I’ve gotten quite a bit of email regarding the post and decided to answer some of the better ones here so that others may benefit from my answers:

We have tried casual dress in our company and there are always those who abuse it. It got to the point where we had to go back to a strict code. This didn’t go over very well and upper management basically told us managers to tell employees to “suck it up” and “it is what it is.” I fought for the people on my team, but it fell on deaf ears. After reading your article, I’d like to approach my boss with suggestions for a dress code that we can all live with. Do you have suggestions?

Like any policy there are going to be those who try to push the boundaries to see just how far they can get away with things. When it comes to establishing a dress code, you need to take into consideration a few different things:

Environment – Dress code is going to vary for those who work in a warehouse or manufacturing facility than those who work in the customer service department. Safety must come first when coming up with what is and isn’t allowed to be worn in these work areas. For example, warehouse workers should be required to wear some type of safety shoe. You may not want to allow shorts in a warehouse for safety reasons, but the folks in the office may be allowed to. If you have machinery that has moving parts, you may require long hair to be pulled back.

Appearance – Casual doesn’t mean jump out of bed and come to work in your sleep pants. All employees, should be required to present themselves in a neat and clean appearance at all times.

Decency – That pair of short-shorts may look great on the receptionist, but is it really acceptable work attire? Jeans worn around the knees and underwear sticking out the top may be an urban trend, but do you really want to allow that in your business?

Unacceptable Garments – What is going to be on your banned-at-work list? In my companies, we had a few things that were on the list. Short-shorts, tube tops, flip-flops, baggy pants, t-shirts with logos that were not company logos, t-shirts with slogans were some of them.

Once you have your policy in place, you need to enforce it and deal with those who violate it rather than kill the policy for everyone which results in negativity across the entire organization.  One thing I’d like to add, when visitors were on-site, we asked employees to step it up a notch with their dress. To borrow a paragraph from our employee handbooks, when guests were expected “We want clean and classy. That doesn’t mean dressy, but it doesn’t mean “I’m with Stupid” t-shirts, either. We don’t want robots, but we don’t want slobs. Help us look good, feel good and not give up even a pinch of our informality or our edge.”

In regards to your comments about casual dress, define “casual.”

Polo shirts, t-shirts with company logos, plain t-shirts without logos or slogans, jeans that are not torn, shorts that are not torn or considered short-shorts, sneakers, sandals.

Having worked for you, I know your thoughts on hats. Has that changed?

Hats drive me crazy as you know! Perhaps because my mother always said, “keep wearing that hat and you’re going to go bald.” She warned me about going blind for doing something else too, but that hasn’t happened yet and I’m pretty sure baldness runs in the family.

When it comes to hats, I’m kind of old fashioned. I never wear a hat inside a building, but I realize times have changed. At one point, the only employees allowed to wear hats in the workplace were the warehouse staff at TheFerretStore.com. But eventually I gave into pressure from employees and the others on my executive team and caved. UGH! There was one exception to the hat rule – they could not be worn backwards. I’m still against hats in the office, by the way.

I hate to admit it, but I’m terrible at communicating with my employees. Which is probably why I’m struggling with my business. I don’t have the money to take my employees, I have 12, out for lunch on a regular basis, but I need to do something to improve communications and motivate them. What is something low-budget that you can recommend?

I think regular meetings with your staff are crucial and I gather you’re not doing them, which is disappointing. Your employees want to hear from you! They long to be nurtured! They want to be told about what’s going on in your business and how things are going! Open up and give them what they want. Why not bring in donuts and coffee in one morning for everyone, invite them to sit down with you as a group, and talk about what’s going on with the biz. It’s inexpensive, gets people talking and who knows, maybe your Coffee Klatch will turn into something you will do on a regular basis.

I wanted to start a company softball team with a group of my co-workers. When we approached the owner of the company with the idea he said no because there is too much liability for him. Is this true or is it him just being a d**k?

I’ll start off by saying I’m not a lawyer, only pretended to be once when I couldn’t get a telemarketer to stop calling me, and I never played one on television, radio or the Dr. Phil show. Now that I got that out of the way, I’m not sure what liability flows down to the employer if an employee is injured during an event like this, so it would be best to seek the advice of an attorney. However, we did have an attorney on staff at Solid Cactus who did require that employees who used the basketball court in our gymnasium to sign a waiver. I’m not sure if that was because it was on company property or not, so I’d ask someone who knows law about this.

I’m getting ready to hire my first full-time employee. She has been working part-time for me for several years now and I’ve reached the point where I need her full-time. What type of benefits should I consider offering her?

Well, as a full-time employee she’s going to expect to have a suite of perks! Just kidding. At minimum, you should offer her health coverage that you partially subsidize, paid national holidays, paid sick time and some type of paid vacation. Most employers require you to be employed for X number of months before paid vacation kicks in, but since she has been with you part-time for a while, I’d give her paid vacation now. Of course, whatever perks you offer your full-time employees, make sure they’re something you and your business can afford.

I’m glad you pointed out that good employees should be recognized. I’ve been working for the same company for almost five years now and I consider myself a good employee. I work customer service and always get high scores from my supervisors, but the company does nothing to recognize us for our work. I know other people who work customer service at other companies and they get awards, certificates, prizes, they even have a raffle for an all expenses paid vacation once a year for the reps who get a certain score on their annual review. While I like where I work, it sucks not getting a simple “thanks for a good job” from my boss or anyone else in the company.

Wow. I can understand how you feel and I’m sorry your managers have learned to live with that type of work environment. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also a fact that many companies operate this way. I often hear of companies that treat their employees as collateral rather than people and I wonder just how they manage to keep employees coming into work each day. As business owners, managers and supervisors, we all need to remember and recognize the people who work for us – after all, without them we’re nothing. I would suggest getting a group of fellow employees together to discuss this outside of work and get your ideas together for how you can better improve the workplace then ask to schedule a meeting with upper management and bring your ideas to them. If the managers are worth their salt and salary, they will accept your meeting and rise to the challenge to make your place of work one their employees want to come to each day.

Just wanted to say I printed your column out and am going to go over the things you discussed next week during our managers meeting. You gave me some great ideas that I want to implement in my own company, so thank you!

Glad I was able to help. Print, share and give to other business owners as well in the hopes that they too can better the work environment for their employees.

That’s all for now. Keep your comments and questions coming. Drop me a line using the box on the right side of the page.

Just like you need to provide a great experience for your customers, you need to provide that same great experience to the people who are the direct link to the folks with credit card in hand – your employees. After all, these are the guys and gals who act as the “face” of your company when they’re speaking, emailing or interacting in person.

Let’s face it, we’ve all had that one “awful” customer experience that keeps us from doing business with a particular company. Whether it be a bricks-and-mortar retailer, a restaurant, or an online store, if we’re given bad service or treated poorly by an employee, chances are we’re not going back.

Bad employee behavior is often times a direct result of poor management and lack of motivation. If you’re a fan of Kitchen Nightmares, Mystery Diners or Restaurant Impossible, like I am, you see examples in every episode where a lack of leadership and pride in people’s work results in employees providing poor service to paying guests.

You don’t need to have a management degree from some highfalutin’ college to properly manage your staff. Most of the principles of employee management are basic fundamentals derived off the famous Golden Rule – “treat others like you would like to be treated yourself.”

It may sound trite, but at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.

The two companies I’ve owned had fairly large employment numbers. TheFerretStore.com had a staff one person shy of 50 and was a mix of part- and full-time employees in various capacities. From executives and managers to warehouse workers and customer service representatives, the workforce had varying degrees of skill sets. At Solid Cactus, we had close to 200 employees, the majority being full-time skilled positions that required a college degree.

In both companies structure was key to the organizations success. Each “team” had their managers and supervisors who reported to the GM who reported to the executive team. Employees knew who their supervisors were so there weren’t any blurred lines of responsibility.  Blurred lines result in conflicting messages, finger-pointing and a big mess that only results in frustration.

When it came to culture and lifestyle at the companies, this is where I think we shined and what made people want to come work for us:

Casual Environment – When I left the corporate telecommunications world in 1996, I threw my suit coats, dress shirts and ties in the garbage. They were replaced with t-shirts, shorts and sneakers. That’s what I was comfortable working in and it made me more productive. Just because you require your employees to dress for work as if they were going to a cocktail reception, doesn’t make them better employees. People want to be comfortable at work, so let them! While an established dress code is something you need to put in writing, make it casual. Obviously you don’t want warehouse workers walking around in flip-flops, so when coming up with your dress code, think carefully. A comfortable workforce is a happier workforce!  One of the things we did in both companies was had a constant flow of t-shirts designed featuring our different store names, brands, etc that we would give out to employees at no charge.  A few bucks for a t-shirt went a long way for building good-will with the team members and supported our marketing efforts as well!

Communication – Many businesses fail miserably at communicating with employees. Lack of communication results in employees having conflicting information regarding policy and procedure, it breeds rumors and false information and often times can lead to more serious damage such as dissension. The larger the company, the harder you have to work at properly communicating with employees. There are many ways you can communicate with your employees depending on the size of your organization. Employee newsletters, email blasts, staff luncheons, department and team meetings held on a regular basis are things that come to mind. At Solid Cactus, I ,along with members of our executive team, would take a department to lunch every Friday. We’d get a private dining room at a local restaurant/hotel where we would listen to what the employees had to say, take suggestions, and find out what’s going on with them. Once a quarter, we would have a quarterly staff meeting where we would shut down operations for a few hours, gather at a hotel ballroom for lunch and a meeting. Each department manager would present what his/her department was up to and what they were working on so everyone in the organization was aware of what’s going on in the company. Of course, I’d get up tell a few jokes, get booed at, dodge a few tomatoes then retreat and listen to the rest of the presentations.

Extra Curricular Activities – One great way of invigorating employees and boosting morale within an organization is to have some fun after work – or even during work for that matter. Again, depending on the size of your organization, put together some fun events that your employees and their family can participate in. Think “Water Park Wednesday” or “State Park Sunday.” Take the group for an outing they will have fun at! You don’t have to get too carried away, a night of bowling or a trip to the movie theatre to see a hot flick are great ways to thank your team members for a job well done.  Shutting down an hour or two early for a game of softball can’t hurt either.

Let Them Eat Cake – Food is a great motivator and a great way to thank your employees for giving their all. If you had a great sales week and everyone worked extra hard to get as many orders out the door, surprise them by having pizza brought in for lunch. The 4th of July is coming up, why not get a grill and do some BBQ for the team? During the summer months, I’d grill lunch for both TheFerretStore.com and Solid Cactus employees until we got to a size where I’d need three or four grills to keep up! Is it a scorcher outside? Call the local ice cream truck over to provide frosty treats for the group. We had a great local dairy, Hillside Farms, who would do this for us and it was a big hit. Then a couple times a year we would have a catered lunch to celebrate company milestones or a holiday.

Recognize Greatness – When you have stellar performers, they should be recognized. At each one of our quarterly staff meetings we would recognize those top performers and those who reached a milestone year of service with the company and present them with an award. A simple pat on the back, a “good job” and a simple “congratulations” goes a long way in making an employee feel that they’re a special part of the organization. Take time to recognize those who are helping your company be a success!

Be Flexible – We’re all human. We all have things that crop up unexpectedly. We all have family and family comes first. While we would all love to have our employees working a set schedule, you have to realize that’s not always possible. If you have an employee who needs to adjust their schedule for a few weeks because of a family issue, don’t make their situation any more difficult – work with them to accommodate them the best you can. This is one area that can sour an employee quickly! You need to provide your employees with a work / life balance that works for both of you.

One thing to remember when creating a culture within your company is that work is work. Yes, you can make work a fun place that people want to come in to every day without it being an unsupervised Romper Room. What I talked about above are just some of the things I’ve done in my own companies to keep employees happy and motivated. It’s also what played a key part in making Solid Cactus one of the “Best Places for Work in PA,” out of the nearly half-million companies in the Commonwealth, for three consecutive years prior to being acquired by Web.com.

The moral of today’s story is – happy employees make for happy customers! What are you doing for your team members?

I read your comments the other day about the new store owner who was looking for advice on getting people to his store. As a new store owner myself, I sympathize with anyone trying to break into eCommerce, as it seems there is one challenge after the next. I know that getting my site into the search engines takes time and a lot of work and I’m fine with that. But having inventory sitting on a shelf waiting for someone to come and buy it is killing me. I tried to run some paid ads on Google and Bing, but I don’t know if they’re working and I’m confused if I really even set them up properly. When I search for things on my site, the ads come up, but this is so new to me I don’t know what I’m doing. I have money to spend, so I’m not operating on a shoestring, but that money has to last me through my startup period, are there companies that can help me but not rob me? -Kerry.

Hey Kerry,

Congratulations on becoming an eCommerce store owner. I checked out your site and it looks great! Glad to see you hired a design firm to give your store a professional look, that does go a long way in instilling customer confidence and showing that you’re serious about your business.

When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, you’re right. It’s confusing. You need to know what you’re doing or you will burn through money faster than a trust-fund baby. You need to make sure your ad copy is compelling, you’re targeting the proper keywords and most importantly – the ads are generating a positive return on investment. Since you’re new, there is plenty of time for you to learn the ins-and-outs of PPC as you grow your business. But like you said, inventory collecting dust isn’t helping your bottom line.

There are plenty of companies out there who will be more than willing to manage your online advertising for you. For a fee. In the interest of full-disclosure, the company I co-founded, later sold and continue to collect a check from, offers managed pay-per-click services as well as a host of other Internet marketing services for small businesses. Since you decided to build your site on the Yahoo! Store platform, in addition to Solid Cactus, I can recommend another firm that I’m familiar with – Exclusive Concepts. Like Cactus, they offer the same type of marketing services for businesses of all sizes.

Expect to pay either a flat-rate or a percentage of ad-spend, usually 10 – 20%, in addition to signing a contract for an average minimum of six months. A firm hired to manage your accounts will provide you with reports that shows ad spend, conversions and ROI so you know just how things are working out for you.

I encourage you to check out the companies I mentioned as well as others you may find online. Don’t be afraid to ask for references that you can ring up and see how the company is performing for the store owner.

I hired a firm to do a free SEO review of my website and one of the things they came back to me with was a warning about sites linking to mine. They said I should reach out to the store owners and request the links be removed. I don’t recall having asked for links to be placed on these sites, but I did hire a firm a few years ago to handle certain marketing tasks. I thought links to my site were a good thing, but now I’m being told they’re not. What do you think I should do? -Florian

Florian, sounds like the firm you hired may have bought links for you and placed them on sites that Google would deem “questionable.” In the past, this was a common practice, but as we all know… in the world of search engine optimization, things change constantly.

Keep in mind, not all inbound links are bad. Links on sites that are considered an authority by Google won’t hurt you. These are generally sites that feature good, quality content, have a good following of readers/visitors, are on-topic and aren’t spammy. One example of a good link to your site would be an article written on the subject matter of your site, that’s placed on a high quality blog, with a link to your site within the article and maybe one or two other links to external (authoritative) sites. An example of a bad link would be on one of those old fashioned text link pages that not only looks like spam to us, but Diablo to the search engines.

If you have a list of the sites that link to you, visit each one to see if it’s a site you really want to have a link on. If you think it’s a site that’s hurting your rankings, request for it to be removed. Link building isn’t dead, it just took on a new form.

My nephew just told me I should make videos for Vine. What is it and should I? -Melanie

Melanie, Vine is yet another social application designed to distract us from the real world and spend more time in front of our computers and iThingies. Officially though, Vine is an app for your phone that allows you to take six second videos of things and upload them so you can share with those who really get into this stuff.

There are companies out there doing these mini-videos and doing them well, but like anything, it takes time to create one that is going to go viral and provide meaningful benefit for your business. Experiment with it and you’ll find that by coming up with an idea, storyboarding it then doing six second take after take, you spend more time than it’s probably worth.

Many may disagree with me on all the points I made above about Vine, but how many of these things do we need? There simply isn’t enough time in the day to hang out on all these social media sites any more. It’s getting a little crazy! We’re becoming to connected to these websites and too disconnected from the reality of life around us.

But I digress. Vine is still very new. I don’t see it adding any value to your marketing efforts at this point in time. I’d like to hear from others if they have had any success with Vine this early in the game.

We’re investing in some high quality video equipment to do our own product demonstration videos which I’m very excited about. Some of our products have more detail than others and we’re wondering just how long a video should be? What are your thoughts? -Robbie

Well, Robbie. I wish there were a good answer for this, but there isn’t. For product demo videos, you should try to spend as much time as you need to get the most important, key features of your product in front of your viewers. But that doesn’t mean spending ten minutes describing an iPad case.

Unless you have really engaging content, I don’t think most people are going to stick around to watch a video for more than 3 minutes. That’s just me and my short attention span speaking. I believe you’re going to get more views and shares if you hit key features in a fun and engaging manner in a 90 to 120 second video. I know, I’m not sticking around for more than two minutes unless there’s so compelling I can’t take my eyes off the screen.

Like any method of marketing, the best thing you can do is experiment with videos of different length to see which ones get the most engagement from your followers and then use your findings to create videos that will generate the most bang for your buck.

Your article yesterday about handkerchiefs was very amusing, but I must disagree with you. Women don’t use handkerchiefs to blow their nose, we carry tissues for that. I can’t speak for what guys use them for, but I would tend to think us women are a little more dainty with our handkerchiefs. -Alison

Alison, I would love to think that as well, but I’ve seen far too many women use these as if they were mucous sample collection containers. And that’s far too disgusting for me! So dainty or not, please use them as a fashion accessory only and use a Kleenex for blowing.

Gesundheit!

The thunderstorm just passed and the sky began to clear as we sipped Chardonnay at a quaint cafe tucked away on one of Worth Avenue’s vias. As the steam rose from the drying cobblestone, I grabbed my napkin to dab the bit of moisture accumulating on my brow as I commented (bitched) about how hot it was for 6:30 at night.

When I put the napkin back on my lap, my lady friend said, “that reminds me, look what I bought today.”

She reached under the table to take out a nicely wrapped parcel bearing the name of the fine linen company that has called Palm Beach home for the past 90 years. “I bought a pair of Ferragamo’s too, but I want you to see these.”

Like a six year old on Christmas morning, she ripped open the aforementioned nicely wrapped parcel and showed off two handkerchiefs. One linen, the other silk, both  with her first initial embroidered into the delicate fabric.

“I paid $46 for this one,” she said as she felt the fabric pass between her thumb and index finger. “The edges are hand rolled.” I shrugged my shoulders as if I was confused as to what that meant. “You don’t appreciate fine things,” she snipped.

While I do appreciate the finer things in life, like caviar served on a Ritz cracker with a schmear of Cheese Whiz, paying $46 for something to blow my nose in isn’t high on my “fine things” list. I’d much rather spend that money on a few new baseball caps since some of mine are in dire need of replacing. (Hint: send me one with your company’s logo on it, and spare me from wasting money. Email me for my address. Thanks.)

Our server reappeared with wine bottle in hand to refill our glasses. It was then when I realized that a cold glass of Riunite Lambrusco over ice would be more refreshing than this warmer-than-the-weather vino we were swirling around and sniffing like two connoisseurs of the finest Dago Red.

As she reached to unwrap the silk handkerchief, I stopped her. “I don’t need to see it. I think handkerchiefs are vile, disgusting things.”

The look on her face reminded me of the time I suggested she was a Republican.

I have a hard time trying to figure out at what point in time Emily Post was so high on whatever they got high on in those days that it became acceptable to blow your nose in a piece of cloth, fold it up, stick it in your purse or pocket and continue to use it over and over again as you go through the day.

My father always carries around one of these disgusting, germ filled rags. I remember once as a small boy, forcibly pushing him away when he went to wipe my face with the handkerchief he pulled from his pocket.  I used to plead with my mother to toss them in gasoline and light them on fire instead of throwing them in the laundry to swirl around with other pieces of clothing.

Let’s face it, the ladies who lunch may find it fashionable to pull out a $46 piece of linen out of their $2100 Jimmy Choo bag while noshing on prawns in order to dab away the mucosa trying to escape their nasal cavity, but I find it repulsive.

Somewhere along the line, others shared my opinion and invented the disposable tissue that has come to be commonly known as the Kleenex. Use it once, toss it in the trash. Need another? A fresh, sanitary, unused one is waiting for you. Unlike the handkerchief, which is used time after time throughout the day to catch nasal drippings, a loose crumb in the corner of your mouth, a dab of stray lipstick, or to remove a bat hanging from the cave, the Kleenex is one and done.  The handkerchief, on the other hand, is put back into a purse where it takes on a life of its own transferring germs, that could have been in a trash can, onto other belongings like keys, a wallet, a lipstick tube, etc.

Just the thought of it, sends chills down my spine and a rumble through my lower intestine.

By the end of the day, this fine piece of linen is holding more germs than a cat’s litter box.

As I expressed my opinions of the handkerchief, I wasn’t making any headway into convincing her to use it as a decorative accessory rather than an expensive snot rag. I pleaded with her to opt for a Kleenex if she needed to use a handkerchief when with me.

“Isn’t the monogramming nice?” she asked.

I agreed, asked for our separate checks and suggested we go back to the linen shop.

“I’d really like to see if they have reusable toilet paper.”

A recent inbox update to Gmail made things a little easier by breaking out messages into tabs called Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. Less important email gets dropped into those buckets while the more important stuff gets dropped into the inbox, now labeled Primary. But despite that minor improvement, I’m finding it harder and harder to end the day with an empty inbox.

Over the past month or so, I’ve taken a proactive approach to limiting the number of emails that hit the inbox by unsubscribing to marketing emails from my favorite retailers and hitting the “Report Spam” button each time I get something I didn’t sign up for.

Those actions got me thinking about something. The future of email marketing.

There’s nothing I hate more than coming home, walking to the mailbox and pulling out all the crap that gets stuffed in there. The newspaper-like coupons, supermarket circulars, coupon magazines, postcards from the dentist who just moved into the neighborhood and is looking for patients, and those official looking envelopes that promise imprisonment if I put it in the bottom of the cat’s litter pan. After I search for the latest issue of “Leg Show” among the junk, I toss everything else right in the trash, without giving it a second thought that I might be missing out on a coupon for a buck off Bounty.

Like me, I’m sure you’ve learned to tune out those forms of advertising as well, making the only people excited to receive them the garbage men who will have a job forever as long as money is still spent mailing that crap.

But as we get more and more solicitations via email, are we slowly tuning them out as well? I tend to think the answer to the question is… yes. Today, when I get a promo email, if it’s a merchant I don’t typically do business with, or one who’s products I just don’t have an interest in, I unsubscribe. I tend to only keep the emails coming from stores I shop at regularly and who offer me a coupon that makes me want to go back and shop some more.

I just don’t have the time to weed through the noise. Or as I said to someone the other day, I don’t want my inbox to become Twitter.

While email marketing is still a successful and viable marketing channel for eCommerce store owners, I wonder how much longer that trend will continue. For the most part, the same content stores are pushing out in an email to their subscribers is also being shared on their social media pages, making your membership in the “exclusive” email club not so exclusive anymore. If I can get the same content from my favorite brands on Facebook, why should I subscribe to their email list?

Before you answer that, I know that if I let a whole day go by without checking Facebook, I may miss out on the once-in-a-lifetime, second annual, going-out-of-business, 33% off sale on all genuine horse hair fishnet stockings at StripperClothes.com. But, if I’m really interested to see if there are any deals going on when I need to buy something, I head to the retailer’s Facebook page or go directly to their website to see what’s new. I may miss out on an exclusive coupon, but are there such things anymore?

As a child of the 80′s, I remember the day video killed the radio star. If my uncle from north Jersey was still making book, I’d lay odds on social media killing the email marketing star in the next few years. Don’t hang the crepe and break out the black veil just yet, you’ve got some time to keep using email marketing to your advantage and hopefully persuade people like me to not hit the unsubscribe button.

How? Here’s what I’m looking for if I’m on your email marketing list and want to continue hearing your message:

• Make me an offer I can’t refuse. Let’s face it, we’re all cheap (or as my lady friend would say, “thrifty”). Give me an offer that is going to make me come and shop at your store. $5 off a $100 order ain’t gonna do it. But a BOGO, 30% off, free gift with order, or even free shipping may be just enough to make me come on over and drop a dime.
• Make me feel special. I mentioned before about being on that “exclusive” list. Make me feel exclusive! Why should I remain a subscriber if you’re going to post that exclusive offer on your Facebook page and on your website so every Tom, Dick and Randolph can claim it. Treat your subscribers to something special and make them feel part of an exclusive club.
• Don’t make me hit that button. If you hit me with too many emails, you’re going to face the unwanted unsubscribe. I know some retailers push out an email or two a week and they may be successful doing that. But in my case, I don’t have the time or willingness to hear from you more than the three year old next door who calls me “daddy” for some odd reason. Two or three times a month, in my book, is about all I want to hear from you.
• Keep it simple. If I wanted to read a book, I would. Don’t ramble on in your email about how wonderful your $15 coupon is and how many of your amazing new products I can fit in my linen closet. Give me an eye catching graphic that tells me visually what the offer is without having to wade through sentences and paragraphs of text. You’re not J. Peterman. Although, I would love a pair of Himalayan Walking Boots.
• Make it look great. If you look like a three dollar hooker working South Beach next to an $800 an hour lady of the evening, you’re outta here. Invest in hiring a designer to build you the Mercedes-Benz of email templates that you can use to push out professional looking emails. Image is everything, and if you look cheap, chances are we’re breaking up. For good.

Well, that’s enough for today. My inbox is rapidly filling up and I’ve got a Bloody Mary that needs to be taken care of. I need to decide which to prioritize.

I include myself in that number, as I tend to always read reviews before buying. But, I’m not one to sit down and write a review, unless I feel very strongly one way or another about the product I just bought.

The product review topic came up today on one of the eCommerce forums I frequent. The original poster, who just had reviews installed on his store, was asking others if they allowed reviews from non-customers to be displayed on their store.

Some of the eCommerce store owner’s answers to the question went like this:

“My site isn’t a forum for disgruntled people to vent on every place they can find to trash a product. Coherent negative reviews are fine if from a customer.”

“A review, any review, from a customer should be published as long as it’s on topic. Non-customer reviews should not.I wouldn’t take non-customer reviews of any kind.”

“… [if] the person does not seem to be a customer, and you feel the review does not add value to the product description or seems to be totally out of line, or is hurtful to your business, I would delete it.”

Maybe it’s me, but I think some of the answers given were contradictory to why we install product reviews on an eCommerce website!

First off, product reviews are designed to provide prospective buyers with some form of “real world” examples of how the product is working for people who bought it. If I’m dropping $500 on a new Dyson vacuum, I want to read the fluffed-up marketing copy (aka product description) but I also want to hear from actual users who bought it. I want to read whether someone with a shedding dog is having good or bad luck removing fur from carpeting because I’m looking for a vacuum to do just that. If I read a few reviews from people who say this particular model isn’t picking up dog hair very well, chances are I may look at a different model.

Whether or not the review was written by someone who purchased the vacuum from that particular store or not, isn’t a concern of mine. My concern as a potential buyer, is whether or not the damn thing works good or not!

As an eCommerce store owner, my concern with a review written by a non-customer shouldn’t be whether or not I should allow the review on my site or not. The decision to post a non-customer review should be based on whether or not the review provides valuable information that can help a potential customer make a purchasing decision.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

So what about a negative review? Lets face it, there will never be a time when every single customer is going to be happy with an item they purchased. The underwear I bought last weekend, well, they’re like a cheap hotel. No ballroom. But, I’ve worn this particular brand of briefs (yes, briefs) for years and they’ve kept the boys happy. If I choose to write a review, I may point out that the last batch I bought seems a little more “basket enhancing” than other pairs I own, but does that mean the store owner should not publish my review?

Certainly not.

If I wrote something along the lines of, “Bought these, and they suck. Never again!” Well, that review should never see the light of day on any website.

Consumers expect to see a mix of good and bad review for any product, and it’s up to them to sort through them and base their ultimate decision on their overall impression of what others thought of the item. If a consumer sees only positive reviews from customers, chances are they’re going to give less weight to the validity of those reviews and may go elsewhere.

So, what about product reviews? Here are my three rules for product reviews:

1. Accept and publish well written, coherent reviews that provide useful information that will help the customer make an informed purchasing decision.
2. Accept reviews from both customers and non-customers as long as they meet the criteria described above. Most product review features available for eCommerce stores, including Star Product Reviews from Solid Cactus, identify “verified customers” with some sort of graphic to show that this person actually bought this item from the store who’s website you’re on.
3. Negative reviews should be vetted just as if it were a positive review using the same criteria described in bullet point 1. If the negative is inflammatory in nature or you feel it was written as a “revenge” review, trash it.

Ultimately, the decision to trash or publish a review on your site is yours. But reviews are designed to provide transparency between what the product claims to do and what it does in reality. By not giving your potential customers the ability to see the good and bad side of a product, you’re forcing them to look through frosted glass.

Sure, there are plenty of very successful eCommerce stores out there. Mine were generating $12M in annual revenue when they were sold in 2007, but getting sales to that point wasn’t something that was done in a few months. It took years. And patience. And money.

I’ve helped entrepreneurs for nearly 20 years by offering advice and real world experience to help them be successful online and I always use a cliché I absolutely HATE using. “The Internet isn’t the Field of Dreams.” Unfortunately, many think they can spend a couple grand, open a store, and like magic people are going to find it and start ordering.

I think I just heard you say, “no shit, Scott.”

At least two times a week, I get an email from a new store owner pleading for help in getting them orders. While I sympathize with them wanting to be that overnight success we all dream of, I have to shock them back into reality by telling them that just because they’ve been online for less than a year, the membership card for the Millionaire’s Club isn’t coming in the mail just yet.

Unless you’re selling an instant cure for gonorrhea.

When that email hits my inbox, I spend a few minutes taking a look at the store, offering some advice and explaining that being an eCommerce store owner takes work. Lots of it. And if they stick to it, devote money to advertising, marketing, customer service and all the other components that go into running a successful store, they will eventually be on the path to success.

The other day, I got one of these emails. I did my usual response to the store owner, but I also threw it out to my Facebook followers and said, “How would YOU answer this email?”

Here’s the email that I received:

Scott,

I started a store about three months ago. I get somewheres [sic] around 10 sales a week. I need more but I have no money to spend on internet ads. Can you help me get more sales?

Here are the responses, unedited and some humorous, from my Facebook peeps:

Joe P: You’re selling your products for too little margin. Be creative with packaging and marketing and try to find a way to maintain your volume of sales, while increasing your margin.

Kevin R: That’s normal for us too. Hard times. We really wish that we could do more to reach out and find ways that they could grow with little to no investment… Unfortunately, business just doesn’t grow without investing. Those of us that have grown remember the Mac n’ Cheese only for weeks on end.

Bob B: Use a branded Facebook page along with Twitter to push people seeking your product to your store. Talk it up, blog it up.. FREE. Use proper hashtags and invite comment .. ask open ended questions, offer a coupon code. activity is the key to the NEXT level.

Farukh S: While this is not a step by step approach… it let’s you know the right/long term way of everything that you need to be involved in to grow sales/brand: https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc1/575867_10151414097856246_178700067_n.jpg

Jamie M: E-mail market to your current customers. There are many platforms that offer it for free up to X number of subscribers. Find products that compliment the products they already bought and use them or cross/upsells and e-mail marketing. Do social media and get the customers you did sell something to to join and market those products that compliment what they bought. Signup for as many marketing services out there that you can find that arrange their compensation based on conversions, meaning revenue share, so that you only pay for sales that happen and not some monthly service. Insert fliers in your outgoing orders to market other products or services. Call the customers who did buy to check and see if they had any questions about what they bought and maybe sell other items by gently suggesting the benefits they would garner by doing so – plant the seed. Recruit affiliates and simply use your Yahoo tracking links to avoid hefty network fees in the beginning. Offer multiple unit pricing. Create combos of products that go together to raise average order value. Ask your suppliers for co-op dollars to help with paid advertising costs. Bid on mis-spellings of the actual product names in PPC engines to lower costs. I can go on forever…

James R: Sure, I’ll send this to all my FB friends and urge them to buy from you, and if that doesn’t generate enough sales, I’ll personally order as much as you need to get on your feet. Because I’m that nice a guy.

Shirley T: Everything that Jamie M said and barter for ad dollars somebody must be willing to help him out and take some products in trade.

Joseph K: Get some scantily clad drunk whores to dance around with your products. Be sure to make a video of this and put it on YouTube. Don’t forget to include your URL in the video.

Don’t dis Joseph K’s answer just yet. A funny video that goes viral can drive sales. Not sure what he described would fit that definition, but you get the point. Thanks everyone for your great comments. I wanted to include them here for those that don’t stalk me on Facebook, can benefit from your answers as well.

I’ve taken enough time away from you for today…. don’t you have your own Field of Dreams to plow on a Saturday afternoon?

(Before you get all, “you’re watching a competitor’s webinar” on me, let me digress for a moment. When Joe Palko and I sold Solid Cactus to web.com in 2009, Joe stuck around for a while before moving on to become Chief Marketing Officer at 3dCart. I continue to be gainfully employed at the big SC where Scott Sanfilippo is both my name and title, the latter of which is usually followed by the letters, UGH.)

Duane presented for a little over an hour. He discussed the history of SEO from the early days where keyword stuffing and hiding white text on a white background was considered the norm, to today where it’s all about providing useful, relevant content that users and search engine spiders find interesting and “natural” enough to get your site indexed.

If you have an hour to kill over the weekend and you’re looking for ways you can help your site’s SEO efforts, I encourage you to watch Duane’s presentation. It’s well worth the hour.

While I’ll let you pull your own take-aways from the webinar, there were a few that I’ll point out here that I feel are relevant for us eCommerce store owners:

Social Media
For those of you who think Social Media isn’t a factor in SEO, think again. Your company’s activity on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the others is indeed factored into your credibility online – or “authority” as the search engines call it. The more relevant, sharable, unique content you push out to your fans and followers, coupled with the number of times they are liked, +1′d and shared goes into the mysterious algorithms the engines use to determine rank.

In the social sphere, Duane noted that unique content is important. If you’re sharing things on your walls or in your tweets that a gazillion others have shared, you’re not helping. The search engines are going to look at who the original provider of that content was and consider them the authority, not you. So the more unique content you can provide your followers, the better.

Another point he made that I found interesting, is Bing’s relationship with Facebook. Once you connect your Facebook account with Bing, they use your Facebook activity to tailor search engine results based on that activity. While Google uses the less popular Google+ to do this, Bing has quite an advantage by the tie-in they have with Facebook which has a user-base the size of Texas compared to G+’s Sheboygan sized base.

Other social media take-aways:

• Don’t buy followers! I’ve never been a fan of those companies who buy likes just to make themselves look good. The search engines are on to this practice, so avoid it. Duane suggested staying away from clicking the “Boost Post” button and sponsoring your Facebook posts to get additional fans, as this has the same effect as buying followers. 
• Posts with links are perceived by the search engines as being more credible than those without. But don’t fret, you don’t need to include a link on every tweet or post you make. 
• Like everything else to do with SEO, unique content is what users are looking for, and it’s what drives them to return to your page and follow you. 
• Watch your follower/following count. Duane says the search engines are smart enough to know that if you have 20,000 followers and you’re following 18,000 people, you don’t have the time to keep up with those 18,000 people’s tweets. So skip the auto-following of those who follow you and only follow those you feel you want to receive tweets from.

Mobile Commerce
mCommerce is all the rage with eCommerce store owners. We know that more and more shoppers are using their smart phones and tablets to place orders and that trend is only going to increase year over year. While it’s important that we embrace mobile commerce and adapt our websites to enable shopping on mobile devices, there are some things we need to change that we’ve done in the past.

One of the things Duane recommends is dropping the m. domains, if you can, that we have become accustomed to. He points out that many times, these m. domains produce duplicate content that can work against you – as we already know.  (Hang in there, if you can’t do this…. put the razor blade away and read on, it’s not all bad!)

So, what does he recommend? Responsive design.

Responsive design is becoming more and more popular as the number of people browsing the web are doing so on their phones and tables. A site built responsively is built once but programmed in such a way that it displays optimally across all platforms – phones, tablets, desktops and laptops – with just one URL and one site to update.

I wrote about responsive design previously and how you should give it some serious consideration if you’re going to be embarking on a redesign soon. So, skip the mobile version, forget about creating an app for your store and just invest the time, money and effort into picking a designer/programmer who can give you a responsive website that looks great and functions just as good across all devices.

It’s important to note that many platforms don’t fully support responsive design yet. For my fellow Yahoo! Store owners, this includes you. Although I know one developer who has launched a responsive design package. King Webmaster has been creative enough to manipulate the Yahoo! Store checkout to be responsive.

If you’re on a platform that does not currently support responsive design, you can keep using the m. domains or a sub directory for your mobile pages, but it’s recommended you restrict spiders from accessing those pages through your robots.txt file to avoid the duplicate content issue. While search engines are probably smart enough to figure out that one page version is mobilized while the same content on another isn’t, it’s better to be safe than sorry and go with the restriction if you can.

Page Rank
Google Page Rank has been something we all used to determine the “popularity” of a website. But is Page Rank relevant today? According to Duane, no. So don’t get hung up on it.

Webmaster Tools
Both Google and Bing offer a set of webmaster tools. Most of us are probably pretty familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, but how many of us have dived into Bing’s? As someone who uses Google for everything except doing my laundry, I admit I haven’t given Bing’s Webmaster Tools a test drive. But after yesterday’s webinar, I’m going to kick the tires.

In addition to the features found in Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers some additional ones which include: organic keyword research, rank stats, index stats, index tracker, canonical alerts, SEO report, SEO analyzer, and a link explorer.

So go ahead, and check it out.

These are just some of the things that I found interesting from the webinar, but there were plenty of other gems discussed that you may get some value from. Again, I encourage you to watch Duane’s presentation and put some of the practices he discussed into play in your own business.

Right now, the way sales tax laws are written, eCommerce merchants are required to collect sales tax only in states which they have a presence in (aka nexus). That means if my online peanut butter store has an office in Pennsylvania and a warehouse in Florida, I would be required to collect taxes on orders shipped to those two states.

Online store owners are working hard to persuade members of Congress to “just say no” to the Marketplace Fairness Act. They are citing the additional costs for labor and technology that will be required for tracking and remitting sales tax.

Members of Congress in favor of passing the bill say the additional dollars generated by the new tax will be used to line the coffers of states who are missing out on boatloads of cash from tax exempt online purchases.

As an eCommerce store owner, I feel the frustration my counterparts are feeling regarding this. For years we have promoted the “tax free” benefit of buying online and have only remitted sales tax to our nexus state(s). Whether we remit taxes monthly or quarterly, there is labor involved. Doing it for all the states will certainly increase the amount of labor we will need to devote to accomplish the task. Right now, most shopping carts and accounting software packages allow for tax collection from multiple states and if the law passes, I’m sure there will be time for those software providers who need to make updates to do so.

Having had one of the very first online stores to hit the Internet, I’ve fought the “fairness” fight with bricks-and-mortar retailers since 1994. I’ve heard the arguments that online stores don’t have the same overhead a store in a strip mall has and that online shopping is putting traditional retailers out of business because they are unable to compete with us “dot com-ers.”

I always answered back by asking them how many employees they had, what their rent costs were and what type of expenses they incur every month for their bricks-and-mortar operation. Once they were educated on the number of people it takes to staff a customer service department, a pick-pack-and-ship warehouse operation, the millions of dollars in inventory that sits on a shelf waiting for someone to buy it, and the advertising money that is spent attracting a nationwide audience versus a local campaign, they usually shut up.

I remember hearing from local pet shop owners when TheFerretStore.com was in its rapid growth phase. I would be called out for taking business away from them, but once they were shown the number of orders, which usually was less than 10 a month, from the local area they were shocked and offered an apology.

As a consumer, the issue of paying tax on something isn’t a factor in determining where I’m going to buy a product from. If I want a pair of pants and the online store has to charge me sales tax, I don’t look for another store to buy them from, I place the order. $2.52 on a pair of $42 pants with free shipping is more than likely still cheaper than walking into the mall and buying them. Plus it will probably cost me more than $2.52 in gas to run to the mall and back.

I was shocked to see the results of a survey conducted by Endicia which found that 75% of people aged 18 – 25 will buy less online and more in bricks-and-mortars and 44% of U.S. voters will buy less online if the Marketplace Fairness Act passes Congress. Those numbers are HUGE, and in my opinion will never be the actual numbers we will see if this does pass.

I can’t imagine a few pennies on the dollar will stop people from shopping online.

But you may say, eCommerce merchants will have to pass on the costs of their expenses related to the bill in the form of price increases. True, but let’s face it, online shopping offers extremely competitive pricing, the ultimate in convenience and the overall best value for shoppers. I don’t believe that will change even if this bill does pass.

In the nearly 20 years I’ve had online stores, I’ve been faced with numerous challenges and threats, and all were overcome. From fiercely competitive newcomers in the marketplace who got me on the nasty habit of biting my fingernails, to shipping compliance issues that resulted in additional costs that needed to be passed along, and a litany of other unforeseen “issues” that we worked around without losing customers.

I don’t like politicians and I don’t like to see government entities with their hands out looking for money at every opportunity while they squander taxpayer funds on pork projects and initiatives that have no impact on the citizens they serve.

If the Marketplace Fairness Act gets pushed through, eCommerce stores owners will have to find ways to adapt to the change. There’s no way around it. Sure, there may be some that won’t be able to, but there will always be plenty that will.

We are all entrepreneurs and part of being an entrepreneur is facing challenges head-on and finding ways to solve them. Passage of the bill is just another one of those challenges we may be forced to face, but we can do it! And we will do it!

In the mean time, ring up your local Congressman or Congresswoman and tell them how you feel about the Marketplace Fairness Act. I don’t think those phone calls and letters do a whole heck of a lot, because these men and women, for the most part, already have their minds made up based on political affiliations and alliances, but who knows. Maybe the one who serves your area is as clueless as some of the bricks-and-mortar store owners I talked about earlier and could use a lesson in how an eCommerce store operation runs.

For now, we’ll just sit back and wait and see what happens next. If my Uncle Garibaldo from North Jersey was still the neighborhood’s “most friendly bookmaker” I’d lay odds on the bill not passing. And that’s coming from a guy who picked Oxbow in the Kentucky Derby!

I seriously did! It was the name of a manufacturer we used to deal with, so I said “what the heck.”

Proves that you should always go with a hunch.

In this photo released by Royal Caribbean, Adam Goldstein, President & CEO, & Anders Aasen, AVP Technical Services inspect the damage on deck six of the Grandeur of the Seas following a fire.

Those of you who follow me regularly know that cruising is one of my favorite activities. I love boarding a vessel, hitting the ocean and marveling in the vastness of the world that surrounds you as the ship glides through the waves.

I’m not loyal to any particular line and there is only one which I will never set foot on. They shall remain nameless. I mix up my cruise experiences in order to experience different classes of ships, see how different lines define customer service and of course, enjoy fine dining at sea. To me, it’s not about the destination, but the ship. Which pretty much sums up the reason why I very rarely get off the boat when in a port-of-call.

Over the past several months, the cruise industry has had its share of bad publicity. From the sinking of the Costa Concordia, to the exaggerated reports of norovirus, to the recent fires aboard the Carnival Triumph and Royal Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas, PR teams have been working overtime.

Since cruising, social media and red heads are all passions of mine, I’ve been following the Grandeur of the Seas fire and the work that the Royal Caribbean teams have been doing in the social media world intently.

Shortly after the fire broke out, the Royal Caribbean social media team took to Facebook and Twitter with posts that acknowledged the fire, told when guests were released from their muster stations, what the current status of the ship is, where it’s headed and when executives would be arriving to meet with guests onboard. Photos of the damage, executives sitting down with passengers and even people getting off buses were posted.

Questions posed by the media and others on Twitter and Facebook were promptly answered.

In my opinion, Royal Caribbean did a great job in handling a nasty situation for the company.

How would your company handle a situation like this?

I remember several years ago, my online store TheFerretStore.com, had a mini-crisis situation. We had a private label ferret food manufactured for us by a pet food company in New York. We literally sold tons of the product each month in three different size bags and they were shipped all over the country and to Japan.

It turns out that one of the ingredients used in one batch of the food had to be recalled. This impacted hundreds of bags of product and also put a dent in our product availability.

We were able to contact every customer who was impacted, explain the situation to them, ship them new product and tally up the costs this incident set us back. We communicated openly and honestly with our customers and managed not to lose a single one due to lack of trust.

Luckily for us, there was no Facebook or Twitter at the time, so we didn’t have to fight the social media storm a recall would generate.

During the history of Solid Cactus, there were some more modern-day PR issues that had to be fought in social media such as politics related to a move out of a downtown location and a downsizing we had to endure in 2009. Thick skin, vodka and a good team were definitely required!

When it comes to crisis PR there are a few commandments any size business needs to follow:

• In the face of crisis the first thing anyone wants to do is downplay the situation, look for ways to hide some of the horrifying details to save face and spin the story in a way that wont make you look too bad. However, that is not the way to handle it! You need to communicate the facts openly, honestly and in full. The media today is smart, tell everything you know at the time to save yourself from answering questions as to why you didn’t disclose.

• When communicating sensitive information with employees and other key individuals on your team, use the phone rather than use email, text messaging or other forms of communication.

• Don’t use the “no comment” answer to questions. It looks like you’re hiding something and gives the media ammunition to start digging.

• Don’t be a Monday morning quarterback. You can’t speculate on what could have happened if you did so-and-so.

• Rumors will flow. Respond to them immediately with accurate information which dispels the false information.

• Don’t hide the CEO or owner of the company. Many CEO’s like to hide behind a press agent or a company spokesperson. That doesn’t cut it these days. In the face of crisis, people want to hear from the top dog. If the CEO isn’t fully briefed on the situation and isn’t prepared to speak about the issue at hand, have him field questions along with the person with the information that can answer.

Above all, honesty is the best policy when it comes to managing crisis PR. Give the facts as you know them and provide updates on the situation as often as necessary. Royal Caribbean did all this and more and prevented a barrage of negative press associated with the fire.

Hopefully your business will never have to go into crisis PR mode, but nothing is guaranteed. If you don’t already have a crisis PR team in your company, now is the time to put one together. It should consist of your CEO, your company spokesperson, your lawyer and key management, and those team members who will be responsible for social media and responding to the press.

They should be advised of your company’s policy in the event of a crisis as well as the points I spoke of above. When crisis hits, those should be the people who assemble and formulate the plan of attack.

Remember, news travels quickly now thanks to social media! You have to react just as quickly, so be prepared.