July 2010 Featured WebNet Hosting Site: Youngevity.net

UncategorizedTags: Featured Site, Miva Hosting, Miva Hosts, Miva Mercahnt, miva merchant 5.5, SEO, shopping cart, shopping cart hosting, WebNet Hosting

Featured WebNet Hosting Site for July 2010

Each month we profile a client that is operating a successful e-commerce site in our newsletter and blog.  This month’s company is Youngevity,  located online at Youngevity.net.  Youngevity is an authorized distributor of a line of healthy mineral supplements created by Dr. Joel Wallach.  The following is an interview with Christopher Scruby of Youngevity.net:

When did your site launch?  Give us a brief history of your business.
Originally we started on the web in 1995 writing natural health articles and marketing products for Dr. Joel Wallach (of “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie” fame).

We did not even have a shopping cart then. At that time it was phone in only and needless to say it was a slow process. We built our first websites with Notepad. There were few service providers that were stable at all and would crash constantly with nonexistent tech support. It was hard to keep a business up and running.

How long have you been using the Miva Merchant Hosting services from WebNet Hosting?
We found Miva in 2004. But we did not use it right away, mainly because our old host was having trouble making it function.

We moved our first site to WebNet in September of 2009, and then in December we moved our entire web presence to them.

So you were using Miva before you switched to WebNet?  If not, what made you switch?  If so, what made you sign-up with WebNet?
The hosting company we were with was not really able to support Miva well and minor problems became disasters. The site was not able to stand without constant intervention, sometimes offline for 24 hours or more. It was not a good way to do business online; totally self-defeating. We spent weeks working on the site to finally see orders coming in then it would stop, only to discover that the site was down and my last host was clueless as to how to fix it. Finally, we were out of business during Christmas and our old host was moving the server (during Christmas)? This was too much and it was then we found WebNet to be the best solution.

My hat is off to PJ and Vince of WebNet, who took a disaster (my Miva storefront), moved it, fixed it and had it running in 24 hours.  Actually, they moved two Miva storefronts. One was damaged and we had a hard time getting the files to make the move. We would have lost a year of work, not to mention Christmas sales revenue, if the WebNet team had not jumped in to fix it so quickly.

I cannot say enough about the WebNet crew! They are PRO and they respond quickly when I need them and seem to have the right answers. I have never seen this type of instant service in 15 years on the net.

What do you like most about Miva Merchant’s shopping cart software?
I like the Miva interface mainly because it is predictable in form and function. Once you get the learning curve behind you it becomes second nature to make modifications.

Making mods is well supported in the forums and if you do make mistakes, it is easy to revert to a copy that was working before.

Making product changes is not a big hassle as the fields are well defined and you do not have to be a tech guru to update product data on the fly. For us, this is crucial since we offer about a thousand items and they change all the time. Miva makes this so easy to manage that even our non-tech staff can update product data with little hassle.

What do you like most about WebNet Hosting?
This all comes back to the point, we were doing ok before WebNet, we stayed in the game but there were always problems on our site that would make it tough for us to grow. Plus, we had no real solid tech support to point us in the right direction. We are finally able to show a consistent growth of sales and revenue starting from the time we came to WebNet until now. We are having one highest ever monthly profit after another.

It is the same site, what is the difference? There has been minimal disruption of service for one thing. These servers are very stable and I always get immediate response from support. WebNet’s servers are fast; this translates into customers not leaving because of slow response.  A hidden benefit of fast servers is that search engine spiders will get deep into your site where you want them, as the time a spider stays on one site is short and limited by design. I can compare this activity to my older logs and see that there was nowhere near this much activity by the spiders before moving to WebNet.

This is key to being in business on the web. Speed of service, stability, durability of service.

How many items do you offer for sale on your site?
We currently have about 800 different products from 14 different product lines with more to add.

Do you use any modules?
Just the show basket and the mini basket. We try to keep the site as simple as possible because it seems as though our customers are more interested in getting right to the point which is getting their product ordered securely, rather than shopping on a flashy site.

Have you had any third-party development done on your site?
No, we have been hands on since the start in 1995. It makes more sense to me to be able to keep hands on rather than count on a “would be” developer to keep it updated for you. I have seen that go far astray of what is considered optimal in managing a site.

What do you use for credit card payments and what have your experiences been?
We have always handled credit card payments in house and never had problems.  Then again, we are still old school in that area. We have always taken security very seriously in this office and work behind layers of firewalls and limited access to our processing system.

How many employees do you have?
We have a small crew here of less than ten team members so everyone has overlapping functions.

What are your strategies for SEO?
First and foremost, I don’t spam the head tag with unrelated tags and keywords. Also, I spend time daily studying my logs to see keyword trends. Don’t make the mistake of guessing what people are searching to find you. Always remember that trends change and if you are not paying attention you will be yesterday’s news. Also, write real content (articles with some real meat on them) and never ever copy another person’s articles — having duplicate content is a sure path to page 1000 on the results. Furthermore, follow the Miva Forum for SEO tutorials because one can always glean new insight from the Pros.

What were some of your biggest mistakes? (so that others can possibly learn from them)
Read the SEO section above. Those lessons were learned through painful experience. Also, as you can see, the wrong hosting provider can do more damage to your online marketing efforts than you could ever possibly imagine. It hides out there as a hidden “WHY” things are not happening for you. If you are not on top of it you will be out of the game before it starts. Make sure the host is not limiting your bandwidth or dumping you on an overloaded shared server with a spammer that keeps getting your whole IP block banned for Viagra ads. You laugh — but it happens frequently! Don’t cheap out on domain services. We had a few heart stoppers in the early days with domain registration services. Go ahead and register your site for at least five years just for piece of mind. We had a (not to be mentioned here) cheapo registrar that actually gave my prime domain to my competition over the phone. So save the heartache. Spend the bucks with a reputable service.

What have been your biggest successes?
I guess the biggest success has been that I am still here doing this business online after starting from scratch with a 33mhz computer, 4megs of ram, two 20 meg hard drives, Windows 3.1 and a 1400 bps modem that was so slow, I could put coffee on and get the kids ready for school in the time it took to load a web page and download the email, providing it did not crash … 15 years ago!

Finding WebNet was a stroke of luck and for the first time I have been able to get back to building new sites and upgrading my existing sites, instead of constantly having to deal with crisis management. The professional hosting environment frees up a lot of energy one could waste on substandard providers, which by their nature are a risk due to incompetence.

Thanks for everything, WebNet! I feel we have finally arrived!

Take the time to visit Youngevity.net to learn more about their healthy mineral supplements and Dr. Wallach’s ideas!