Hi Everyone!

I'm new to the board and brand-spankin' new to the world of e-commerce. My family and I want to give internet retailing a go (part-time to start). I just formed an LLC with the name of Chesapeake Traders. As I'm coming to realize, I think I am going to want to "brand" my store(s) more specifically based on the products. For example, rather than use Chesapeake Traders for a site selling games and puzzles, I might want to brand it "CoolGames.com" (just a hypothetical). Let's say down the line we decide we'd also like to sell health & beauty products on a separate store site and would like to "brand" it "Beautiful You" (again, just picking a name out of the air).

Can I just name the sites/stores what I want, get a domain name, design a nifty logo, and off to the races I go...or do I have to trademark each brand (logo and all) BEFORE I can put up the site? Can someone give me a step-by-step based on your experience?

I'd love to hear from those of you who are set up in this kind of scenario. Please give me as much advice as your fingers can take. By the way, do you still identify your real company name somewhere in your individual sites? Where and how?

Thanks!

Yes, you can do it this way, and one of our old urls was completely different than the company name for a number of reasons. Actually in hindsight, it wasn't really that good of an idea because the url was too unrecognizable from the company name.
For example, when people are on your site and call you on the telephone, unless you answer CoolGames, there is confusion.
Also, you'll need to make sure the cc companies show your url on the customer's statement instead of your company name because you'll get a ton of charge backs, people claiming they never ordered from Chesapeake Traders.

As far as getting trademarks for logos prior to use, I really don't know. You might want to visit the gov's trademark site.

Good luck

Yeah since you have an LLC, you can open those other businesses as DBA (Doing Business As). A lot of companies open different entities under and generic corporate name. You would need to get a different EIN for each of them I believe, not sure though.

Trademarks are a big pain. We tried it once. Finally gave up.

Another aspect you'll need to consider is that you'll need to spend time, energy, money, etc. promoting multiple domains. If you plan to work on your site's link popularity and organic rankings, consider selling multiple product lines from the same domain / store. If your product lines are similar, my advice would be to sell them from one store and promote one domain.

I'll let others comment on this from their own experiences as well.

Welcome to the boards and .
... and best of luck!

Check out these tips for your new store(s)

I've noticed lately that many online businesses have many sites, each with related products. They could easily be combined into one store with a greater selection for the visitor.

What is the benefit of dividing them? Could it be a site optimization issue? Each site optimized for a certain group of products?

It just seems odd to me. I'm more likely to buy from a site if I can find many things that I need. Just one little thing that's interesting won't motivate me to run downstairs and try to find my credit card.

I bought some bookcases online last night and I searched every category to make sure there wasn't something else I wanted before dragging out the credit card. I ended up buying two more items.

Our regular customers want one-stop-shopping. And we continuly expand our product line to keep them happy. We have less sales these last couple of years but much larger orders. We're actually making more $s now.

As far as seo, if the products are related it's better to keep them together. It gives your site a theme and it generates much more internal links. All of which the search engines love.

We are in this discussion right now. We are going to expand our line, and we were thinking about opening up a completely new store. Which there are good and bad reasons to do so, as opposed to having it all in one store. I will list a few pros and cons that I feel and see what the rest of you think.

With one store:

Advertising and phone numbers can be the same saving allot of money.

I only have to maintain one store instead of 2.

And others I can't think of right now

With two stores:

Products can be separated since they will not be NASCAR products for the most part in the other store.

Orders will be separate for other none NASCAR items.

We can provide links to each store. (Would this help or hurt search engine placement).

The NASCAR store is not going anywhere (we hope) since this is the business he started with and enjoys the most.

But the big question is would another sports fan go to a nascar domain name to find other items?

Any other ideas from merchants? Also, what about the bandwith issue. For sure we would at least have to move up to the next level, and it could be close to the highest level after time. Which we really don't care if we are making money, to support the change

Thanks,

I'd like to build on what ErinE said (below).

If your product THEME is the same, then use one store. If not, create another store front. This is hugely important when it comes to SEO. Trying to optimize a site for multiple themes is impossible. Your traffic and sales will be lopsided.


< Another aspect you'll need to consider is that you'll need to spend time, energy, money, etc. promoting multiple domains. If you plan to work on your site's link popularity and organic rankings, consider selling multiple product lines from the same domain / store. If your product lines are similar, my advice would be to sell them from one store and promote one domain.

I'll let others comment on this from their own experiences as well.

Welcome to the boards and .
... and best of luck!

Check out these tips for your new store(s) >

Just saw a group of stores yesterday that was interesting for this very reason. It was a children's apparel store, and they had at least 3 separate domains and shopping carts - 1 for the whole line, 1 for the boys only and 1 for the girls only.

WhoaGirl2:

I just visited your site and you seemed to brand the site differently from your company name (such as what I was getting at). You have "Horse-Gifts.com" as your domain and logo, but I am assuming Equine Promotions, Inc is you actual company. Was there anything special you did (trademark, etc), or did you just grab the domain, create your logo, and GO??

-Chris

I have five websites at last count. All different domain names, one of which is equinepromotions.com, my first. I started back in 1999 with just that site, which was originally designed to promote other horse websites (hence the company name). How I ended up here, I have no idea. Seriously. It all just evolved.

My actual company is Equine Promotions, Inc., as registered in the Commonwealth of Virgina. All correspondence includes company name, and that is how I answer the phone now.

I did not trademark. Someone else bought the domain equinepromotions.net. I get lots of their traffic.

Don't laugh at the above website, it hasn't been updated in years. It just keeps plugging along. I have big plans for it, just no time or the money to pay someone to do what I want. Maybe one day. It amazes me that it makes any money at all, considering how neglected it is.

So, to answer your question, I just grabbed the horse-gifts.com domain and WENT!

To be honest, I'm not really clear on what "branding a website" means (does it show?) In the world of horse gifts and decor, not a week goes by I get a nasty email from someone who says they placed an order and haven't received it yet. Always turns out to be a competitor they ordered from, so I guess I'm not doing a very good job of branding, whatever it is.

I'm beginning to see problems with my two different ecommerce stores. Answering the phone is becoming an adventure, every time the phone rings.

However, I've never had a problem with a website (horse-gifts.com) different from the company name. Never has been an issue. The only issue has been to discover which website a customer is calling about. That is the adventure! They don't get confused, but I do.

My vote is with Erin and Saxon gifts advice. Having two stores with similar niches is frustrating at times. I think that google is on to this mentality, plus, as stated earlier, your promotional lingo, mindset and everyting is so hard to differnetiate to make the stores different enough for SEO and people just pick up on it - "oh thats them again." I personally can't seem to muster up enough energy to constant differentiate the stores enough.

Everyone's business is different, but I believe there are arguments to be made for multiple stores, even if the product lines are similar. One example would be a site that sells wholesale and a second site that sells retail.

I have a question for the SEO experts. If we were to set up a "mirror site" for wholesale, we would probably use the same images. Shall we rename the image files to prevent the G**gle Gods and other search engine algorithms from becoming angry with us?

I have read (don't ask me where!) that the search engines hate to see essentially the same site twice.

Any guidance on how to set up a similar wholesale site without pissing off G**gle, Yah** and M*N would be appreciated!

On a similar note: is there a way to change your store name easily, without losing too much traffic?

Our store was originally designed as a small store for a small market. We soon found that we had a huge market outside of our target that was greatly in need of some of our stuff. Now, our store name may be a turn off to them, as they might think we don't have stuff for them.

Is there a way to change the domain, switch our current store right over to it, and not lose all our old traffic? Can old pages be redirected to new ones? If so, would this cost us a fortune? I know search engines would take a while to get our pages indexed. Also, would having the same exact product names give us problems if the old url was no longer active?

Mirror sites can be bad for your rankings in the search engines, primarily if you use the same text-based content for both sites. Duplicate content anywhere on the Web can result in a loss of rankings or penalty from the search engines.

When setting up mirror sites, we always recommend changing all product descriptions, category descriptions, homepage text, etc. And yes, you might as well change alt tags, meta tags and any other primary content areas that are spiderable by the search engines.

Robert,

One thing you could do is require login to the wholesale site. That would block any of the bots from crawling through your pages so they could not see the duplicate content.

Requiring login only affects the ASP pages, though, so you could put static HTML in front of the ASP to still get good listings in the search engines.

Thanks for the suggestions.

It may depend on state but I don't believe that, for an LLC, you'll need a different EIN. We have several DBA (Assumed Names) for our business each of which only requires a new filing with the state. As far as the federal government is concerned, it all the same (money ) to them.

Bob

Robert, do not set up mirror image sites. Create pages that are similar, but not cookie-cutter style. Change up the "alt" tags that you give for each image (the actual picture doesn't matter - the alt tags are the important part)

~Chris

Thanks, Chris, but you're responding to a post that's 14 months old! I've made the same error in the past.