Posts Tagged ‘Kikscore’

Some Recent Highlights of KikScore Making News

We just wanted to highlight a bit of the coverage we have received recently and send out a special thank you to those great folks that took the time to cover KikScore.  As you all know we are a bootstrapped startup so we do not have any real budget for PR so all of our PR efforts are self-generated and the coverage has been really organic.  In all honestly it has been pretty cool to see our efforts get recognized by some of the most respected sites in our industry.  Now that I think of it,  I will follow up with a blog post in the near future on how startups and small businesses can generate their own PR and increase their chances of being covered.  I think there are some nice lessons learned and some tips from our own experience and I will be happy to pass that along to the community.

Here is some of the coverage:

1. How to Give Online Shoppers Confidence in Your Website at SmallBiz Trends.   Special thanks to the always awesome and fabulous Anita Campbell for this fantastic piece that covered us.

2. Trust is Critical When You Date, Bungee Jump and Sell Online on Business Insider.  We have to give a special thanks to the man who has endless energy, passion and drive for all things small business, Ramon Ray for this write up.

3. KikScore Named Best of 2011 SmallBizChat Interviews by the SmallBiz Lady.  Melinda Emerson who moderates that super informative #SmallBizChat every Wednesday on Twitter from 8-9pm named KikScore as one of the top 10 chats of all of 2011 and put us in the same company as Anita, Guy Kawasaki, Tai Goodwin and Pierre Dubois who also made this prestigious list.

4. KikScore Online Trust Survey Finds Information Sharing Leads to More Trust at the fast growing startup blog TechCocktail.  We have to send a special shout out to Frank Gruber, Jen Consolvo and Shashi B at DC-based TechCocktail for this great write up.

5. Launch Story: From Business Affairs & Legal Executive to Ecommerce CEO at one of our favorite sites Launch While Working.  Thanks to the amazing Tai Goodwin for this write up and for all the support she has given KikScore.  Please make sure you look out for her book that every person who works in Corporate America should buy and then read – The Employedpreneur Plan: How to Launch Your Business Without Quitting Your Day Job.

We hope to keep up this pace of having KikScore in the news, but for this go around we send out our incredible gratitude and thanks to the great bloggers and websites that covered KikScore over the last few weeks.

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Posts Tagged ‘Kikscore’

Small Business Interview with Hostile Bacon

I had the opportunity to interview Miss Ren & Pete who operate an up and coming Shopify store named Hostile Bacon this week.  They had some very interesting lessons learned from their experience starting their business and how they have evolved their use of social media to help market their business over time.  Please check out the interview below and let us know your thoughts in the comments as well.

Tell us about your business and who you focus on serving?

Hostile Bacon is an online store that provides a variety of products that are unique or quirky in nature. These are lifestyle and fashion items that you typically wouldn’t find at the local shops, some items are handmade by local designers, others are sourced from overseas and closer to home. We also provide random yet interesting information through Ren St blog and our social media channels.

Our focus is to serve anyone who likes things that are a little bit different, a shopper who is looking for a gift for themselves or someone else. If you’re nostalgic, whimsical, fashionable, health conscious, practical or all of the mentioned, Hostile Bacon is for you.

How did you get started selling online?

www.hostilebacon.com.au came about by necessity. I’ve been designing and making things since I first stepped foot in a home economics class room many years ago. At the start I was making things for myself and then friends and family started putting in orders and then eventually friends of friends were buying my designs, by this stage online was the best medium to have as a shop front and I also started sourcing products to provide a larger variety.

What inspires you to grow your business?

I really enjoy sourcing new products, coming up with new ideas, researching and writing my blog and seeing what so many talented designers are producing. I’m also inspired by the fact that we provide a good shopping experience for our customers. Shopping should be an activity that is pleasurable and easy.

If you had 2 lessons learned from your business that you could pass on to others about selling online, what are those?

Lesson number 1 would be to invest in a reputable, secure hosting company, to keep your site operating securely.

Lesson number 2 is to remember that little things make a big difference. Wrapping an item, replying to a post or comment, these things and more, create a good experience for shoppers and potential customers.

Where has your business focused most of its energy this year?

This year we’ve focused on sourcing new and interesting products and optimizing the website to attract and maintain customers. We want to be found easily and for our customers to come back repeatedly and to do this we have to offer something new regularly and provide a reason to come back to the site.

What do you see as 2 new trends in for small business and in your business?

I believe more small businesses will use social media to engage rather than push products. We’ve built social media into our marketing plan as a majority of our target market are social media savvy.

A user friendly website that is clean and easy to navigate is becoming more favoured, long gone are the days of clunky websites with neon flashing banners and an encyclopedias worth of information. We regularly make changes to the site to ensure those that do visit have a good experience and stay longer.

If your business/store could be any movie or movie character, what movie/movie character would it be and why?

I would choose the character Holly Golightly played by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s as she is synonymous with style, glamour and eccentricity.

If your business could have a dream spokesperson for your company who would it be and why?

Fonzie would the our dream spokesperson, he was cool in 1974 and 38 years later he is still cool.

What is the biggest challenge that your business faces as a small business and how do you work to overcome that challenge?

A big challenge is competing with large companies with even larger marketing budgets.  To overcome this we will continue with traditional marketing activity and provide our customers with a great experience so they ‘market’ us to friends and family.

Do you have any parting thoughts for our readers and the small business community?

You are the expert in what you do so rely on experts to perform tasks in other areas to help you with your business, things that may not be your strengths. It’s very easy to become bombarded with tasks in running a business and sometime it would be a much more effective use or your time and resources to utilise someone else’s skill set and lastly, enjoy what you do. I’m always smiling when I talk about Hostile Bacon because I enjoy it so much.

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Posts Tagged ‘Kikscore’

SmallBiz Strategy Tips from Our 7 Best Blog Interviews of Last Year

The holidays are over (for most people anyway) and people are returning to work.  Last year was hectic and I don’t think this year will be much better considering it’s election year. Now before we start running for the underground bunkers or start to wade through the tens of thousands of political articles and interviews, let’s take a look at 7 really good interviews of last year that were on the blog.  [Please note that these are in no particular order, except for maybe how they appeared in my tab list.] I selected these because I think that they offer some new tips and talk about things that aren’t often talked about.

1. Books the new old Google

Turning Sites into Gold: This is an interview of John Nicholson from Marketade. The thing I liked the most about this interview was that Nicholson suggests going to a library and looking at books to get information.  I love libraries (although I haven’t properly been inside one in ages) and I think this is a source that most people overlook.

I remember when I was doing a Linguistics project, my partner and I got all of our information from two very good, but slightly outdated books.  Sure, the internet is a great resource and will probably have the most current information, but how much of that is actually valuable? At least with books, you know that it’s been filtered and scrutinized enough to know that it’s valuable. It may not be current, but it’s probably the best.

2. Law, Perfection and the Internet

The Right Side of the Law: This is an interview with Gregg Hand.  One of the things Hand talks about in the interview is the fear of starting a business. I like his examples of the types of decisions that one has to make when starting a business.  Often it’s stuff that you don’t think about.

Hand also mentions that conditions for small businesses have become more favorable due to the internet. Now this is probably something we all know, but it’s always nice to hear it in words.  The best bit of advice that I think Hand gives in this interview is that things don’t have to be perfect. If you’re starting a business, often you won’t have everything set up just yet and you will most likely encounter setbacks even if you make a habit of starting businesses.  Eventually, you’ll have to jump right in and get started.

3.The Duo of the Elite Group

“Putting Your Money baQ Where it Belongs” : This is a double interview with both the CEO (Brian J. Esposito) and the CTO
(Peter Hermsen) of paybaQ.  Their advice is solid and I liked the acknowledgement about family members and friends un/intentionally bringing you down. I think this is something that happens often, but that no one really talks about.

One of my favorite bits from this interview is the description of the small business community as “elite”.  They mention that small business owners should be proud of the responsibility that they have taken on and I feel like this is a point that should be brought up more often. It takes a lot of work, energy and determination to start a small business, so feel proud small business owners!

4. Platforms and Personality

The Speech AND the Pen are Mightier than the Sword: I’ll admit to a little bit of bias on my part for picking this. I’ve met Jill Foster before and I like her and thinks that she gives great advice.  One important point that she brings up in this interview is that one doesn’t have to use all of the social media platforms that are out there.

A lot of the things that I’ve read online make it seem like small businesses have to use every single platform that they can find. I know that’s a bit silly, but that’s the impression I got. Jill is the only person I’ve seen so far mention the fact that one shouldn’t use all of them.

Another good piece of advice that she gives is to make sure that your business has a personal feel to it. Big businesses like Target or Walmart  have a certain feel to them, but it’s impersonal and not the type of feeling that y0u want a customer to get from your small business.

5. Juggling Jobs

Talking Employedpreneurs & Steps to Success for Businesses with Tai Goodwin : What I like about this interview is that it focuses on people trying to start a small business while having a job.  Goodwin gives some great pieces of advice such as putting in systems to manage your small business while you work at your other job.  Goodwin also talks a little bit about different business models and suggests trying something other than the traditional one-to-one model.

The piece of advice I liked best from this interview is that it’s important to be flexible.  Having a vision is good, but often, due to the way the environment changes, you may need to update it. Customers and markets tend to change quickly and you’ll be in better shape if you can adapt faster to keep up.

6. Products and People

Small Business Interview with Sophie Kovic from FlockStocks : My favorite piece of advice from this is bit about choosing a product that doesn’t vary much because then you’ll have less trouble.  Another great piece of advice is to trust the people who work under you. You cannot manage everything. Let go when necessary and trust that when you go on vacation, the people whom you leave in charge will work things out.

7. Coordination and Background Knowledge

Reach Your Best Insights: This is an interview with Pierre DeBois.  One piece of advice I liked from this interview is the fact that online and offline activities should be coordinated. It’s like picking colors, you has to choose ones that go together. Another thing that DeBois talks about is going beyond Search Engine Optimization. Yes, that is important, but there’s things beyond that which Small Businesses should do too.

One of the points that DeBois brings up is the fact that Small Businesses need to think about what goes on in the background that’s essential to either the customers or the business itself.  Reading all of these articles and tips for Small Business owners, I get the feeling that it’s something that’s often not touched on.

All of these interviews offer valuable advice for Small Businesses and should be reviewed as you owners start drawing up your plans for the coming year. If you have any tips or interviews to add to or contest, leave a comment.

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Mobile Shopping is Going Viral this Holiday Season!

With only 11 shopping days left until Christmas, shoppers need all the help they can get this holiday season while trying to find the best deal on the perfect gift for their loved one.  This year more shoppers than ever before are using their smartphones to find the best deals while they are in stores around the country and even at home and work.

Pricegrabber just released these survey results last week of 3,574 online consumers in the United States.  According to these results, 39% of all respondents have a shopping-related application on their smartphone.  Out of the respondents with a shopping application on their phone, 56% indicated that they have these applications on their phone because they believe they get the best prices using mobile shopping applications.

These numbers show a staggering increase from just 1 year ago when I wrote this KikScore blog post that talked about a Wall Street Journal article that indicated that only 5.6% of consumers used a mobile phone to price compare while on the go.  The WSJ article referenced in the aforementioned blog post also says that only .1% of consumers used a mobile phone in this way in 2009.  As you can see from these numbers consumers are continuing to increase their use of smartphone mobile shopping applications at an exponential rate!

So, what are merchants across the Unites States doing in response to these legions of mobile smartphone shoppers?  Unfortunately, the answer is still “not very much” at this time.  Again, like I mentioned in my blog post last year, I still cannot walk into a Best Buy, use my smartphone to find a better price on an item online and get the store to match this price.  Many bricks and mortar stores are still having a problem reacting to this new wave of technological advancement in the pocket of the U.S. consumer.

According to this article in the Chicago Tribune, some retailers like Macy’s and J.C. Penney are starting to react to these mobile shoppers by streamlining their mobile websites, creating custom shopping applications, and increasing the speed and efficiency of their sites.  In my mind, however, this is just the very basic levels of catering to the mobile shopping consumer and great strides will need to be made in the coming years in order for this new bread of consumer to be on the same page with these large retailers in the U.S.

Have you had a positive or negative experience while using a smartphone with a mobile shopping application at a retailer?

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Business in Bloom: An Interview with Mark McCurry

Recently, I had the opportunity of speaking with the amazing entrepreneur, Mark McCurry. Mark is a man with an impressive background; not only is he the president of the successful delivery business 1-800 Courier, but he has recently started the rapidly emerging online florist business known as Peachtree Petals. From our interview, I quickly became aware of Mark’s impressive knowledge of creating and maintaining businesses, which I want to share with others:

When and why did you decide to create Peachtree Petals?

I actually started Peachtree Petals about one month ago. At my other brand, 1-800 Courier, I noticed that we were getting a lot of delivery orders from florists. This got me to thinking that, instead of just delivering floral arrangements, maybe I could make and sell them myself. It was really easy to set up Peachtree Petals’ online store using Shopify. As of right now, we are 40 to 50 orders per day.

What was one of the biggest challenges you faced and overcame in launching Peachtree Petals?

Honestly, with my experience of launching and maintaining 1-800 Courier, I didn’t encounter a whole lot of challenges with Peachtree Petals. The one thing that I would say was most difficult was finding a designer, since I don’t really know much about flowers.

How do you advertise yourself to get more clients?

I was able to get a lot of customers out of my other business’ clientele, but I have taken a few other routes. I take advantage of Google AdWords, which is useful regardless of your business. I also set up a Peachtree Petals Facebook page, am part of a floral network, and had two billboards put up.

Have you had any trouble proving your business’ credibility and legitimacy to potential customers and website visitors?

There’s always some trouble when trying to show people that your new business can be trusted. That’s why my store uses KikScore. It’s already helped to increase by conversion by 10 percent or so.

When you’re not working on Peachtree Petals, what do you do to relax?

I have three daughters, so I spend time with them and take them to their various events. I also enjoy going out to dinner with my wife on weekends. Aside from that, I have five websites that I spend a lot of time on.

What trends do you see in the business world that you think are important for small businesses to take note of?

The biggest trend that I am seeing lately is that margins are shrinking in retail. This is due to internet-based shopping. It’s now a lot easier for people to go on line and compare prices. There’s no longer a need to get what you see at first sight.

What tools would you recommend in the small business world?

I definitely recommend Shopify for setting up your store. As I mentioned earlier, it’s really easy to do. Google Analytics is another useful tool for helping you monitor your store. Other than those two, I would suggest interconnecting through blogs. That’s a really good way to help spread the word.

If you had to pick two lessons that you’ve learned from launching and maintaining your business, what would they be?

One lesson is that you need to watch your marketing cost. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of overspending and hurting yourself more than helping yourself. My other lesson would be to make sure that you’re selling something that there’s a demand for. If there’s no demand, then who is going to buy what you’re selling? It’s best to keep watch and look out for what is in demand.

Thanks to Mark for a great interview! I hope that everyone can benefit from his business savvy and entrepreneurial spirit!

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Small Business Interview with Sophie Kovic from FlockStocks

I recently had the chance to interview Sophie Kovic from FlockStocks and here are some of the highlights of our discussion:

Tell us about your business and who you focus on serving?

We are a feather hair extension supplier that mainly sells to salons. We hit it big when we opened up FlockStocks as our store opening serendipitously coincided with the start of the Shopify Build-A-Business competition. Since then we have been focusing on improving our products and services and following trends. We are really trying to listen to what our clients want, and developing our products accordingly.

How did you get started selling online?

We started on eBay selling a range of products. I had a clothing label originally.  Selling online was inspired by Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week. But the clothes didn’t really match his lifestyle model. FlockStocks is much more rewarding, and far less work. Tim would be proud.

What inspires you to grow your business?

Besides the obvious cash incentive and the subsequent lifestyle, I just really enjoy the work. One of the exciting things for me is meeting new like-minded people. At the moment my goal is to meet an inspiring business mentor.  I also have a new baby and want to make sure I can provide for him properly.

If you had 2 lessons learned from your business that you could pass on to others about selling online, what are those?

1) Choose something with little or no variation, such as size, color etc. With little or no variation you get less hassle, less complaints, less stock-keeping, and less returns.

2) Choose something with good Adwords potential. High clicks and low competition is everything. You must be sure you can drive customers to your site in the beginning.

Where has your business focused most of its energy this year?

We have been focusing on developing a new way of grading our products, which makes the whole process much easier for clients to select a product based on their needs and budget. That is still in the works. We have also been diversifying our products, finding better suppliers and generally growing our range. Staying current and rolling with the trends is absolutely vital to our business.

What do you see as 2 new trends in small business and in your business?

1) Sites that host timed discounts such as Groupon are great ways to get exposure.

2) Instant advertising methods have changed the way we can get potential customers to our sites. Adwords, for example can get you results in one day. Long gone are the delays of print advertising.

If your business/store could be any movie or movie character, what movie/movie character would it be and why?

Juno. That movie came out of nowhere. It didn’t appear to fit with the mainstream, but most people ended up thinking it was really cool.

If your business could have a dream spokesperson for your company who would it be and why?

Kim Kardashian would be our dream spokesperson. Besides being gorgeous and surprisingly articulate she has a very talked about hairstyle and would be the perfect fit for our premium positioning in the market.  

What is the biggest challenge that your business faces as a small business and how do you work to overcome that challenge?

A new flooding of competitors is the main challenge facing our business today. Refocusing on a different clientele (salons rather than individuals) where there is less competition has been our approach to this problem.  That also works in well with Tim Ferriss’s  80/20 principal, where 80% of profits come from 20% of customers.

Do you have any parting thoughts for our readers and the small business community?

Read The Four Hour Work Week. It changed my life. I am writing this from a villa in Thailand, where I just celebrated my 25^th birthday, with my partner, son and friends. We have just spent 3 months here, and I have not so much as looked at an order the whole time. I learnt that things can be automated. The world will not fall apart if you step away. Trust your people. They are smart. They will work it out. You will have more time to come back with better, bolder and bigger ideas.

So go. Do something. Be inspired. And have fun! 

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Posts Tagged ‘Kikscore’

SmartCEO Magazine & Ecommerce for Beginners Features KikScore

We just wanted to take this opportunity to send a shoutout to two great publications that featured KikScore recently.  We had the honor of being featured in Rachel Cieri’s article in SmartCEO in October called Good, Bad and Uncertain – As the Internet Changes So Does E-commerce.  We were able to give our feedback and some lessons learned to SmartCEO magazine and Rachel on our experience at KikScore being an e-commerce company and also serving small businesses.

Also a special thank you to JP Jones at the Ecommerce for Beginners Blog.  JP did an awesome interview of KikScore where she allowed us to tell the in-depth story behind KikScore, the biggest obstacles we have overcome, marketing tips for small business, how we handle customer service and so much more.  Check out our interview and so many other small business interviews on the Ecommerce for Beginners Blog.  We recommend JP’s blog for regular reading for all small businesses!

Many thanks again to JP and Rachel for showcasing KikScore.

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Congrats to Our Longtime Customer PaybaQ on 2011 W3 Award for Their Innovative & Unique Website

Over the weekend we found out that our long time customer, PaybaQ won a very prestigious W3 Award for outstanding website design.  Paybaq was selected by W3 from over 3,000 entries. The founder of Brian Esposito has been a longtime KikScore customer and proudly displays his KikScore seal on PaybaQ’s website.  PaybaQ is a new age micolending site that has been growing fast and is getting a lot of attention. His KikScore seal has actually helped him increase registrations and sales on his award winning site over 20%.

To find out a little more about PaybaQ, Brian and his CTO Peter Hermsen told us their small business story just last month in one of our most highly read interviews on this blog!  They are clearly on a roll and this great award is just one further step in the growth and development of PaybaQ. Here are the details on the award that PaybaQ received.

Congrats Brian and team.  Keep it up!

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Five $5 Dollar Marketing Strategies with Fiverr

Efficient marketing has been and will always be a key function of business, especially when dealing with small businesses. Most small businesses do not have the financial capital to support a full-fledged ad campaign and have to find other, relatively cheaper marketing tools and techniques to find their target market and attract customers. In this day and age, the internet provides many cheap and free marketing tools, such as blogging, e-mailing, and operating social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. These are great tools to exploit when marketing, but another trending site to utilize is www.fiverr.com.

Fiverr is a social marketplace website that allows for the purchasing and selling of a magnitude of services for only $5. Yes, you read it right: only $5! This website is an excellent source for inexpensive outsourcing of a wide variety of different services. The services provided on the site, called “gigs”, range from video marketing to advice to SEO building. While you may find some offbeat and bizarre services offered, such as “I will cry and put any text on a paper” or “I will be your girlfriend/wife or anything else on facebook for one week”, this website is actually does offer many great opportunities for small businesses. Here are five marketing tactics that you can implement through fiverr:

1. Video Marketing

Making videos is extremely time consuming and requires a lot of technical work for your company; instead, for only $5, you can outsource this work to a freelancer on fiverr and with your vision and guidance, he/she will make you a commercial within 2 weeks! In fact, it was too great of a deal to pass up so we at KikScore capitalized on a fiverr “gig” and had a professional video made. All we needed to do was provide the freelancer with the text and photos we wanted to use, and they put the entire video together. Check it out below!

embedded by Embedded Video

2. Writing

In addition to have a video made of virtually anything, whether it is a professional commercial or an animated cartoon, there are also a bunch of talented writers on fiverr, both business and song writers. There are many people offering to write jingles or raps on your company and what it provides and those funny and creative tunes can definitely bring in new customers! In addition to song writing though, there are also many “gigs” offering to write press releases or just articles on any topic.

3. Market Research

While I wouldn’t solely rely on fiverr freelancers for an extensive market research report, I would use their service for some basic research. For only $5, you can pay someone to conduct brief research for your business while you focus on more productive business tasks.

4. Graphics, Banners, and Logos

Similar to making videos, oftentimes designing new banners or graphics for your business’ website requires expensive graphic design work. Instead, you can outsource that work to the fiverr community, where there are a good amount of awesome, professional graphic designers.

5. Search Engine Optimization

SEO optimization is extremely crucial for all small online businesses. All businesses strive to be on the first pages of search engines like Google and Yahoo!, and employing effective SEO optimization techniques is necessary. On fiverr, many sellers offer “gigs” that will improve your business’ SEO, whether it is by social bookmarking, promoting your links on social media outlets or different directories, or helping you build a LinkedIn following.

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Helping Small Online Businesses Demonstrate Trust & Credibility: KikScore and Shopify Partner Up

As you all probably know, we at KikScore are dedicated to helping small businesses alleviate consumer trust concerns. What you may not have known is that, for the second time, KikScore is going to attempt to take over Canada! That’s right; we are once again arming ourselves for the coming partnership between KikScore and Canadian company Shopify. Together, we’ll help to revolutionize the ecommerce industry and continue to fulfill our mission at KikScore of doing everything we can to help small business and entrepreneurs!

Shopify, an online retail platform that hosts over 1,600 stores, has decided to partner up with KikScore. This new alliance will give Shopify ecommerce stores access to KikScore’s Confidence Badge app. This app contains KikScore’s 4 unique tools that are packaged together into a one-of-a-kind trust seal: (1) a business-specific trust score to help small businesses, (2) a Confidence Badge to display at the bottom right of the business’ website, (3) a dynamic and informative merchant report card, and (4) an interactive feedback platform.

There are a number of reasons for our partnership with Shopify. Here are a few key data points:

1) More than 50% of internet users don’t shop online because of security concerns.

2) 85% of consumers worry that online retailers don’t do enough to combat online fraud.

3) Over 75% of all potential online purchases are abandoned.

There is even more data on this issue of the challenges of small business and demonstrating trust here in this recent post we did on the topic.

Our partnership with Shopify will allow small businesses to empower themselves like never before. “We are really excited about being able to offer our KikScore Trust Seal through our new Shopify application. Now all Shopify customers can easily add a KikScore seal to their site through this streamlined application” says KikScore VP, Product, Mike Collins. With our app, small businesses can easily and efficiently display their track records of reliability. It’s time to cut down on shopping cart abandonment and increase sales!

For more information on our awesome new partnership with Shopify, take a look here.  Also please make sure to check out the KikScore Confidence Badge and Trust Seal App in the Shopify App Store.

Thanks to everyone at KikScore and Shopify for helping to make this possible.  If any Shopify merchants would like more information about the App, please feel free to email us at support@kikscore.com. We would love to hear from you.

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