E-commerce Case Studies
With several thousand live sites, Actinic Ecommerce software is the backbone to many successful businesses. The following case study examples highlight the challenges customers have faced and the success they have achieved with the help of Actinic solutions. To see more customer example sites.
Classic Leisure
Many people dream of quitting the so-called rat race and moving to, say, the South of France and earning a living from there. Some people even do it – but it doesn’t always work out as smoothly as the migrators had hoped. For Peter Mulcock and his family the idea was appealing and had a happy ending, but because of red tape and changes in circumstance, they have retained a base in the UK as well.
The Mulcocks’ Gardening eStores - Getting the Right Balance
Peter owns three websites to do with gardens: Classic-lawns, Classic-leisure and Trampolines4fun. Classic-lawns was the first, and the others operate under its umbrella rather than as entirely separate concerns.
“Classic-lawns and Classic-leisure were distinctly different markets, and what I didn’t want to do was mix markets because I think that can be very confusing,”
explains Peter.
“Then we had some success last year with trampolines. We had explored this mini-site option and thought we’d get better optimisation if we did a site specifically for trampolines, and that’s why we took it separately.”
So far, so standard – until you bear in mind that the trampoline site’s designer is actually Peter’s 15-year-old son, Oliver.
“He’s been interested since we started this business two and a half years ago,”
confirms his father.
“We started with a very small web design company in Cirencester, and Oliver came with us when we went to meet them and showed incredible interest. It was fantastic, he really drove the whole thing.”
Oliver explains that,
“The designers suggested using Actinic’s software, although they had never really had any experience with it, so I began doing some research. Then I discovered how much we could do with it.”
The Mulcocks liked Actinic Developer because it was flexible and would allow them to develop further sites under the same licence.
The original designers were honest enough to say that the likely finished site would be beyond their capacity, so the Mulcocks went to another web developer, called Smart Decision.
“They brought lots of ideas to the table and spent quite a lot of time talking to Oliver because he was the one with the software skills, even though he was only 13 and a half.”
The initial outlay on the site was around £4000, funded from the directors’ own reserves, which included the ecommerce software and Dreamweaver MX.
“Now that the sites are fully live and functioning I look after all of the technical side of the business when I am not working at school - making the odd change and constantly keeping the sites up to date,”
explains Oliver.
The company also link to Sage accounting system which allows the shopping cart activity to feed directly into the accounts, saving a lot of re-typing.
The first diversification came shortly afterwards, when the seasonal nature of people buying from Classic-lawns started to bite – everything went understandably quiet from September to February, when people leave their lawns alone. Classic-leisure for garden games followed, although Peter freely admits this has the same quiet periods as the initial site.
The products and prices are diverse. Classic-lawns offers 260 items of garden machinery, while Classic-leisure has 150 items of outdoor games and toys. The trampoline site offers a further 50 products. When it started the first site attracted 450 unique visits per month and the sites now get 3000 per month, most of whom find it through web searches. To measure the success you need only to look at the fact that Trampolines4fun sold 100 trampolines in two months when it opened in October 2004 – this is far in advance of what they expected from a site selling outdoor equipment at that time of year. In contrast it took Classic-leisure the whole summer to sell 100 trampolines. So creating a niche product store seems to have worked. The total business turns over around £800,000 per year and pulled into profit within six months – Peter expects to top £1 million in the next year.
The beauty of a website, of course, is that there’s no reason to live on the developer’s doorstep. Peter Mulcock and wife Judith gave up their well-paid jobs to go to France, envisaging a total change of lifestyle. Oliver did well at a French school and all looked fine.
“The difficulty is, though, that it’s a UK-registered business and we pay our taxes in the UK. If you’re staying out of the country for more than 183 days of the tax year, you’re considered not to be resident in the UK and you have to pay your taxes in the country in which you’re seen to be administering or generating the income in.”
This would have meant registering the business to pay taxes in France.
“For some businesses that’s OK, but for our size of business French taxes are very heavy.”
The costs would have been prohibitive as far as Peter was concerned, although he stresses that this has as much to do with unfamiliarity with the system as with any features of the system itself.
Other practicalities militated against basing the business overseas. Customers often phone to get information, even on trampolines, and if they aren’t expecting a foreign ringtone they assume they’re getting number unobtainable or engaged when they hear the European version. There was no way around this, particularly since the company prides itself on being accessible and never, ever, using a call centre.
Oliver’s circumstances were also changing.
“Oliver decided he wanted to study medicine. He wanted to take the International Baccalaureate, because he didn’t necessarily want to be confined to any particular country to do his university education.”
This wasn’t as straightforward in France as it would have been elsewhere.
“We looked at schools from France and found Oakham School in Rutland, and they accepted him and that’s where he’s going to do his IB. Oakham has also recognised his IT skills and decided that an ICT GCSE would be totally inappropriate – Oliver is now studying for the Microsoft Certified Professional exams, and takes the first of these exams this summer, making him one of the youngest in the county.”
But the good life hasn’t been abandoned -- the family have retained the French house and, whilst Oliver completes his IB, will only spend about three to four months of the year there. There will be further developments as well; Peter Mulcock is still keen to address the seasonality of all of his websites, and wants to develop something to plug the gap in the winter months. If he knows what his next move will be, he’s keeping tight-lipped; you could guess, though, that Oliver Mulcock will have a hand in its development. It’s a typical family business except that one of them is still at school and they run the thing from wherever they feel like – getting the best of both worlds.You get the feeling it suits them rather well.