Greatest Bully Sticks Thrives on Teamwork

"Lessons Learned" is a series where we request ecommerce business owners to discuss their experiences. With this setup we seen with Avrum Elmakis, president and owner of Greatest Bully Sticks, an online store based in Richmond, Va. that sells all natural dog treats and chews.

Greatest Bully Sticks home page.

Elmakis and his wife Lauren began their online venture in 2005 to serve a possible market in the pet treat market. "We've got two dogs of our own and we had been spending a great quantity of money on dog treats and dog chews for them in conventional pet stores and I just thought,'Gosh, this is costing us a fortune. There are most likely other people out there like us' And, that's how we got started."

At the moment, Avrum and Lauren were both working full time in the medical and pharmaceutical sales business, so that they started out selling just a couple items on eBay. "It was only in eBay sent us an email from a new venture named ProStores [an eBay-owned cart] we actually thought about getting our own site," he said.

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Now Best Bully Sticks stocks approximately 500 SKUs, with gross revenue from $3 to $10 million annually for it and three other sites. "We now have four websites specializing in the pet area and approximately 60,000 customers, but it is not something that we openly promote," said Elmakis.

Avrum Elmakis

"There are completely different customer bases. We have found that there are particular consumers which are very focused on the green movement, so we strive to get a vertical geared specifically to those people. Then we discovered earlier that there are particular clients out there that are just buying on price, thus we have a vertical dealing specifically with those people. Maybe it's the colours on the page or anything, but certain men and women prefer to purchase from 1 area over another for really no reason other than they just have a taste to that thing or business."

Shopping Cart

"We began as a ProStores shop, which is essentially an ecommerce shop driven by eBay. It provides you some integration tools which permit you to go back and forth with your things in their platform and it was terrific. It worked well for us for the first six months of our organization, until we got to a stage where we wanted a certain degree of personalization, since it was evident we will be here for a little while.

"We did not feel like ProStores had sufficient customization in that bundle. We moved over to MightyMerchant, which we are still currently with. We really like our relationship. They do our hosting, they do our safety, and they do a good deal of graphic work. It was kind of a holistic move for us to go together. And, as I've grown and learned over the years getting other businesses or starting new companies, the cart does make a huge difference in your ability to succeed."

Payment Gateways

"We use a fairly traditional setup. We operate with Authorize.Net as our payment gateway, and we accept PayPal payments. That is really the extent of it. The 1 thing I'd encourage business owners to perform regularly as an internet vendor is to return to your people about three times annually and attempt to renegotiate your pace, particularly if you're on a growth curve. That will be a substantial savings in the long term."

Fulfillment

"We do all our fulfillment. We now have our warehouses in Richmond, Virginia. We mostly manage orders through the shopping cart, but we have got a fairly heavy integration with UPS as our primary shipper. We do a little shipping with U.S.P.S. for smaller packages under 1 pound. The integration is pretty easy with MightyMerchant where we could activate most order fields to move in the delivery platform and generate a tag pretty quickly.

"We inventory 98 percent of our stock. For large heavy things, like enormous vacuums for a grooming shop, we drop ship. However, 98 to 99 percent of our items are done in house.

"A lot of the stock is normal and shared stock [between the four sites we have ], but we do have some sections in our warehouse that are dedicated specifically to various verticals. A company focused solely on dog treats and chews is not likely to be very heavy into the dog spa department, so we sort of keep a little bit isolated."

Shipping

"We have got all of the choices that UPS offers from floor to expedited services. Then we have what we call a market option, and we have also got free shipping. So we've basically got three classes. If a client were to select something in the free delivery category, it is at our discretion how we choose to send it. Thus, we can select either the U.S.P.S. or UPS. Should they choose our market option (which is a particular thing that we setup with UPS), it is a lengthy service period. It is a three to eight business days service period, as opposed to a one to five business service period, and we are ready to do this at a discounted rate.

"We don't provide free shipping throughout the board. We have looked at it over time, and I receive the doctrine. It was always that free delivery is actuallyn't free. People which are providing free shipping construct that transport cost into the cost of this merchandise. We just decided early on that it'd be better for us to just put our market price out there and then let shipping be actual shipping. It's worked really well for us."

"Now, for the things we do provide free delivery on, very especially, are things maybe we would like to move in fantastic volume, or we are having a special sale or a promotion. We reserve that for specific items that fall in that category for a very special reason. We do not have any offers of free shipping over $99, or free shipping over $49, or anything.

"There are definitely folks that specifically search for free shipping and we sort of our clients into different purchasing categories. There's a group of buyers out there who is purchasing only on price and shipping built-in, and we have kind of created to market directly to those people."

ListenListen to Avrum Elmakis discuss beginning Best Bully Sticks in 2005.

Employees

"We're a group of eight employees that functions in order fulfillment and shipping. They're all full-time workers. My wife mainly works with our vendors now. She was doing all sorts of different things, but her principal capacity now is the vendor relationship and new product development. We also have a customer service position that manages phone ordering and data entry, customer service."

Social Media

"We subcontract all our technical writing, blog writing and social marketing out to 2 different third party agencies. Those people help us with the marketing throughout the board.

"We're very, very busy socially so clients have the ability to find us Twitter and Facebook, which can be considered kind of both top tiers in social networking."

Search Engine Optimization

"We are extremely aware of SEO writing for our product descriptions and our webpage titling. That's essential to do. We began that very early on and then we complemented that with our website writing. We probably have well over 10,000 or possibly 15,000 pages of content that is very relevant to what we do, and I believe that that's important to bear in mind. We try to consider this on a daily bases in the writing we do on our blog, and in our outreach with our clients and all those different things."

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

"We outsource PPC into a third service. It's another firm that MightyMerchant owns, Hero Web.

"Early on, we could not create PPC work with our version since our model is volume-driven, and pay per click is a very costly form of advertising. But it's also quite effective. So through time, we have developed strategies that we believe work really well within our budget and create the type of return on advertisements that we are searching for. We have got around 1,500 to 2,000 key words.

"We concentrate on all search engines. We do Google and Yahoo! and Bing. And we do comparison-shopping engines such as NexTag, Pronto, PriceGrabber.

"We also do Google Shopping. That's a massive thing, particularly for people starting out. The feed is free advertising (it is free for us because we simply make it out of our shopping cart). So, particularly for extended tail keywords or tail items we sell, we discover that converts really well through the Google Shopping portal."

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Accounting Software

"We use QuickBooks. We have found that it is very simple and simple to use. We integrate our shopping cart using an agency called T-HUB, which functions as a liaison between shopping carts and accounting software packages. We have researched a few different options but we have discovered that QuickBooks is our simplest way to keep things straight."

Biggest Mistake

"One of my biggest mistakes was my standoffishness towards embracing social media as it hit. Among the most difficult things as a ecommerce business owner is to understand what trends you need to leap right into, because there's always something new. As a company, I had been about six months late to this game."

Biggest Success

"We have an awesome group of folks and it is wonderful to have the ability to work together. Through time, we have been able to do great things, like have benefit programs and 401k and all that sort of stuff that you might not find in a small firm. We think that those kinds of investments in our employees produce very concrete results on the backend. So, the best thing we have going for us is our staff, and I would say putting those people together is one of my greatest successes."

Final Thoughts

"I would tell a new person starting out to actually understand what the customer service and support is like for the various services you get. When it is a shopping cart or a payment gateway or anything, you do not want to get stuck in a situation where you send in a support ticket and you receive a response three days later. You need to associate with folks that are extremely interested in your organization and react very quickly. It's great to have infrastructure in place to respond to a problem speedily. That's a very big key to success"

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