When most people think about building a website and having a shopping cart, the first thing that comes to mind is the cost and return on investment. Today we’ll explore how Camila launched a WordPress website with a Paypal shopping cart and earned over 16,000 in little more than a weeks time.
The royal wedding between Kate Middleton and Prince William has caused quite a stir worldwide. It’s expected that their wedding would draw over half a million viewers today to watch the nuptials.
Camila Prada is an artist and an entrepreneur. She creates ceramic pottery and stoneware.
When she heard about the wedding she decided to put out a set of limited edition mugs that said, “I could care less about the royal wedding”, registered the domain http://sorrybut.co.uk and uploaded a simple website using WordPress that contained all of five pages.
Not a big, complex website by any means. The mugs were available to be shipped worldwide and you had two choices based on your location. It turns out that other people agreed with Camila and the mugs quickly began to sell. So fast in fact that when Camila checked her Paypal account the following week, she had a balance of over $16,000! That’s right!
A quote from Camila to a Bloomberg reporter:
“I was just sitting at my computer freaking out,” Prada, a 34-year-old Canadian, said in an interview. “My account went from zero to 10,000 pounds ($16,000) in a week and a half.”
Breaking It Down
Here at Freshworkshops, we often see the frustration entrepreneurs experience as they learn to build an online presence. They want to get traffic, be contacted and make sales but it can seem overwhelming to plan, build and launch a website. They may already have a website up and running somewhere else, want to understand how SEO really works or are trying to figure out how to use social media to promote their products and services.
Let’s look at what Camila’s website and what she did to make this simple ecommerce site a success:
A domain name. By branding this product with it’s own domain name, the site became memorable and stood out. Now Camila could have put it under her main website but this was a much smarter move because the url indicates what people will find there.
A website build with WordPress. This was a great choice because out of the box, WordPress is SEO friendly and is easily indexed by Google. A quick search for “sorry but uk” shows Camila’s website as the fifth result out of over 32 million. That’s amazing! So not only was Camila able to put together a site fairly quickly, it began doing really well for keywords in the major search engines. Wordpress is known for being an easy website platform to work with. If you know how to use Microsoft Word, you an manage you own website. Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) and that means it separates the design of the website from the content making it fast and easy to do updates.
A single product. Rather than sell mugs, t-shirts, plates, necklaces and keychain holders, Camila focused on promoting one product with one message. The choice for the visitor was not, “Which one do I want” but rather “Do I want this?” making their next question, “How do I get this?” which is an excellent conversion workflow. If you have an ecommerce site, sit down with a piece of paper and write out all the questions a visitor ask themselves before they hit your buy button. Too much thinking can cause potential buyers to give up.
Images of the item being sold. Especially with products that you can’t touch, it’s important to give a sense of texture with screenshots. In this case Camila had a physical product to offer and she puts it front and center on the website. She also takes the time to create a photo gallery page and shows the detailing on the bottom of the mug. Excellent!
Pages explaining more about the product. Camila uses the About page to identify with the buyer about the royal wedding as well as explaining the availability of the product as well as that part of the proceeds will go to a charitable cause.
Tired of the media circus?
Commemorate your indifference with this fine china mug made in Stoke-on-Trent, in the heart of England. This is a beautifully made, rare memento for folks who go against the grain. A maximum of only 1000 limited edition mugs will be produced.
10% of the selling price from each mug will to the WE LOVE STOKE Fund, a charity for Stoke-on-Trent, the birthplace of quintessential English fine china. Stoke has one of the highest unemployment rates in the UK due to ceramic factory closures, unable to compete with cheaper manufacturers overseas.
Ecommerce through Paypal buttons. There are a lot of choices when it comes to selling online. Many people get wrapped up in the idea of a shopping cart and all the fancy bells and whistles. Paypal is one of the easiest flexible and most popular ecommerce solutions out there. Not only can you create basic buttons like Camila did, you can connect Paypal to shopping carts, accept reoccurring membership payments, have your developer connect to their API and use their new mobile payments service. It’s free to sign up for Paypal.
Social media buttons. The website made it easy to share the mug message. There were both Twitter and Facebook buttons near the bottom right corner to encourage people to spread the message. It’s definitely a snarky statement to say something to the effect, “Hey! I don’t care about your darn wedding!” and on the Internet, outspoken, racy messages are king.
Summary
Camila’s success shows that you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars, create a lot of content or wait months to see results. Business owners feel apprehensive about starting to build a website so much so that they often hand off the entire project to someone else for fear of making a mistake.
In this example, there were three strong message about the success of the coffee mugs at Sorry.co.uk.
Camila provided:
- A product people wanted
- A straightforward explanation of what you would get
- A way for the buyer to purchase it her mugs
So content is still king but it certainly helps if you lay the foundation for success with planning, strong content, an easy to navigate website and of course, WordPress! It also turns out that Camila is a friend of one of my friends so it was nice to learn about WordPress helping yet another small business owner become successful!
If you’re a business owner, what you do feel is holding your site back from being successful?
If you’re a website designer, what is the biggest challenge you see to client success?
Get WordPress Training
The training program on WordPress that we offer here at Freshworkshops, Build Your Own WordPress Website, teaches you step-by-step how to setup your own website from scratch.
Everything from registering the domain name to the hosting to installing WordPress as well as once it’s setup how to create post and pages, install themes and widgets plus planning your content to attract people using solid SEO techniques.
Thank you so much, Adria. As usual, you make ideas clear, accessible and palatable for those of us who are NOT Techie WordPress Geniuses.I am transitioning my site right now and I was 95% sure what I wanted. Now I am 100% sure. Thank you so much!