In March 2005, Metro Medical’s Debra Peterson began working closely with FastPivot Owners Matthew Ledford & Keith Enloe to design MetroMedicalOnline.com’s new custom Yahoo! Store.
Back before Metro Medical’s (see corporate home site) ecommerce store launched, the company had four bricks-and-mortar retail stores. One of those retail stores wanted to do an online website to expand their bricks-and-mortar offerings, so Peterson carefully evaluated a variety of online store platforms and decided to go with the Yahoo! platform because she determined it to be the one that was most all inclusive. She noted that the Yahoo! Store made it easy to build their own pages, process credit cards, and fit within the tight budget they had at the time.
Once Metro Medical’s custom Yahoo! Store was designed, Enloe came in to conduct an initial training on how to use a Yahoo! store ‚Äì which included lessons on basic html, managing the catalog, and populating the excel spread sheet with product info.
In August 2005, Metro Medical’s Yahoo! Store site went live. Everyone worked hard those first few years after launch. Peterson was spending 80-90 hours a week writing product copy, answering the phone, packing products, working with vendors and suppliers, etc. Some of the crucial strategies which helped grow the Yahoo! store during that start up period included:
1) Refining navigation so customers could more easily find what they wanted.
2) Installing an easy three click check out process.
3) Writing in-depth product copy descriptions (great for improving SEO).
4) Concentrating on cross-sells and adding a new related items feature.
During that start-up period, FastPivot was on retainer for three years at ten hours a month (SEO consulting, additional Yahoo! Store training etc.). Metromedicalonline.com also received a site facelift in mid-2007, which included a new cart and PayPal, signed on with MyAccount, and started up with Commission Junction after launching OrderMotion in 2008.
Looking back, it’s apparent that all of the time and money that was invested in Metro Medical’s Yahoo! Store was well worth it. From the time of Metromedicalonline.com’s first actual order on 8 /15 /2005 to now, revenue has soared from zero to approximately five million USD annually.
FastPivot.com designs world class custom Yahoo! Stores and mobile-design-social media upgrade solutions for those Yahoo! Stores. Contact FastPivot today to get started.
$5 million/yr? $5 million total? Big difference betweent he two, obviously.
Thanks for pointing that out Bob…blog update has been made to say “annual”