In 2008, fresh out of high school, a consulting client offered me to partner on his ecommerce website in Moscow, Russia. For a year there, I learned and practiced every major area of website growth.
When I arrived, we were totaling between 5 and 10 orders per month, clearly not enough for a $30 product.
Being directly interested in our success, I set out to learn and do everything I could to help us reach higher revenue. In addition to web development, I wanted to master how to build and grow and online business:
- I redesigned the website to make it more in touch with Russians tastes and habits(after studying them), which improved visit duration time
- I conducted A/B testing on the shopping cart to understand why we were losing so many users before they could complete their order, and fixed it to see a 200% increase in conversion
- I conducted a seo strategy (web media outreach and link building) that put us first on the leading search engine (Yandex) for our main keyword
- I created an email subscription program, that had people sign up for free decoration advice (the site sold decorative goods), and sent them cool free stuff every 3-4 days until they ordered (and they did!)
In 8 months, the website grew from a monthly revenue of $300 to $12,000. As the 2008 crisis hit however, Visas became hard to come-by and we were almost forced to leave the country overnight. Our main competitor (totaling around 5000 physical point-of-sale in the country) was eager to acquire those who had beaten him in the search results. It was a great way to end this adventure.
