Over the next week or two our customers may be contacted by one of our staff members to see if there is anything we can help you with for your Ahwooga store, If you have not been on the site lately now is the time to come aboard and grow with us totally FREE.

Our main goal has always been to have an automotive site large enough to compete with the majors that has the flexibility sellers need. The only way to do this is to have the parts on Ahwooga that buyers are looking for.

Our staff can either re-activate your listings already within our database or we can re-duplicate your listings you have on eBay currently.

We also have big plans for SEMA this November. We are very excited of the new changes and hope to chat to you soon.

To Don and all the folks at Ahwooga.com,

I just wanted to personally take the time to wish all of you a Very Happy and Prosperous 2011!  And to thank you for all your help and support in 2010, you guys are the best and no one has more commitment to, or better customer service then Ahwooga.  You guys go the extra mile and do it in such a minimal time frame.  It could not have been any easier to begin selling on your site.  Not to mention the immediate traffic and sales too!  I could not be any happier with ahwooga.com and hope to continue to have such a wonderful relationship and experience in 2011.

Sincerely,

Darrell Kiehm

DK Superstore

Darrell, Thank you for the kind words, we sure do appreciate you being on Ahwooga.com.

We knew from the beginning that it was going to take having a diverse inventory of products on the site to make Ahwooga.com successful. While we have no way of tracking sales and inquires  that have been through telephone contact, we are able to view reports from on-site sales.

We have tallied up total site sales among all vendors by month and quarter. The following is what has us so excited.

The forth quarter represented 56% of total year sales for dollars and 41% for number of all items sold.
December so far has produced 24.8% of total dollars in sales and 16% of number of items sold.
Site sales began to accelerate in October which represented 14.3% of the annual. November continued the trend with 17.3% of the annual and December should end at close to 26%.

The last 90 days also represented 44% of all new registered users on the site. That is also a tremendous forecaster for future growth.

We would like to thank all of our vendors who have helped in the creation of the site. We look forward to continuing the relationships we have built and the future growth of  ”Ahwooga Your New Online Automotive Marketplace”.

In preparation for the upcoming SEMA Show in Las Vegas, the core staff at Ahwooga HQ sat down to map out our plans for the show. As usual our conversations turn to discussions about long-term goals and ultimately, how do we take care of our sellers as the site continues to grow.

This encompassed two phases, rewarding existing customers for their loyalty and recruiting new members. So after some kicking, screaming, arm wrestling and name calling we all agreed on a new, less expensive and simpler pricing structure.

Existing customers account levels have already been adjusted to the new accounts and all are either going to be saving money or able to list higher quantities for the same amount. Some of our customers actually benefited both ways, and that made us feel pretty good.

Next week we will be at SEMA, having fun and getting the word out about the site. We hope our efforts bring many many new members on board and we’re glad we were able to do something to take care of our existing members too.

We will be away from the office all next week, but still available by e-mail.

Follow us on Facebook to see our first SEMA experience.   http://www.facebook.com/Ahwooga

Both of these were top level and did not have sub-categories and they were becoming hard to navigate with the amount of products they had in them. The staff at Ahwooga HQ moved the products into the correct sub level categories already.
Here are what they look like now with the new Sub categories in place.

Site speed has been the other issue we have been dealing with here at Ahwooga HQ. So along with the hardware upgrades, we also needed to tweak some of the setting that actually deliver the site to your browser. Here are some of the results in the short time the changes have been in effect.

The Good;
(Week to week comparison)
Pageviews  +20.73%
Bounce Rate  - 1.46%
Page Per Visit  +13.42%
Avg Time on Site  +5.87%

The Not so good;
Sessions IDs were timing out too quickly. (Friday & Saturday Morn)
This news blog and the new Ahwooga warehouse crashed. (Saturday Night)
Saturday morning we had an image delivery issue. (Saturday Morning)
All of these issues were fixed by Saturday by 9:30am.

I hope we didn’t inconvenience any one too bad during these important changes.

Team Ahwooga is constantly looking for ways to not only improve the site but also improve the user experience. We feel that these 2 things will improve the seller performance and increase seller visibility.

To that end we have created a web based portal of information we call the Ahwooga Warehouse. The warehouse combines a full blown forum, tech articles and manuals, an interactive calendar and a picture/video gallery.

Visitors can take in all the information we put into the site and they can also contribute by adding additional content to the site.

How can this benefit you?

By participating in the forums, galleries and the creation of content, you will be helping to generate more traffic to you through increased visibility before a wide potential customer base. Through your minimal efforts the entire site can benefit greatly, so please click the following link and join us in the warehouse.

The site also features a banner management system that is set up to drive traffic to the main Ahwooga site and to seller storefronts.

Please take a few minutes to browse around. We are open to any suggestions, so feel free to contact us.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4igUg5jfaL4

Episode 5 of I Am Ahwooga. The theme was Head Shots, straight on but as always there are a few twists and lots of fun. Enjoy

The I Am Ahwooga Facebook group is now over 1100 members and over 1800 user submitted photo’s.

If you are not yet part of the I Am Ahwooga Facebook Group, please join.
This has been a very fun ongoing way to help brand our new company and showing our passion for cars!!

This is a very simple program to use for the person requesting the chat and you only have to enter a name to get started.

This option is available when the chat button is green and one of our staff members is online. The button turns grey when we are offline and it offers a way to send a note to us.  The offline message will direct users to our help center.

We spent a while today and tested it in all the browsers. IE8 and Google Chrome worked the best, while Fire Fox had an odd issue with shrinking the original window. Over all the software seems to be working well and did not effect the speed of the site.

We try very hard to avoid desktop applications since we need access from our homes, on the road and at the office. For managing our Twitter,  Facebook Profiles/Pages and LinkedIn accounts we have been using Hoot Suite.

Hoot Suite uses a browser instead of a program and allows us to have it running in a window behind what we are currently working on. When we need to post an update,  it’s there.  We are confident in recommending this service and of coarse are big fans of using social media’s to promote products across the web. The site also has a very FAQ and help section. There is even mobile apps.

I hope this helps, and we are looking forward to see you tweets, updates and tiny URL’s about your Ahwooga listings.

We got a call from a very nice gentleman in Texas that sells parts and manuals for planes that was interested in our site. Originally we had not offered this category when when we launched the site. So the staff sat down to discuss if we should create it? Our unofficially motto has always been “Buy any Sell things that move you”. We all agreed that aviation products fall within that scope.

In previous  posts to this blog I have shared things that our team has done to improve the site. As always, I want to thank the buyers and sellers that have provided valuable input.  That really helps us make good decisions.

I would like to review some facts about the last 30 days that have created some smiles for us.

The last 30 days represents 14% of the sites life.
Below are stats from the last 30 days as a percentages of the last 7 months.

• New Members – 24.2%
• Number of Sales – 27.4%
• Dollars in Sales – 43.8%
• Visitors to the site -  23.3%

The beginning of August shows numbers that exceed those stats.

One of the only things we can’t track is telephone calls from buyers looking at listings. I truly hope all of our vendors are too busy to ask every caller “how did you come across my products”.  With over 90,000 listings with phone numbers to the vendors, phone calls must be coming in.

Just for the record, our team is going to continue to be as aggressive if not more in growing the site and doing what we can to benefit both the buyers and sellers that use our site.
This has all been possible because sellers put their trust in us to help market their products.
Thank You.
Team Ahwooga

P.S. We have published some tips for selling auto parts  online for most of our veteran sellers, the information is just review. Maybe someone might pick up a few idea’s to help them wherever they sell. You can fin the tips here:  http://www.sellcarpartsonline.com/

As always, I want to thank those of you who have shared with us ways to improve the site.

Through buyer feedback and traffic analysis we were able to identify areas where buyers were experiencing some difficulties. By allowing sellers to put their phone numbers in their banners and listings, buyers who may not be as computer savvy can still call you and make a purchase but we wanted to streamline the process and make it better for buyers.

We walked through the procedure many times and were able to implement a set of changes that both simplified and improved the purchasing procedure.

We see buyers come in from a general Google search and within 5 to 7 minutes they view a product page, register for the site, complete their verification, return to the product page and then purchase the item.

As a seller you may not have had the experience of buying on Ahwooga, so we encourage you to go to the site, look around, find a hot wheel or a sticker or something and make a purchase from another seller so you can experience what the buyers experience.

As always we would love to hear how it went for you and we are always open to suggestions.

With the large increases in traffic we have been experiencing recently, we wanted to make sure new site users are able to navigate through the check out process. I personally had a lot of fun since I bought some really cool items during the final testing after changes were made. In a couple of days I will publish the changes that were made.

We added more search engine optimization today. In this site update, we made what shows up in your browser title bar be the title of the listing.
(see highlighted areas)
This will also make the search engines display the same result once the site has been re-rolled by the search bots.

Tonight I am running a new XML site map to try and speed up this process and will submit it to all the major search engines. The end result will be, more click-ins into our site from natural search results.

For everyone how has helped with this by linking our site to other site, I want to say thank you for helping share the word and strengthen the site.

Six months have gone by since our hard launch and the site is at 75,000 live listings. The lion’s share of these listing have vendors phone numbers and e-mail address so viewers who either have questions or maybe feel more comfortable calling about a product can do so.  And with the backlog of customers we are helping bulk upload ad the ones doing their own listings, this growth is going to continue at a rapid pace. The staff here is going to continue to aggressively seek out more vendors that in turn will bring in more buyers.