Business Tools: Lighting retailer builds site to draw Web surfers

Tag : Lighting

Tom Farin can still hear those e-commerce crickets as he waited forvisitors to find www.pegasusassociates.com, the online store helaunched in 1999.
“When I look at it now, I blush with embarrassment because Iwas so naive,” said Farin of his Beaver Falls-based business,which sells more than 2,800 varieties of lighting products tocustomers of all kinds. “The biggest misconception I hadinitially was that I’d put my Web site up on the Internet andthey’d come. And that’s not going to happen.”
A former high school physics and math teacher who started thebusiness when his wife couldn’t find a bubble light oneChristmas, Farin plunged $1,000 to start the site but realized itwould take a full immersion in the fledging e-commerce field tolearn how to steer customers to his new business.
The company has built its customer traffic over time, improving itsunderstanding of how Web surfers really find sites. Forget the ideaof a Web site’s home page as a front door, Farin emphasized.His customers, which come from as far away as Qatar and SouthKorea, come to his site’s pages from everywhere imaginable onthe Web.
“The first thing I would tell people is to understand thateach page of their Web site is what pulls in a visitor,” hesaid. “Do not assume that every visitor goes to your homepage first.”
Think of each page as its own Web site, he added, designing it tostand on its own with a title, description and topic.
Farin also studied search engine optimization to help guide Websurfers to the site.
Pegasus has inventoried the impact of 300 key words that Websurfers use to find www.pegasusassociates.com. For the past fewyears, Pegasus has adjusted its marketing strategy to occasionallyuse paid key words, ponying up ad dollars of varying amounts to Yahoo and Google to ensure key words drive traffic to their site. Yet the companycontinues to depend on unpaid, organic key word searches, whichgenerate three-fourths of the company’s search enginetraffic.
Farin is proud of how Pegasus has done on its own.
“When we add a new page, it seems like it’s two to sixweeks, and we’re in the top 10 for Google,” Farin said.“I’ve been to some search engine optimization expertswho said, ‘You did this on your own?’”
Sally McKenzie, a Seattle-based e-commerce consultant, saidunderstanding key word search, whether it is paid or organic, is anessential e-commerce skill.
“Both of those things require considerable knowledge andeffort,” McKenzie said. “That’s really the nameof the game.”
Today, Pegasus Associates Lighting is among the fastest-growing private companies in the region, with55 percent revenue growth from 2005 to 2007.
Brenda Shuster, the company’s director of operations,remembers a time when the company didn’t have an onlineshopping cart and drop-shipped all its inventory.
“Now, we’ve blossomed into a company that ships 70percent of our orders from our own inventory,” Shuster said.“The number of orders has grown from five to 10 orders a day,to 50 orders a day.”