I’m sure I’ve told the story once or twice on here about how, by sheer luck, I caught an order going out for the very first Ferret Store customer nearly ten years later. It was one of those moments where I realized that if you provide your customers with good value and exceptional service combined with making them feel as if they’re the most important customer in the world, you’ll have them for life.
Granted, there are always going to be bumps along the customer lifecycle that are going to cause you to lose one here and there, but for the most part a satisfied customer is going to stick with you as long as you treat them right.
I had another one of these moments last week while preparing the internal employee newsletter for Solid Cactus. (See Dad, that communications degree you paid all that money for really did pay off, I’m editor of a newsletter with a circulation somewhere around my lower blood pressure number.)
One of the things I publish, besides inter-department gossip and what really goes into the gravy on “Meatloaf Wednesday,” is a list of new website and eCommerce stores that were launched during the week. This gives the entire team the opportunity to check out some of the fantastic work that our designers and programmers do every day while they’re scrunched in a chair with headphones on, glued to three different monitors as if they’re launching the next generation of interplanetary spacecraft.
As I pasted the list that was sent to me, I came across a domain name that caught my eye.
Besides wondering just how much someone paid for a domain like that, I needed to find out who it belonged to. As I loaded the site, I was amazed to see it belonged to a customer who has been doing business with Cactus for years and one who I’ve had many interactions with over the years – Edward Hechter of PartyPail.com.
It’s been a few months since I talked with Edward, so I shot him a quick email to congratulate him on the launch of his new site and to see what’s new in his world.
There’s a bit of a backstory here I need to tell. When Edward and his wife Lisa launched their first store, PartyPail.com, he was an executive with web.com. Like most of us eCommerce entrepreneurs, he started his store and maintained a full-time career while building up the business to a point where he could leave the corporate world behind and concentrate on his new online venture.
Edward called upon us to build his first store and over the years picked up the phone time and time again as he launched new ones or redesigned existing ones. Edward and I would speak with each other on occasion and he would always compliment me on the way he was treated as a Solid Cactus customer.
Again, treat your customer well and they’ll come back for more.
Edward kept coming back for more and eventually came to Joe Palko and I and asked if we would be interested in speaking with the beards at web.com who expressed some interest in learning more about Solid Cactus.
Of course we said, “yes.”
That introduction resulted in us selling Solid Cactus to web.com a little over a year later.
So, there’s another reason to treat your customers well. You never know what kind of connections they have that can benefit you later on!
Anyway, over the years Edward and Lisa had many successes with their own business and they grew quite a bit.. Their growth caught the eye of the Hoffmaster Group and, much like how web.com loved Solid Cactus, Hoffmaster loved Party Pail and another marriage was made.
Today, Edward is shoulders deep into managing the eCommerce strategy at Hoffmaster and one of his latest projects was the launch of the B2B eCommerce site, Napkins.com.
Take a moment to check out the article I just published on the Solid Cactus blog that talks more about PartyPail.com, their journey from kitchen table to where they’re at today and what lies ahead for this eCommerce company that’s really on the move.
