Do-It-Yourself Web Site Service Clicking With Small Businesses

Sue Schwartz, owner of YarnXpress, an e-commerce company specializing in novelty yarns, still can’t believe the sudden interest her Web site attracted when it launched in August.

“We opened in the middle of a heat wave,” Schwartz recalled from her West Milford, N.J., home. “And yet the first month we had $2,500 worth of sales. That just blew me out of the water.”

The middle school assistant principal and part-time entrepreneur owes much of her newfound success to Freemerchant.com, a free, do-it-yourself Internet catalog service that caters to small businesses.

Like most new e-commerce entrepreneurs, Schwartz expected to rely on Yahoo or another well-known Web portal, even though they typically charge $300 a month to host a new business. “But nobody could offer me an iota more than Freemerchant.com offered,” she said.

Schwartz isn’t the only person to come to that decision. Since it went online in December 1998, Freemerchant.com, based in Emeryville, Calif., has enticed 45,000 entrepreneurs to build their Web pages using its Web host, according to President Serge Wilson.

Freemerchant.com’s free services include a secure shopping cart, a user-friendly Web site builder, unrestricted catalog size, traffic logs, an e-mail account, merchant message boards, shipping and tax calculators, a 24-hour help line and discounted services from its advertisers.

Entrepreneurs such as Schwartz can choose from about 40 Web templates, then click on icons to add content, adjust text and colors, and insert photos of catalog items. Including the time Schwartz spent photographing her inventory and perusing other Web sites for ideas, she spent 12 days getting her e-store set up exactly as she wanted.

“When YarnXpress hits about $4,000 in sales a month, then I’m going to seriously think of turning it into a full-time job,” she said.

She has started buying print ads to boost her sales, but even without them, her company has looped in some global sales. “I have a couple of customers in Canada and in England and in Australia,” she said.

Like most Web firms, Freemerchant.com isn’t turning a profit. It generates revenue through referrals and ads for OfficeMax, CompuBank and other partners that Freemerchant.com has signed up.

The company’s chief rival, Bigstep.com in San Francisco, also offers free Web site building and hosting, although it limits its server space to 12 megabytes per user and provides technical support only by e-mail.

Bigstep.com boasts 40,000 e-commerce merchants, but only 8,000 of them allow buyers to order directly from a Web site, and merchants have to pay $14.95 a month for that feature, plus a fee for each transaction. For the other 32,000 Bigstep merchants, customers must order by phone, fax or e-mail.

Freemerchant.com users can also avoid the standard Internet domain name registration fee (typically $60 a year) if they use Freemerchant.com’s suggested domain: www.(yourbusinessname).safeshopper.com. If merchants elect not to include “safeshopper” in their domain names, they must pay the registration fee, but can still be hosted by Freemerchant.com.

The inclusion of “safeshopper” not only saves the owners of e-stores money, but it also appears to attract customers, says Hugo Cardinale, who with his wife, Cynthia, owns Cynthia Cardinale Cosmetics. The Orlando, Fla.-based cosmetics business, which has existed only online, debuted as https://www.cardinale-online.com, Cardinale said, but soon after the couple opened a second Web site, https://cosmetics.safeshopper.com.

Both e-stores offer the same high-quality cosmetics at identical prices, but the safeshopper address generates more sales, Hugo Cardinale said. He attributes the greater traffic to the fact that the newer domain name identifies the product and suggests trouble-free shopping. “That may give people a sense of ease of a safe shopping place, which it is,” he said. “‘Psychologically, it may play a role.”

Cardinale, who works full time by day for a travel agency, said the safeshopper address has also resulted in his company’s first international sales, with orders from Hungary and the Philippines. Today, his safeshopper site is generating $3,000 to $5,000 in monthly sales, whereas the Cardinale-online address accounts for about $500 a month.

Another Freemerchant customer is 2CoolTek, a Satellite Beach, Fla., firm that sells high-performance computer cooling equipment. Its Internet sales have jumped to $60,000 a month since it went online in March. Company President Ian Felts said he still operates a retail store, but that generates only about $500 in monthly sales.

“I market to people who like to tear into their computer systems and upgrade them themselves,” Felts said.

His site, https://www.2cooltek.com, gets about 1,000 visitors a day, he said, most generated by computer bulletin boards that are seen by prospective customers in such disparate places as France and Malaysia.

“There are people talking about my site on sites I’ve never been to and probably never will go to,” he said. Felts especially likes Freemerchant.com’s invoice-exporting feature, which allows merchants to transfer data on their sales, including customer name, item bought, cost, tax and shipping costs, and shipping address.

Wilson said Freemerchant.com is developing a system to automatically prepare shipping orders and export declaration forms for merchants. Freemerchant’s software already allows its merchants to transfer inventory and accounting data, eliminating the need to retype information.

“With our software, you don’t have to double-enter any of the actions that happened on the Web,” Wilson said.

Simplicity is why Darla Daulton is a big fan of Freemerchant.com. “You don’t even have to know anything about a Web page to put up a site on Freemerchant,” said Daulton, operations manager of Silk Treasures Floral Wholesaler in Somerset, Ky.

Her Web site, https://silktreasures.safeshopper.com, in business since May, has generated many new customers, “and most of them are repeat customers,” Daulton said. Her brick-and-mortar retail operation has been in business five years. “I probably get three to five phone calls a day from that Web page.”

Because Silk Treasures ships its handmade latex flowers and other floral products by truck, it generally limits its sales to a five-state area because of high trucking costs. Still, her Web page has led to sales as far away as the Caribbean, she said.

What Daulton likes most about her Web site is the role it plays as an advertising tool. When prospective customers call for a catalog, she steers them to the one online, which saves her time and money.

The owner of the Clay Factory of Osceola, Ind., also values that feature. “I have a lot of customers who call from various places, and [the Web site, https://www.clayfactory.com] is somewhere I can send them to see what’s available,” said Darlene Buckel. “Whether they order over the Internet or by phone or by mail doesn’t really matter to me.”

Still, Buckel prefers that prospective customers visit the Web site because it can automatically calculate their shipping and tax charges, so there aren’t any disappointments. “I really like that aspect of it,” she said.

The Clay Factory has been selling self-drying, heart-shaped pieces of clay intended for children’s handprints for 13 years, the first 12 under another owner. Buckel’s Web site has existed for only nine months, but it already accounts for about 10% of the $100,000 in revenue her four-person company generates each year.

Buckel said it took her only two hours to create her Web site, “and I don’t know anything about computers. If I can do it, anyone can do it.”

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