How to Increase Sales by 8% with only 4 Items in Catalog

This month we’ll spotlight Magento store that has only - attention - four items in the catalog, Kirkland Science Labs!

‘Life should be good’ the company’s slogan says, and the business IS good confirms Brad Dennis, the store owner I had the chance to talk to. Read on to learn the company's follow up strategy and how the store managed to increase sales by 8%.

Who: kirklandsciencelabs.com

What: Kirkland Science Labs design and sell supplement stacks. A stack is a synergistic formulation of nutrients that work together to help you achieve your goals faster.

Where: Seattle, US

Q: How you became involved with Magento?

A: We have been running our store a little over a year. But we used this platform for an earlier business so we had experience with Magento.

Q: What was the hardest thing in launching a Magento-based store?

A: Design is definitely the hardest part. It's a real intensive process getting the store & emails themed and developed the way you want. Especially with add-ons.

Image Slider, Featured Products, Z-Blocks & Knowledge Base in use.

Q: Any features you’re particularly impressed by?

A: The extensibility and ease of use. Magento is very powerful, and it's the most polished and sophisticated open-source platform out there.

Q: There is an opinion that Magento platform is slow and resource intensive. Have you faced such problem?

A: Not particularly. With the caching and compression, we haven't seen an issue. But our catalog is very small, only 4 items. I don't like their EAV data model, so I'm glad to see they implemented a flattened version of some of the data.

Q: You own 14 of our extensions. Why did you set your choice on aheadWorks?

A: The answer, in a nutshell, is top quality and 100% open source. Here are the modules we use:

Advanced Reports Frequently Bought Together Checkout Promo Featured Products 3 Follow Up Email On Sale Image Slider

Blog Knowledge Base Market Segmentation Suite Who Bought This Also Bought Subscriptions and Recurring Payments Sociable Z-Blocks

 

Q: What’s the most powerful AW extensions for you and why?

Knowledge Base really help us provide useful information to our customers. And Follow Up Email lets us stay in touch with them via their inboxes.

Q: Can you give us some examples of using FUE?

A: We use Follow Up Email to send the customer a quick touch about 4 days after their order to give them some tips on using our products. We also send them a re-order reminder 30 days after their purchase. We've seen a 7-8% increase in sales with these added customer contacts.

SARP, Sociable, Frequently Bought Together in use.

Q: Where do you see KSL in five years?

A: Growing and still providing 1-of-kind high quality supplement stacks.

Q: Any last words you might have?

A: Just a quick thanks to aheadWorks for their high quality extensions. They're really an integral part of our business!

P.S. If you would like to share your store with Magento society, please feel free to contact me at [email protected]