Rehabbing a Defunct E-Commerce Site

Many of you who know me or regularly read this blog probably know that last December, my husband and I sold our online toy store so that we could focus entirely on our e-commerce practice. The new owners seem to be doing really well with the site, and I’m glad to not have to focus on the day-to-day business anymore – I always liked working on the website much more than running the business. But in addition to the toy store, we also had a drop-ship site for children’s furniture that we had started as a second line of income for that business.

However, our focus on NetBlazon left us with too little time to manage the customer and vendor relationships for Coolest Kids Furniture effectively, and as a result we turned off the ability for customers to check out on the site. It gets some traffic, so we didn’t want to take it completely offline – but without bringing in revenue, it likely wouldn’t have been very enticing for a buyer. As it was, the site was just sitting there doing nothing.

We were left with the question of what exactly to do with it?

Then I ran across a neat set of posts by Eric Nagel on coding a datafeed site using PHP. That sounded like a lot of fun! I don’t get to do much PHP work anymore, and the thought of getting my hands dirty on some code was enticing. So weekend-before-last, I sat down with his scripts (there’s an entire series of posts Eric wrote), my ShareASale and Commission Junction accounts, and the templates from Coolest Kids Furniture’s shopping  cart. Although I made a number of tweaks and adjustments to the scripts Eric provided, they saved me hours of work (especially on the CJ web services) and let me get the site up fast.

The site is now pushing traffic through to a number of other furniture retailers through the two affiliate networks. I shut down the old merchant accounts (that should save me $35/month) and moved the shopping cart to a backup directory. Plus I threw some Google AdWords campaigns on there to see how they might perform too.

Last week I added a WordPress 3.0 blog to target additional keyword phrases for the site’s SEO efforts. The new version of WordPress is so easy to install, and the default template is wonderful. I made a quick header graphic, installed a few SEO-related plug-ins, and it was ready to go. Plus, all the work I did on the site a couple of years ago left me with enough knowledge about the products that the posts are quick and easy to write.

Almost makes me wish I hadn’t let some of those other domain names expire!

Do you have any old sites sitting around that you don’t know what to do with? Are you up for a rehab? Or looking to sell? Let us know your plans by dropping a comment below.