(view original article here)
By James Maguire
June 18, 2004
By his own admission, Fredy Riehl is not a computer whiz. He'd rather be surfing -- that is, on water -- than juggling FTP commands and handling style sheets. But it was Riehl who built Brave New World's BraveSurf.com, and one tool in particular made it possible: Actinic, his e-commerce site building software.
"It makes me look professional," Riehl says.
Brave New World is a New Jersey-based water sports retailer where Riehl had previously worked in offline retail. But bitten by the e-commerce bug two years ago, he left to found surf gear site eWaterborn.com -- which quickly found success selling through eBay. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Brave New World -- this time to head up the company's e-commerce efforts, which had yet to produce a live, standalone storefront site.
Despite his earlier efforts in e-commerce, Riehl was still a relative newbie when it came to selling through a dedicated storefront. That's why he gives much of the credit for his achievement with BraveSurf to Actinic, which is built by a British company of the same name and is offered to the site through its hosting provider, SureSolutions, which is also Actinic's U.S. distributor.
Making It Easy
Riehl has come to rely heavily on Actinic's ease of use. Building an e-commerce site "was basically a whole new set of skills," he says. "I had worked in retail and really had no concept of the Internet."
Fortunately, the software was simple to set-up and configure. "I took the time to read the manuals and it was pretty straightforward," he says. "And the guys at SureSolutions were pretty patient with all the stupid questions we threw at them."
To his relief, Riehl also discovered he didn't need to know the software inside-out to get going. "Actinic has a huge amount of potential that I'm just starting to scratch the surface of."
Riehl administers BraveSurf.com using Actinic's two sections: the catalog section, which shows the site's inventory, and the order section, which shows all current, pending and completed orders. The order section interfaces with PayPal, which Riehl likes: It allows BraveSurf to garner sales from a larger number of customers.
Actinic's storefront keeps things simple and efficient for BraveSurf.com.
He uses the software's order processing tool each morning, gathering the orders placed overnight and checking credit card validity -- a sizable task, since the site has a huge number of customers from overseas surf havens like Brazil and Australia, and verifying their credit is a major headache, Riehl says.
Actinic also makes shipping easy for Riehl. The software integrates with World Ship, UPS's shipping software, and he uses this shipping function to create a tracking number and manage shipments.
"At the end of the day it prints out a tag," he said. "At the same time, it sends our information to UPS," he says. Actnic exports CSV (Comma Separated Values) files for the shipping company's use.
Avoiding HTML
Actinic's catalog section makes it comparatively easy to add or remove vendors, products, or look at a global or individual product view. Riehl uses the catalog function to add pictures, pricing and equipment size scales.
Better still, "Actinic, in the background, does the HTML -- I don't need to be that good at HTML to maximize the site."
Riehl uses Actinic's built-in Cascading Style Sheet support to change the look of the site with a minimum of fuss -- a real timesaver, considering that it has 3,000 to 4,000 pages.
Also helpful in page creation, the software uses static instead of dynamic pages, which Riehl prefers for search engine optimization. The pages "look like they're all individual pieces of content, which the search engines like."
Vital Statistics
Name: Brave New World Surf & Snow Shops
Founded: 1977
Sales/revenues: Undisclosed
Content management/storefront system: Actinic Business
Database backend: Cam Data Profits
Hosting provider: SureSolutions
Payment solutions: HeartLand Payment Systems
Number of employees: 155+ employees, including offline business
Number of tech staff: 2
Key strategies: • Simple, intuitive store management
• Integrated shipping controls
Riehl credits the software's creation of static pages and the resulting high search engine listing as a main sales driver. "In a short period of time we went form being a millionth-ranked site to being consistently in the top 40-50,000 sites on the Internet." (Riehl tracks BraveSurf's ranking using the Alexa toolbar, which he attaches to his browser.)
The Point
Riehl uses his site's statistic package, Plesk (also provided by SureSolutions) to monitor customer habits. The site got about 51,000 unique visitors in May, up from 34,000 in April.
One of BraveSurf's key findings gleaned from Plesk's stats: The site's information pages, which educate shoppers about surf gear, are a major traffic draw. "We've learned there's a hunger for information, so we're putting up more of them," Riehl said.
But perhaps not at the moment -- summer's here and it's time to surf. (And there really is a surf scene in New Jersey, Riehl says. "Oh yeah, go to places like Manasquan or Seaside Park, and there's a huge population of kids surfing everyday," he says, noting that New Jersey's waves are not as regular as California's but they're still pretty gnarly.)
"That's the point -- having fun," he adds, referring to both the surf and running the site. "That's the part that drives all the rest of it." |
