, “The three pieces of advice I would give are:

1. Be sure your site is attractive with a clean design and an easy, intuitive navigation scheme. If you don’t have graphic design skills, get some assistance from an expert.

2. Understand the specific information relevant to your industry that your customers are looking for. In a clothing related industry such as ours for example, sizing and color information is critical so we try to do a good job in making that information clear.

3. Perhaps the best tip I can offer is to be sure you accept alternative payment methods beyond traditional credit cards, such as PayPal, Amazon, and Google Wallet. Because ShopSite made this so easy, we just went ahead and did this from the beginning, but were soon to be amazed by how popular it became. Almost half of our orders come in using one of these payment methods, a number that has truly surprised us.”

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