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Client Profile
We speak with Mike Ockrim, who has developed a range of sites with MightyMerchant, including a blog and forum, which relate to his business selling educational materials to school districts and teachers.
When Mike graduated from college in 2000 with his business administration degree, he went to work for his mother, who runs a teacher and school supply store in Chicago called The Education Depot. While he was there, they concentrated on growing the business through catalog sales and the Internet. His intention was to continue managing the store for his mom, but, he says, they grew to a point where it made sense to split the businesses.
Mike split off the online part of the business and formed ChicagoSchoolSupply.com and ChicagoTitle1.com (a site regarding the use of government funding in education), while his mom retained The Education Depot as a brick-and-mortar store with an associated website.
ChicagoSchoolSupply.com focuses on providing educational supplies to school districts
within the Chicago Public School system and other areas of North America, Europe and Asia. From that, Mike started SchooDoodle.com, which is a shopping portal designed especially for teachers. The orders coming through Schoodoodle are considerably smaller than the ones that come in through ChicagoSchoolSupply, and they need to be totally automated in order to be profitable. "That's one of the amazing things that MightyMerchant was able to do," says Mike. "They not only helped us to build the site that is super user-friendly, and is locked in with UPS, and that has all those different sorts of tricks automated into it, but they were able to work with our wholesaler and our supplier to build things into their backend. All the data is exchanged electronically. They update inventory every hour, they update pricing every hour, they send us UPS tracking numbers and things, which automatically get uploaded to our customers. MightyMerchant did an absolutely amazing job building our site."
Mike wasn't sure of the direction he wanted to take for the look of the sites, but with
creative input from the MightyMerchant designers, they chose primary colors and fun
photos. The sites are bright and clean, they look distinctive, and are easy to navigate.
His mother's The Education Depot site was designed by a company that publishes catalogs for different people in the education industry. They add a customized logo to the catalogs, and do the same thing for the websites, Mike explains. "They have a standard website and they just put your logo on there and your store information," he says.
The main problem with that approach is that the Ockrims had little control over the site, not to mention all the sites look the same. "But more importantly," Mike says, "they didn't build it to be search engine friendly and they did that on purpose, because if they have 100 or 200 or 1000 people all using the same websites they can't all be optimized the same."
You can tweak some of the basics, but there's no real customization and changes are expensive, which is a common trap with companies that operate on template systems. "The pricing is not that much less, if it even is less, than what someone like MightyMerchant charges," says Mike. "When you end up paying for every little change it doesn't add up. It's brutal. If you could just build it the way you want it from the start, it's worth it." (See MightyMerchant's article "Why Hire A Professional Web Design and Development Company" for a hard look at the choice between template companies and professional designers.)
Mike started ScienceFairSanity.com in July 2007 as a free resource for teachers, parents and students to download resources for their science fairs. Mike wanted to provide a place for teachers to share information about their science fairs, so MightyMerchant designed Science Fair Sanity Forum. "We're just rolling it out now to our teachers," says Mike. "Once we get into January we'll have a better handle on how the forum is working, because ScienceFairSanity.com is really just getting started now."
He also recently started SchooDoodle Blog. "We've been trying to figure out the best way to share free information with our clients to get them into the habit of visiting us and using us," says Mike. He was posting free lesson plans on his site and sending them by email, but he knew they could do more. "I started to think, 'Well, gee, if we did a blog then we could regularly post it on there,' and if we're consistent with our postings . . . then people would start to get into the rhythm of signing up for it or going to it every week." But more importantly, they'll be ranked higher in the search engines because of the regularly changing content.
Mike's strategy is to post regular features like education news, lesson plans, or product reviews on specific days of the week, so teachers know when to tune in. "Our goal is that we're trying to build this big footprint online," he says, "and we're trying to brand our company. Our postings are doing well and we've already been showing up in the top 10 on Google for different things."
Mike sees a gap in their industry, which his sites have been able to fill. "We either have people who know a lot about the industry and they know nothing about the Internet or the technology component, or they don't want to build it into their business model because they're brick-and-mortar retailers and they don't necessarily see the value in it," he says, "or you have people who are doing pretty well on the Internet because they're one of the few players out there, but they're not from our industry. They're simply people who look for opportunities on the web and saw this as a ripe market, but they're struggling because their websites aren't in tune with the industry." Mike believes that without understanding the product nuances, his competitors' site organization and categorization of items suffer, and it ultimately makes a confusing site.
Mike uses Internet marketing firm Out Of The Box to provide search engine optimization services, and follows his site metrics in Google Analytics. He saw that 60% of their August 2007 revenue was from organic listings. "We finally turned the tables from PPC, and it's attributed to a few of these different things. Out Of The Box has helped us streamline and manage and get us a great ROI (return on investment). I've been wildly happy with MightyMerchant and our online experience."
Congratulations, Mike!
We love to talk with our clients about what is working for them, and the unique features of each site. Please let us know if you would be interested in being profiled for a future newsletter!
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