Six or seven years ago I never would have dreamed that our company would see the growth that we’ve seen since then.  Our main product, terry cotton bathrobes, have increased in sales at least ten fold since we first began selling them online.

In the beginning we were only selling our men’s pajamas on eBay.com.  As many of you know the competition on eBay.com is tremendous and its difficult to find customers on eBay that value quality over low price.  Even so we were able to see some solid growth on this marketplace and as time went on we were able to setup our own website and leverage eBay’s site to help bring in more customers on our own website.  Repeat sales would normally happen on our website in which our margins were much better than on eBay’s marketplace.

The second big growth step for us was getting our products onto Amazon.  Starting in 2006, Amazon has seen phenomenal growth in all of its major categories.  We were lucky to get in at the right time and ride this growth wave and we’ve been riding it ever since.

The third way in which we were able to grow even further was to get into the ever changing and ever evasive world of SEO. To be sure we tried our hand with numerous ‘experts’ many of whom easily took our money but whom rarely lived up to their promises. This is common in the SEO world and we would advise anyone who is in the retail space online to not put all their eggs in the SEO basket. SEO takes time and money and unless you’ve got the cash to burn, its better to use multiple channels such as eBay, Amazon, Overstock and many other comparison shopping sites to augment your sales while you build your reputation online.