Case Study - Essay Institute

“We are saving approximately 10 hours a week that we used to have to spend on managing various customer-related spreadsheets and on setting up email campaigns with a non-integrated marketing solution.”

Erick Widman
Essay Institute
http://essayinstitute.com

What did you use to run your online business before you started using GoodBarry?

Before switching to GoodBarry we ran the Essay Institute for a couple years with a Yahoo store. It was a reliable platform and Yahoo made a solid effort to make everything user-friendly. They also made a point of creating partnerships with a number of service providers, such as Campaigner for sending out newsletters and Typepad and Wordpress for adding a business blog to your site. However, Yahoo's ecommerce solutions are definitely designed for businesses selling tangible products. Our website sells a service and we had to hire a programmer full time for a week to allow customers to securely upload documents to us and then integrate this new functionality with the Yahoo checkout process. In many ways, we felt we were "forcing" the Yahoo store to work for us. But we didn't think we had any real alternatives besides spending even more money on a programmer to create a system from scratch.

What do you find different about GoodBarry when comparing it with your old solution?

Once a friend recommended GoodBarry to us and we explored its features a bit we immediately knew we wanted to switch over. The appeal of using just one platform to handle ecommerce and hosting, manage customers, send newsletters, and have an integrated blog was too compelling to pass up, despite the inevitable time involved in switching from one company to another. What was truly remarkable about setting up our website on Goodbarry, however, is that my wife (the web designer) and I were liberal arts majors but we were able to create and customize the store entirely by ourselves using Goodbarry's flexible Web Apps and Web Forms. First, we easily set up our SAT Essay Practice Packages to be sold as e-products. Then we gave our customers the ability to create an account, upload the essays they'd like us to review and then download the reviewed essays after receiving an automatic notification--simple but powerful. Just as important is the fact that these processes are reliable and bug-free and we don't need a programmer on call to fix the various PHP errors that used to crop up when we had duct-taped our own code to the Yahoo store.

How has GoodBarry helped you grow your business?

The day to day operation of our website of course is the fun part and where GoodBarry truly shines. GoodBarry is a powerful web 2.0 solution (or maybe even 3.0) while many other platforms are stuck back in web 1.0. We are saving approximately 10 hours a week that we used to have to spend on managing various customer-related spreadsheets and on setting up email campaigns with a non-integrated marketing solution. After experiencing GoodBarry's "Live Feed" on the home page that shows what our customers and visitors have been up to on our site, we could never go back. Overall, the interface is simple, powerful, quick and intuitive. Being able to set customer-related SMS alerts on my mobile phone and easily integrate Google Apps for Your Domain to handle our email with multiple tutors has been very satisfying. In addition, I don't know html but I'm able to change text on the fly with GoodBarry's "sitewalk" technology and so I don't have to wait for our web designer to correct typos or feature a new promotion. Speaking of promotions, we love the ease with which we can create promo codes and put our products on sale for a specific period of time. The fact that I can do all of this for $39/month--and that this includes very reliable and speedy web hosting--is an excellent deal. I truly wouldn't be surprised if Google buys GoodBarry. Not a bad idea!