Goodbye Atlanta. Hello San Francisco.

Posted by Mike Johnston on Oct 28, 2007 in Personal | 0 comments

Some of you may have heard by now that our family’s life is about to change dramatically. Over the last few months I have been able to consolidate our business life to focus solely on the launch of our new company, Storybook Anytime and a new full-time dream job…

Several weeks ago I accepted an offer from the San Francisco based company, Millions of Us, to become their full-time technical director. I will be working on 2D and 3D virtual worlds as well as marketing systems for major brands inside video games and social networks. It’s going to be fun, challenging and ground breaking.

This will of course mean that we will be relocating to the San Francisco Bay area in January. We are currently in the process of house hunting in Marin County and are excited about the opportunities that Silicon Valley brings to both Storybook Anytime, my career and our overall quality of life.

We suspect that we will miss Atlanta greatly but are excited about this new adventurous chapter in our life. My website, http://www.mikejsolutions.com, will be updated soon to reflect all the new happenings and will be a great place to keep up with our progress. There you will find access to our Flickr! photos, Blog and daily Twitter updates in a single location.

Great things are on the horizon!

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Profit from your products - Ship them for free!

Posted by Mike Johnston on Oct 11, 2007 in Online Marketing, Startups | 0 comments

Seth Godin, marketing guru, suggests in a recent blog post that online, the economics are clear: repeat business is what matters.

Amazon has set the tone with free shipping while most online businesses tend to over inflate shipping prices. This creates a profit center in most cases from shipping charges alone. Not good for repeat business.

Take for example small ticket items that cost more to ship than the product itself. This is a loser online for both you and your customer. Once they reach checkout, your customer will feel they are getting ripped off- which is the truth.

Your product should have enough profit margin alone to sustain free shipping. Otherwise it’s not a good product to be sold online. This will allow you to better serve your customers and increase repeat business.
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Make Prices readily available and easy to find

Posted by Mike Johnston on Oct 8, 2007 in Online Marketing, Startups | 0 comments

Many people are using the web for price comparison and research. This means that, unless you have a single unique product, your customers are going to judge you as much on price as anything else at your store. In today’s world people hit a web page and make a decision on where and what to click next within 4-15 seconds. Do you want the conversion?

Case in point: The worse usability idea ever was seen during the Christmas shopping season last year. The day after Thanksgiving (the single busiest shopping day in the US) Circuit City decided to force all visitors to add items to their shopping cart prior to seeing the “deal” price. This meant you had to register before you could find out how much an XBOX costs. It took almost 5-8 clicks to actually see a price. By the time you completed this asinine process you were to tired to buy.

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