It has been a while since my last post as things have been so hectic here. I have been trying quite a few different things on my sites, as well as having loads to do on multiple consulting projects for my "day job".

So far I have talked almost entirely about my UK silk ties internet shop however I thought it would now be good to tell the story of my latest ecommerce site www.artspecialist.co.uk. The idea came to me while I was looking through a directory of dropshipping and internet wholesalers. I saw a Chinese painting studio advertising, went to their website and liked the range of paintings there. About 10 years ago I had bought a couple of reproduction paintings from an art gallery in Brighton and had really liked them, so I thought this was a good idea. I contacted the supplier and they were willing to paint to order for my customers so I didn't need to hold any stock and they would ship direct to my customers so I don't have to touch it. They also had 1000's of paintings in their catalogue so I would have a range bigger than any gallery. I did some searching on Google and eBay and while there where a couple of other people doing it in the UK and quite a few around the world, there where only a few advertising on AdWords.

I ordered an oil painting as a trial, a reproduction Dali. The quality was good and they were good to deal with so I decided to start the site. I found a suitable template that looked smart and art gallery like and bought a shopping cart from the same company that looks after my tie website. I decided to continue with the "Specialist" them with the site names and picked the .co.uk version because the .com is taken, I enquired how much they wanted for it, but they quoted more than a $1k which is too much at this stage.

I spent a couple of weeks getting a reasonable selection of artists in and putting some of them into basic categories so that it would be easy for customers to find something they like. I also worked up fairly text heavy intros for the main page and each category. For artists, I put a short life history on their category pages. I want there to be a decent amount of content to engage both site visitors and the search engines.

When I thought it looked decent enough to get started, I did some basic testing by running a couple of dummy orders through. It is really important to test well, I have picked up so many mistakes through testing and made a couple of howlers when I didn't. The two worst? For two days none of the pictures on the tiespecialist silk tie website were working after I had made some changes to the catalogue and during that time I was still spending lots of money on adwords. The most recent one was after we introduced a feature on the tie website to automatically email a satisfaction questionnaire to each customer a week after their order is despatched, unfortunately the first day it was on, it sent 22 copies of the email to every customer in our address book. Dohh! I got quite a few angry emails and had to write back to all that complained to apologise and explain.

For the first week of advertising on adwords, I was getting loads of clicks (I started with bids sufficient to be in the top 3) and after a week still do not have a single sale. Luckily I didn't panic, and on the next day I got two orders (Cezanne and Picasso) then the next day another one (Monet). We had lift off. The reproduction oil paintings were starting to sell at the rate of four or five a week after a month, and the next thing I added to the range were portraits. The portraits are painted from phographs by the Chinese portrait artists, I got some examples from them and put them up on the website. The supplier doesn't have an easy pricing system so I need to email the photo to them and they do me a different quote for each one. I have found that the portraits have all come out really well, in a realist kind of style. The oil painting portraits from photos are selling pretty well at about two a week and I am about to add the option of doing portraits in various styles via a new supplier I have found and am ramping up the advertising money I spend and search engine optimisation I do on portraits.

After two months I find I am in the position where I am making a small profit and am continuosly improving and expanding the service.