When we sold TheFerretStore.com to Dr. Fosters and Smith over a year ago, Joe and I wanted to remain e-commerce store owners, but obviously we couldn’t do anything pet related, so what is a guy to do?  Open a Lawn & Garden supply website!

It happens that one of our previous suppliers was also a supplier for lawn and garden supplies and drop-shipped for many online retailers.  It was a no-brainer for us to move ahead and continue selling online, but with a much different business model.

We setup the store (http://www.neeps.com), loaded our products and started selling.  The only form of advertising we used to start out was listing our products in the comparison shopping engines (CSEs).  We used our FeedPerfect product to manage the items and watch profitibility.  We were astonished with the sales we generated without doing ANY pay-per-click advertising.  More than a year later, the majority of our ad spend is still directed to the CSEs.

There is a lesson to be learned here.  With the holidays coming, it is very important to start getting your products into the CSEs if they’re not there already.  But don’t waste your time if you’re prices are 3x higher than your closest competitor.  CSEs are for the bargain hunter and the price shoppers.  If you’re competitively priced, you’ll do well.  Using a product like FeedPerfect will very easily tell you where you’re making money and where you’re losing it.

Sales pitch for FeedPerfect, yeah.  Wallowing in CSE success, priceless.