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    http://www.polymerclayprojects.com

Larry Rubin, owner and President of Boston ClayWorks, started his business in 2003. He was a crafter who made a stained-glass chessboard and needed the pieces to go with it. “I wanted to make my own to reflect the look of the board I had made,” he explains. He eventually stumbled onto polymer clay to use for this project and liked it so much that he began working with it. “I attended craft shows and was focusing on creating functional items with various components that I purchased from a multitude of sources,” he says. “After a while I wondered if other artists might be interested in my kits.” So, he started selling some of his kits and they were very popular. “My business has been expanding ever since,” Rubin explains.

Rubin has had his website with IPOWER since August of 2003 and has loved every minute of it so far. “I’ve had two other service providers in the past and had horrible experiences,” he explains. The first provider he had sold the company to someone else who didn’t transfer the data and one day his website was just gone without warning. The second provider constantly had service outages that left his customers unable to reach his website for periods of time. Since he conducts the majority of his business online, such outages really hurt his sales. “We haven’t experienced one service outage since switching to IPOWER three years ago,” he says.

Rubin says he initially chose IPOWER because of the great price – he liked the value of the services provided with the company including the storage, email and reporting capabilities. “At first it sounded too good to be true,” he says. Overall, though, he’s been very pleased with his service and his ability to go in and make changes as needed. “The website is completely different now than it was three years ago when we switched to IPOWER,” he says. “It was originally made from a template. It looked okay, but it did have a generic feel to it.” About a year ago, Rubin hired a professional designer to redo his design. “I still have the access to be able to add and alter the content myself, however.” He likes his new design because he appreciates that it’s now more professional looking. “The website doesn’t look like a one-person operation now,” he says.

They are also adding new products continuously so it’s helpful that Rubin can go in and add these new products as they come in instead of having to rely on a web designer to do it for him. To keep the homepage as compact as possible, he’s added collapsible menus. Rubin has his product types listed on the menu on his homepage, and when visitors click on these product types the menu expands to show more specific categories. This way, site visitors can quickly see all the different types of products he offers without cluttering the page.

Rubin keeps track of his inventory manually, so it’s important that he can go in and update his site himself. “I purchase a lot of products in large quantities, but I do keep track manually of what we have in stock.”

Several months ago, Rubin added a sign-up box for his site to gather names for newsletters and mailings. “So far I have about a thousand names on the list,” he says. “I use the mailing list to show new products, what they look like and how they work. I can also add a coupon to the newsletter.” He hopes to eventually move to a monthly newsletter, but right now he sends it quarterly. “I do see an increase in sales after sending a newsletter simply by noticing how people use the coupon I send out.”

In the past three years Rubin’s business has grown 9-10 times in size in terms of visits to the site and in sales of his products. He attributes much of his success to advertising, word of mouth and using web tools such as Google AdWords. Rubin is constantly adding new products, so that has contributed to his success as well.

To keep up with his growing business, he’s been able to add other new features to his site. “We use scripts to add animations or to add special notices for our customers.” For example, on the home page of the website, there is a scrolling image of the different products offered on the site. Visitors to the site can then click on an image that intrigues them and it links to the product description and sales page. “These script animations don’t directly boost my sales, but they make the site look more professional.”

Rubin also likes the reporting capabilities he gets with his web services. “I can go in and see where people come from and which pages they are looking at the most.” Since the most popular page is the homepage, he knows that this is the best place to highlight special notices. “We use this area to showcase new products as much as possible. We also use it for any announcements that we need to make to our customers, for example, if we close for vacation or want to notify them of an upcoming promotion.”

BECOME A FEATURED IPOWER SUCCESS STORY! We will feature a new online business in every issue of The IPOWER Informer, and we plan to pick the site from the email requests we receive from our customers. Are you interested in having your site featured as an IPOWER Success Story? If so, please send us an email at pr@ipower.com

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