What makes a good online retailer great? Knowing what customers want and making it easy for them to get.

For Tim Stewart, a 15-year veteran of the automotive and Internet industries, combining his passion for vehicles and his knowledge of the Web seemed like the ideal path to professional fulfillment. In 2000 he founded xccessory.com, an e-commerce provider of accessories and parts for sport utility vehicles, trucks, and cars.

"I always wanted to have my own business, and after completing graduate school, all of my experience was automotive-related," he says. "I was looking at buying a car dealership, but I also saw opportunities with the Internet. It seemed pretty logical to combine the two."

The site, originally SUVxccessory.com, grew quickly, eventually forming three separate sites: www.suvxccessory.com, www.truckxccessory.com, and www.carxccessory.com. While similar in functionality, each one offers accessories that are exclusive to that vehicle type.

"We sell most of our products to SUV and truck owners," Stewart says. "We offer everything from wood-dash interiors to performance air filters, custom grills, and brush guards. There's just a lot more you can put on a SUV or truck than a car, but there's definitely a market for all three."

The Lake Forest, Calif.-based company currently serves around 15,000 automotive enthusiasts a year, generating a healthy revenue stream that keeps the company growing. Getting to this point took some work however, and Stewart shares his success strategies below.

Success Strategy #1 - Be Happy
As most southern Californians will tell you, commuting on the 5 freeway isn't the most pleasant way to spend your morning. Stewart, who spent 10 years with automotive-giant Nissan North America and later with Edmunds.com in their Santa Monica offices, spent far too much time commuting from his Orange County home and not enough time with his son.

"I had been commuting at least two hours every morning and nearly two hours every night," Stewart says. "I came home one day and took my nine-year-old son out to dinner to celebrate the last day of school. He had done really well on his report card, so we went shopping after and I told him to pick something out. He picked out a skateboard and said 'Yeah, I'm looking forward to having the summer off and riding my board, but I'd be really excited if you could have the summer off, too.' I turned in my resignation the next day and haven't looked back."

Having the extra time to spend with his family made it easier for Stewart to focus on running a successful business.

"It's a lot easier to be successful when you also have time to focus on your family," he says.

Success Strategy #2 - Build a Great Site
After forming his business, Stewart began beta testing his site in 2000. He initially turned to an outside design firm but it took a while to find a designer he was happy with.

"I wasn't really happy with the work the first design firm I hired did," he says. "I started looking around for some help and I noticed that Yahoo! Merchant Solutions provided the service I needed, not only from a site-building process but from an order management process as well, so I signed up. We've been able to do our own layout and design work that integrates easily into their system. They've been great to work with, and I'm really happy with the site."

Stewart says that the only way for a retail site to be successful is to make it easy to navigate.

"To have a successful retail web site, you have to make it easy for your customers to find what they're looking for," he says. "The less time it takes them to find the item they want, the more likely they are to buy it."

To facilitate this, he simplified the navigation on xccessory.com to make it as fast as possible for customers to find the accessories they're looking for. When customers enter the site, they can browse products by first selecting the year, make, and model of their SUV, truck, or car. They're then taken to a page that lists every available accessory for their vehicle.

"There are so many accessories available for a particular car that people would get lost blindly searching a site," Stewart says. "We try to organize the products in a way that makes sense. It's easy for them to choose the wrong item without the correct navigation."

Success Strategy #3 - Cater to Your Customers
Auto enthusiasts shopping for accessories are looking to add either style or performance to their vehicle, not because they need to, but because they want to. Stewart keeps this in mind and limits his inventory to products that fit his business model.

"We focus on selling items that are easy to install," Stewart says. "We stay away from hard-to-install mechanical repair parts. We figure people are installing mechanical parts because they have to—it usually means something's wrong with their car, so they're not happy to begin with. With accessories, they're buying something that they really want. So this way we don't have a lot of returns. Pretty much everything we sell is do-it-yourself."

Success Strategy #4 - Market to Win
A good marketing strategy is critical for any online retailer. Stewart, who puts 10 percent of his revenue into marketing, believes that marketing plans should closely follow your business plan. Xccessory.com's goal is to sell auto accessories, not build brand recognition, so he sticks mainly to search engine and paid-search marketing so his customers can find him more easily.

"Banner ads and the like are great for someone looking to build a brand, but we're looking to make sales. The more customers that find us, obviously, the more successful we'll be. And they'll find us by doing online searches."

He adds that it's important to be aware of not only who your customers are, but where they are.

"We do most of our marketing online, since our customers are online," Stewart says. "It wouldn't make much sense for us to do a lot of print advertisements because that's not what our customers are looking at."

Related Links
xccessory.com
Yahoo! Merchant Solutions

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Small business owners facing this dilemma, fear not—search engine optimization techniques can help you move your site closer to the top of the list on most major search engines, enticing more potential customers to visit each month.

Many small business owners confuse search engine marketing with search engine optimization. Search engine marketing is essentially a fee-based marketing system, where sites can be listed on cost-per-click engines: The more you pay, the closer you are to the top of the list—and the more people are likely to click on your site. While this type of solution proves effective in the short term, it can get expensive quickly. Search engine optimization, however, enables site owners to increase their visibility across the Web.

"The difference can be huge," says Matt Spiegel, president of Chicago-based search engine marketing firm Resolution Media. "Think about how many searches are conducted on a daily basis, and think about the potential to increase the percent of visits from these searches by even 10 percent. Using a few optimization techniques could mean the difference of tens to hundreds of thousands of new people seeing your site every month."

Picking the right search engine keywords is the most important step in optimizing your site. Keywords are one of the most critical factors of increasing the web site visibility and online sales for small business owners that utilize them, according to a report by Cube Management, a sales and performance consulting firm based in Portland, Oregon.

"It all starts with keywords—understanding how your consumers are searching online," Spiegel says. "You really have to think about the difference between the words you think your potential customers are searching and the words they're actually searching."

Placing keywords in your site's Meta tags, the HTML code on your site that's not visible to users but passes information to search engines, is an important step, but there are other effective keyword placement strategies to keep in mind. Search engines generally rank keywords in linked text higher on the page, and links containing the searched keywords that connect to your page from other sites help even more.

The images on your site can also be optimized for search engines. In the code for each image, incorporate keywords by either including the word in the name of the image file or adding an alt tag (which displays a text description of the image when users roll their mouse over it) to the image link that uses the keywords. When crawlers, the components of search engines that gather listings by automatically "crawling" the Web, search your site for keywords, they will "see" extra resources from which to pull. Try to avoid using generic names for your images, like "image1.jpg." Instead, take advantage of the opportunity to relate the file name to your site. For instance, if you sell coffee cups, name the images something like "coffee-cup-black.jpg."

Crosslinking is another effective way to optimize your business' web traffic. Crosslinking is dividing your content across more than one domain name, and then linking the sites using keywords in each of the hyperlinks. For example, if the name of your web site is www.buycoffeecups.com, you also could buy the domain name www.buycoffeecups.org and link the information between the sites. Purchasing and setting up multiple domains can be a great way to increase your visibility on the Web, and if you crosslink those domains appropriately, you can increase the likelihood that your site will appear on more searches.

However, keep crosslinks in the editorial context of your site rather than just tacking on a lot of links in a map at the bottom of the page. "Some search engines frown on excessive crosslinking and will lower your page ranking if they detect it," Spiegel says. "There's a right way and a wrong way to do it. If you're blatant about it, it's like you're spamming the search engine. There's almost a code of ethics involved."

Spiegel adds that optimizing your site is quickly becoming as important as having the site itself. "Over the past year and in the next couple of years, more companies are going to turn to search engine optimization as a way to grow their customer base," Spiegel says. "If you learn to do it the right way, it'll pay off."

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Once that new customer makes a purchase, loyalty and repeat purchases are key to profits. As long as customers remain satisfied and interested in the product offerings, then they will return for repeat purchases and thus the merchant finds the formula for success in retailing. Merchandise selection, profit margin, transaction frequency, purchase volume, and other factors obviously affect the specific value of customers, but their impact is undeniable. Said Neil Kugleman, of Goldspeed (www.goldspeed.com), "It costs a great deal to acquire a customer, so once you've got one, whatever you can do to make it right is worth it."

Goldspeed, one of many successful Yahoo Store merchants, has some top tips to improve loyalty for those key customers.

Excel at Customer Service
For Kugleman, CEO of Goldspeed, an Internet-based jeweler, the unfortunate reality is today's standard for customer service is low. But, that means that a small business can stand out simply by doing many of the little things right. "When they get a phone answered on the first ring by someone who can help them and speaks intelligently, it makes a big difference," he said. "Most people are nice and decent. They like the personal service."

Kim Michaux, who runs seven Yahoo Stores (www.OneofaKindKid.com, www.SnipsnSnails.com, www.GigglesnCurls.com, www.CradlenCrib.com, www.MistletoenHolly.com, www.OldWorldNutcrackers.com, and www.CollegeTeamShop.com), couldn't agree more. She sees the key to her businesses as prompt email and telephone outreach. "Customers are always shocked when you answer right away," said Michaux. So by responding promptly you can exceed expectations and delight your customers.

Personalized attention is another way to differentiate your service and gain customer loyalty. As a merchant with access to relevant information you can acknowledge a repeat customer and thank them for returning to shop with you, offer suggestions for additional products to compliment what they have already bought, and always ask, capture, and act on their feedback. These seemingly small and incremental elements equate to special attention, and customers welcome the personalized service.

Still others customers prefer the speed and efficiency of checking the status of an order, or confirmation of a return directly themselves. By offering choices and the flexibility for self service you allow customers to interact with your organization at their pace and comfort level, and with on line, self service you can also minimize costs.

Empower Your Employees
Having good people on the customer service front lines is crucial, but equally important is giving them the tools and authority to make customers happy. The customer service representatives for Michaux's stores thoroughly know the product lines for which they are responsible and are afforded the flexibility to offer free or upgraded shipping when the situation requires it.

At Goldspeed, Kugleman's goal is to have customer problems resolved on the first call or email. If the situation needs to be escalated, all pertinent details flow from one person to the next. "There's nothing worse as a customer than telling the whole story and then having to tell it all again," he observed. For Goldspeed, the result is a host of happy customers who go the extra mile to write letters in praise of the company's knowledgeable and responsive customer service representatives.

Other merchants empower customer services representatives to recommend alternative products if something is out of stock, and also provide service representatives the ability to include an additional item if there is an issue with an exchange. Access to information and the ability to flexibly execute within a dynamic environment will allow you to surpass customer expectations who would otherwise walk away disgruntled.

Know Where You Stand
Central to being able to provide superior service is the ability for customer service representatives to get a detailed snapshot of the customer's history with the company. For both Kugleman and Michaux, the e-commerce solution must contain accurate, up-to-date information so the problem can be resolved appropriately, and the customer has confidence in your ability to service them consistently.

With multiple call centers in different time zones, Kugleman's personnel remain up to date with customer situations using a single system. "You may want to provide great customer service, but you can't unless you have the infrastructure to pull it off," said Kugleman. OrderMotion, the system Goldspeed leverages, allows customer service representatives to see the complete history of the customer in real time and provide rapid and easy access to inventory information. With all this information available, Goldspeed is able to understand what's working for customers as well as measure and improve operations to continually advance.

Execute Flawlessly
In the end, of course, every component of every business has to run without errors. Double and triple checking everything is part of Michaux's success as well as a process that works for her organization.

Still, she combines it with acceptance of the reality that mistakes do happen. "When that does occur, it's a great opportunity," she says. "If you fix a mistake quickly and nicely, you can really turn a customer into a very loyal customer by going the extra mile."

And hopefully that customer will share their experience and encourage others to become customers as well.

Related Links
OrderMotion

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Next Generation Yellow Pages
That's where Yahoo! Local comes in. The new search service packages Yahoo! Search's proprietary technology, leading Yellow Pages and maps offerings, and unique third party and user-generated content to create an improved local search experience for consumers. Like Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local provides fast general information such as the names, phone numbers, and addresses of businesses.

In addition, Yahoo! Local empowers consumers to conduct more detailed searches instead of being limited to the typical browse-by-category feature. For instance, instead of browsing a list of Italian restaurants in New York to find the right dinner spot, searchers can enter specific terms such as "romantic restaurants with fine wine." The restaurants that refer to these terms on their web site or in their enhanced listing would appear in the search results.

Businesses can be very descriptive about the products and services they offer, as well as what sets them apart from the competition. This boosts the chances that the business will be relevant to a user's query. The old adage, "The more you tell, the more you sell," really applies when you want to maximize the return on this marketing service.

Finally, consumers can use Yahoo! Local's ratings, expert reviews, and user reviews to help them decide whether a local business or service is the right fit. All users are welcome to submit a rating for the business and write a review about their experience.

Are You Listed?
You may already be included in a Yahoo! Local listing. How? Yahoo! Local is built on Yellow Page information from across the nation. To find out if your business is listed:
1. Go to local.yahoo.com.
2. Enter the city and state for your bricks-and-mortar business.
3. Search for your business.

You may want to try multiple search terms to see all the different ways a customer might encounter your business.

How to Get Listed or Enhance Your Listing
If your business isn't included in a Yahoo! Local search, you can easily get it listed. Basic listings are free and include the following features: