Featuring Windy City Parrot
Running an online store is no easy feat. The road to success for an ecommerce merchant isn’t straight and narrow – it’s a winding mountainous path of missteps, obstacles and grueling hard work. For those that possess unfaltering dedication and perseverance, the journey’s rewards are rich and bountiful. Few stores understand this better than Windy City Parrot.
Windy City Parrot is an online pet supplies store powered by Shift4Shop. They service the needs of caged bird keepers in ownership of a wide range of parakeets and parrots, assisting with the challenge of taking animals out of the rain forest and into the living room. The store’s founders, Catherine and Mitch, made the transition from a physical storefront to an eCommerce site on New Year’s Day 2003, and since launch, have experienced firsthand the fortunes and hardships unique to the ecommerce market.
The Fiery Road to Success
The first sale for any ecommerce business is a memorable occasion that yields smiles of satisfaction and hope – hope for prosperity, hope for success, and hope for a promising future. For Windy City Parrot, the 2003 New Year saw more than the launch of their online store, but also their very first order. It wasn’t long before Windy City Parrot found itself on page one of Google, reaping newfound success with a worldwide audience. Mitch attributes their store’s early success to Catherine, who had spent the previous decade building and establishing a large bird show audience through her participation in bird shows.
After their 2003 launch, Mitch and Catherine continued to foster and nurture their business, developing and expanding with ease. Unfortunately, eternal smooth sailing wasn’t in store for Windy City Parrot. Tragedy struck on June 23, 2005, when their 15,000 ft.² retail space burned to the ground, taking with it 100% of their infrastructure and inventory. In the weeks to follow, they became the most prolific drop shippers, drop shipping more than 900 SKUs from nearly 100 vendors who were sympathetic to their situation.
After moving into a 5000 ft.² warehouse space in 2005, they’ve since had to move three additional times due to negligent landlords. Picking up and moving their business, its infrastructure and its inventory was a challenge unto itself, but proved unsuccessful at hindering the growth and determination of Windy City Parrot’s steadfast owners.
Just two years after the calamitous fire, Windy City Parrot bounced back in 2007, reaching a revenue milestone that secured their spot as one of the world’s leading and premier exotic bird supply stores.
With an infinitesimal marketing budget compared to titans such as Petsmart and Petco, Windy City Parrot’s ongoing success is heavily dependent on organic SEO. The bird supply store adds 5,000 to 10,000 words of fresh content on a weekly basis, either to their blog, products or categories.
But their efforts don’t stop there. In addition to being prolific bloggers, Windy City Parrot reaches thousands of readers around the world with their weekly “Sunday Birdie Brunch” newsletter, delivered every Sunday Morning at 7 AM. According to Mitch, their email and blogging effort provides an impressive 20-25% of their total revenue.
And of course, with the proliferation of social media, the utilization and exploitation of Facebook and other platforms is essential to the exotic bird supply store’s success. Windy City Parrot maintains an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumbler, Reddit, LinkedIn, and more, to bolster and broaden his customer reach.
Tools of the Trade
Mitch and Catherine are resourceful and enterprising entrepreneurs, incorporating and employing innovative technology and services that help their small business compete against some of the biggest brands. The Windy City Parrot founders proudly use QuickBooks, Paypal, Norton, MOZ, Searchspring, Clicky, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Product Listing Ads, and Go Data Feed to support their business.
To meet their shipping needs, Windy City Parrot adopted the usage of ShipWorks in 2003, and continues to use their services to this day to produce FedEx and USPS shipping labels. They’re also partnered with UberRush, which allows them to make commercial fulfillment and delivery in the Chicago City limits in less than 60 minutes.
For product images, Mitch relies on a bit of creativity and ingenuity. “I use my galaxy S6 phone to take product images with its 16 megapixel camera, which automatically uploads to Google images via android. This enables us to slice and dice images using PicMonkey. With software to extract images, we can place images of birds onto products, and produce robust visual displays for not a lot of money.”
Windy City Parrot’s Word of Advice
As a successful online business, Windy City Parrot knows what it takes to grow and thrive in one of the most brutal, competitive markets. According to Mitch, diligence and thoroughness is the key to everyday success:
"Don't fall in love with your dashboard; spend the bulk of your time looking for items on your website just like your customers would – you'll learn a lot more. Place at least one test order daily, checking every gateway, including PayPal.
If you think Murphy's Law is problematic – ‘everything that can go wrong will go wrong,’ once you get into e-commerce, consider Mr. Murphy highly optimistic."