 Bill and Sandra Petty founded Specialty Optical Systems, Inc. (SOS) in a spare bedroom in May of 181 to supply products to semiconductor and electronics manufacturers. They began by selling microscopes.
Roughly three years later SOS started selling replacement light bulbs for their microscopes. The sale of light bulbs grew and they began selling technical lighting of all kinds. They still sell microscopes but they took a back seat.
In 2001 Bill and Sandra decided it was time to bring in someone to help run the business and improve performance. Greg Anderson joined SOS as VP and General Manager. In 2002 Greg and his team decided to try to move some old inventory that was sitting on the shelves gathering dust. They decided they would try to sell the inventory on the Internet.
SOS built an informational front-end website and combined it with an ASP E-Commerce backend solution. They were open for business January 2003. That first month they sold $242 worth of merchandise and were quite happy to receive orders so quickly. Their second month sales were $2,300. This was now getting interesting. They started spending a few hundred dollars on Overture advertising to draw more customers and to put current products on the site as well. It was around this time that the SARS epidemic was raising it's ugly head. SOS sold $20,000 in surgical masks over the Internet in August 2003. From January to August 2003 SOS racked up $70,000 in sales over the Internet. Now they thought they may be on to something.
Greg quickly realized the importance of leveraging the Internet even more. SOS had done $70,000 in sales with a customer conversion rate of .8%. He went to Bill Petty and asked for $30,000 to maximize revenue from Internet sales by building a better E-Commerce site and focusing more attention on Internet marketing. Greg received $10,000 to work with. He quickly began searching the Internet for a company that could help him move the business forward.
Greg made contact with BizAtomic in Q2 2004. SOS Internet sales were still growing. “What I like about BizAtomic is their commitment to Open Source architecture and their ability to manage all my Internet technology requirements making my life much easier” Greg said. BizAtomic re-designed and implemented their feature rich Enterprise E-Commerce system ( www.soslightbulbs.com ) and implemented an SEO campaign for SOS.
The most amazing thing, according to Greg Anderson, was that SOS immediately got more traffic and a 275% increase in their customer conversion rate from .8% to 2.25%. Greg said “If all else remains the same our new website will generate triple the business”. This means faster sales growth and a better bottom line. In order to consolidate traffic and take advantage of the higher conversion rates, all traffic from their original site is being re-directed to the new site built by BizAtomic. |
