Three years ago, on January 15th, 2013, I announced here that HIPPO Internet Marketing was closing. After ten years, I decided to stop taking clients and focus on my e-commerce sites. Shortly after that, I went to Ephricon as their Director of Client Services for about a year.
Two years ago, after Ephricon became Straight North, I took some Internet marketing clients, but mostly just those that I already had a relationship with already. I never opened up Hippo Internet Marketing in the sense that I started taking clients. But now, after three years of being “closed”…
HIPPO Internet Marketing is Open again!
In fact, I’ve started to redesign our website at www.HippoIM.com!
(I love the fact that my office is the main picture on the home page.)
In early September, I made the decision to start investing in switching our e-commerce websites over to the Shopify platform. Historically, we’ve used several platforms, most notably Volusion. However, it’s becoming more and more evident that Shopify has come out as the strong leader in e-commerce platforms.
Basically Shopify is to e-commerce platforms what WordPress is to blogging platforms. There are several others out there, including Volusion and Big Commerce. But Shopify is not only leading, but making a strong push to drive far ahead of the others.
I’ll post my thoughts and feelings on Shopify on my newly recreated consulting site soon. But in short, I’ll say that it’s amazing easy to build a site on this platform. It’s also easy to extend it to do all the extra things you want to do with their Shopify Apps system.
The whole process was extremely painless and we were able to go live in less than three months. Not bad for an entirely new site with about 200 products, new images and new content. The new site is named Bellman Cart Specialists. Although we’re trying to sell online, the real push for this site is to promote that we are expert consultants on the topic. We’re hoping for more leads as opposed to online orders with this site. We’ll see.
