Re-Launching a Web Business – No Walk in the Park!

We’ve been working on client websites since 2008, mostly concentrating on SEO and SEM work. For some clients, it was rewarding just to get a new e-Commerce site running and looking good. But it didn’t seem good enough for us to specialize in a few areas when 100% of new clients need help in all areas of internet business growth. Make web business better, bigger and stronger.So we decided to re-launch our business with the type of expanded expertise that our clients needed. 1st Choice Website Solutions is the chosen name and we now offer more holistic web and marketing solutions for our clients.

We’ve always targeted small and medium sized businesses (SMB).  Since most small business clients didn’t have time to write updates or create content for their websites or Facebook pages, they’d asked us to do it. They were too busy to write PPC ads, yet alone manage them.  Ask them to tweet out information about their specials, and hear this in return “I don’t know what you mean” or “I just don’t have time for that”.

We were already doing their SEO and SEM work. So when we did the rest of whats required to drive site traffic, it was done with the same strategy and purpose as our SEO work – get more customers for our clients. It soon became  obvious that our company had to offer a comprehensive service package that helped our customers achieve marketing results in areas where they were too busy or inexperienced to do it themselves. Yet, be flexible so that they could pick and choose what they wanted to do versus what they wanted us to do.

Trying to re-launch our new business put us in the same boat as our clients. How do we find time to run our business and set up Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Google+ and others to get our new business noticed? Then we had to create blogs, posts, pins, tweets etc. for ourselves – just like we were doing for our clients.Juggling

Working til 2 am and eating energy bars became the norm for awhile. Reviewing logos and business cards, setting up bank accounts, getting through red tape and all the rest of the ‘got to get done’ items went on a giant check off list. We finally did it though, and it was well worth it! In the future, we will blog about some of the humor, mistakes and stressful times getting to the business re-launch celebration. Having gone through it all twice, we completely understand why companies like ours exist to help others.

The Power of Social Media Against Giants

Today I ordered the latest version of Adobe’s Dreamweaver (version 6.0) from their website. Like most of us, I’ve become accustom to buying a number of things from websites. The convenience is undeniably tempting and I can order from anywhere without taking a huge amount of time trying to find parking places in crowded malls.e-Commerce shopping

I don’t know what happened to Adobe’s e-commerce site, but today’s experience was a disaster. Finding the downloadable software wasn’t too difficult, although you don’t know it’s downloadable until after you select it.  Signing in and entering credit card information was pretty straight forward. But the fun started after the card was accepted and before I was able to download the purchased software.

Like other sites, Adobe sends you an email after your purchase for verification. Before you verify, your status is ‘Pending’  and you are unable to download. When you click on the verification link in the email you get another email congratulating you and giving you instructions on how to download your purchased software and where you license is. All reasonable, I guess. So I went back to the website to download the software. But alas, the status is still ‘Pending’ (even after a couple of refreshes and a log out and back in for good measure).

I placed a call to the support line and the recording told me it could be 18 minutes hold time and asked if I wanted to schedule a call back. I was anxious to try out the new version so I opted to wait on hold and listen to the elevator music on speaker phone. It was annoying to the team, so I tried Adobe’s on-line chat hoping that it would speed things up and end the team’s elevator music pain.

I must admit the on-line chat response was nearly immediate. A friendly person typed out his name and asked how he could help. I typed in my dilemma about not being able to download my purchase because my status was stuck in ‘Pending’ land. He quickly replied that he couldn’t help and explained that he was in ‘sales’. However, being a helpful soul, he asked me to wait while he transferred me to tech support.

It wasn’t very long (not even a half a song’s worth of time) until a new helpful soul was typing questions at me. “How can I help you?” he typed. I thought of a lot of humorous things I could have replied with, but I kept it professional. “I received an email saying I could download my software, but the status still says ‘Pending’ ” I replied. I then copied and pasted the email into the little chat box and hit enter. By now my team is starting to scatter away from the music still playing over the speaker phone while on hold for a human voice to listen to.

His next typed out response put me into a panic. “We are very secure about credit card transactions and it could take up to 24 hours before the ‘Pending’ status changes”. Now I have bought many, many items on websites, but this was a new one to me. This was downloadable software purchased with a credit card that is used every day in our business. If they received an authorization code from the merchant account, what else are they waiting for? I was floored and actually at a loss for words. I politely as possible typed back “For downloadable software? I should have bought it from someone else”. At which time I disconnected from chat and I hung up the speaker phone. So much for convenient shopping.

Social Media Marketing LinksThis is where the Social Media comes into play. Of course I jumped on Twitter. I sent out a quick tweet stating that #Adobe wants me to wait 24 hours before I can download the software I bought from their e-commerce site. It was as professional a tweet as I have ever sent with the limited characters Twitter gives you. I made sure to get the #Adobe in, right up front. 3 minutes later, another email arrived in my inbox. You guessed it, “Your status is no longer ‘Pending’ and you can download your software”. Coincidence?