Joe Arbogast, owner of The Bird Safe Store, takes pride in his store’s values. “Old
fashioned customer service, along with seeing the safety and health of pet birds
is our first priority,” he says. Joe started birdsafestore.com in 2001, after friends
asked him to sell the toys he was making for his own birds. “We had a commitment
to safety while also providing birds some enjoyment,” says Joe. “Not just making
bird toys that look good to the humans!”
Birdsafestore.com is a specialty niche estore supplying the companion bird community
with a wide range of products, from toys to food. At birdsafestore.com you can find
“everything but the bird,” says Joe.
Birdsafestore.com had typical problems associated with online businesses. “Overstocking
too much inventory early. Not enough sales and then inventory went bad,” says Joe.
“We soon learned to manage our inventory better so that we always had fresh supply,
while also giving customers the model that we stock what we sell rather than relying
solely on drop shippers and the control you lose by doing that.”
In 2006 Joe decided to switch his e-commerce platform. I was looking for “one willing
to work with me without having to pull teeth,” says Joe. “One that looks at what
I need from a ‘merchant’s eye’ rather than a developer’s eye (and doesn’t leave
a lot of features out solely to keep the aftermarket vendors in business!)” He says,
“I was also looking for an easy backend that provided us a way to handle all assets
of the business, from managing inventory and customers, to editing and entering
orders directly from the backend.”
After Googling various sites that rated carts, getting recommendations, and evaluating
carts through user forums, Joe chose BV Software to provide his new shopping cart.
It was the “most bang for the buck,” says Joe. “An excellent backend for handling
day-to-day operations. I think the biggest feature was seeing the staff involvement
in the user forums.”
BV “provides features without doubling the cost of the software in add-ons. It provides
a stable environment with very few interruptions and errors. Things work.” says
Joe. He also likes that BV uses .NET 2.0, including AJAX features, and shipping
provider integration.
When implementing his new BV shopping cart, Joe first got set up on the learning
curve by using the demo store. The second step was “successfully importing products
and customers from the old cart,” Joe says. “This was a good process, but could
be improved if you could pull in more info, such as customer address information.”
After that, he used BV’s flexibility and took a step back to rethink the layout
of products and categories and what made the best sense to the customer rather than
for the merchant.
“It was the most bang for the buck. An excellent backend for handling day-to-day
operations.”
And has the new BV driven birdsafestore.com been successful? “So far,” says Joe.
“We’re still a bit away from the monthly dollar goals I’ve set, but BV has increased
the curve getting there.” According to Joe, BV has “made business easier, more streamlined,
and so far increased gross revenues by 20 percent.”
Joe says that birdsafestore.com is more “‘fun’ for the customers and MUCH easier
for me to manage.” He says, “I would estimate that 98% of comments have been highly
positive since the transition to BV. I was concerned about making customers ‘drill’
down an extra page, but I haven't heard complaints about that. The ease with which
I was able to design pages from the application itself, rather than having to use
another package, has enhanced customer experience.”
An entrepreneur at heart, Joe has been running his own businesses for 30 years.
“This has been the most rewarding, while also being the hardest,” he says. “A few
older customers know, but probably most don’t know just how well ‘connected’ I am
with my own birds and how much I care for birds I don’t even know.”
And as for Joe’s like and dislikes? “I like ‘fun’ and ‘simple,’” he says. “And I
don’t like stores that are “canned”—like Yahoo Stores or stores that rely solely
on PayPal for checkout. After running my own site, I’m bothered by stores that take
the “easy route.”