Anthony Bucci

Wasn’t that the famous quote?

So the slow season storm (Jan & Feb) has been weathered and things are looking up – way up. The weather is braking all over the country and our sales our climbing in tune with the ever rising mercury this time of the year. We have also picked up all but a few of the major brands we needed to carry to be a contender.

We are comfortably in the black, our Philadelphia store and dotcom are developing a solid following and the reviews floating around the net about us are nothing short of glowing.

At this point, we are a far cry from the day our first order was placed. After fulfilling the silver frame-matched paint ($12.50) and receiving delivery confirmation of the package we realized that after shipping we actually ate $4.00 on the order. It wasn’t the most fun part of the journey for our founding four – but we can now look back fondly at the moment our joy turned to terror surrounding our first order.

Right now we are concentrating on improving overall user experience and product selection, making key hires where need be, and smoothing out the supply chain via technology and methodical revision at any and all touch points.

Its a fun time to be a founder on a brisk pace to seven figure revenue in our first year – in an industry thats down 25% from last year no less. Booyah!

It also was especially sweet to recently get genuine excitement from one of our friends who built, branded and sold StubHub last year to eBay and is basically “retired” at this point.

There is definitely no lack of focus here either: Customer Service, Customer Service, Customer Service.

Young businesses are definitely Mr. Toad’s wild ride.. Fo’ Sheezy.

Anthony

So today we noticed an interesting referrer while tailing our ecommerce website’s production.log file

(As written and posted by Matt to news.ycombinator.com)
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http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=ZXN2S645SXNTG6SRHV5Z (Notice the link at the top of the page links to revzilla.com (my site), sometimes it swaps to an amazon.com product so just refresh that page if it does)

Apparently someone had created a mechanical turk which is paying people to reword / paraphrase our product descriptions (I assume) for use on their competing website. We can’t be having that so I added a simple rule to redirect any Mechanical Turk referrers to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU 😀

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This isn’t a game… its the retail wild west. Don’t mess with the RevZilla boys – we’ll make you famous.

Click Here to see our post of this on news.ycombinator.com and read other folks responses.

-Anthony

This is why customer service is always king no matter what your business.

Posted today, pulled directly from Superbikes Forum:

KLX*** Wrote:

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Motorcycle, Dirt Bike and ATV Helmets, Gear and Accessories – RevZilla Motorsports

I have been in the market for a new textile jacket for the past three weeks or so. I searched around online for the lowest price for the Teknic Freestyle Jacket and came across two websites. It was either revzilla.com or ridegear.com.

I browsed through revzilla.com’s website and found that it was very user friendly and possibly amongst the best website layouts I’ve ever encountered. A notch above newenough.com in my opinion.

I spoke to Matt who handled my order; I originally emailed him to inquire if they were willing to pricematch a price I found elsewhere, at which point he happily complied.

I ordered this on Thursday (3/13) night, shipped out Friday (3/14) and had it at my door by noon on Monday. (3/17) (Fastest shipping I’ve ever encountered and it was free shipping as well)

I created this thread so people would be less hesitant to purchase from Revzilla.com since they are fairly new. I’d like it to be known that they have excellent customer service, fast shipping, and some of the lowest prices I’ve seen on the internet.

Thank You Revzilla!

Ninja edit: P.S. I’d like it to be publicly known that I have never nor do I now have any affiliation with Motorcycle, Dirt Bike and ATV Helmets, Gear and Accessories – RevZilla Motorsports or it’s affiliates. Furthermore I have not received any type of monetary compensation for this review. This review is soley for the purpose of sharing a great experience I had.

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Blow away their expectations and turn customers into evangelists – further extending your reach, brand and reputation.

We’re on a mission to raise the bar. So far were succeeding.

Anthony Bucci

Guy Trebay of the NY Times wrote in an article today:

“Despite the wholesale plundering of biker culture by the design world, there is plenty of gold left to mine from this $9.7-billion industry. The average age of motorcyclists continues to increase, to 41 today, from 32 in 1990, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. Yet, paradoxically, biker style looks fresher than ever. This, at least, was the impression one took away from the 27th Annual Cycle World International Motorcycle Show, which blew into Manhattan at the Javits Center last week.”

If you don’t know already my new company (RevZilla.com) is focused on the “lifestyle” of the motorcyclist and lesser so on the parts they need to keep their rides running.

The article is great and basically speaks to and validates most things that we had speculated about in varying degrees up until this point. Its nice to see other like minded, non-hell’s-angels taking notice of the readily apparent collision between utility inspired biker wares with high-end aspirational products and lifestyle apparel.

See the Article: Stealing From a Biker Gang

A great example is the striking similarities between the Xelement Biker Boots pictured above and Mark Nason Distortions pictured below. If I didn’t tell you, could you tell that the Xelements are $75 and the Nason’s cost $450?

Somewhere in my due diligence I picked up this snippet: Other than golf & motorcycles, its difficult to name another major lifestyle or hobby that people partake in from the time they are 5 years old until they die.

…and no World of Warcraft doesn’t count.

Its tough to do, and considering I find golf to be about as exciting as Tolstoy – Motorcycles have been a front runner in my mind for launching a new lifestyle based business for a while. I really don’t think I could write product descriptions about putters all day even if I had to.

Each day my partners and I evaluate and reevaluate our offering, competitive advantage, positioning and strategy based all available information.

Lately its been going extremely well, with traffic, conversion rate and revenues climbing steadily week by week. A few times it’s felt like I am in the middle of the Perfect Storm, with things just falling into place.

Now if I can get Mark Nason to let me carry his boots and Tommy Lee to write a testimonial we’d be all set.

Anthony Bucci

You have obviously heard of eCommerce. But have you heard of preCommerce?

About six weeks ago, we launched a design free version of our product catalog located at the URL for our new site which was still very heavily under construction.

It’s a brilliant move which we had used multiple times for different clients during my agency days to make ripples on the search engines long before the actual launch of a new site. Search Engines usually take some time (it varies) before they will completely index a new domain.

For instance with us, Google took a few weeks while Yahoo just went through recently. Even longer still, Google indexed all of our products just a few days ago.

The benefit is that if you don’t mind starting to receive traffic to a semi-complete site you can avoid going live with zero organic results.

Our take was that as long as there was a clear message to the user that we were not “open for business”, we could avoid customer confusion and disappointment, while allowing them to browse and become comfortable with our offering ahead of time.

We also had the added benefit of capturing email addresses before our launch as well as watching our page rank and organic listings climb to the first page of Google due to a solid SEO strategy and diligent monitoring and tweaking.

Recently we launched our site. Right now we are absolutely driving paid traffic, but a greater percent of our visitors are first timers coming in through very specific search terms due to the long SEO tail we have optimized for.

The bottom line is that while no one is popping any cris’ yet, there is a very promising future ahead with immense room for growth based on a solid foundation.

Exciting, exciting times.

Anthony Bucci