No matter how much you spend on local advertising, and no matter how friendly and helpful your salespeople may be, every single day you’re losing customers, sales and profits to online merchants selling diamonds and jewelry on the Internet.

If you don’t have a serious e-commerce game plan and if you don’t do something about it, right now, you will continue to fall further behind in these changing times in the jewelry industry.

But Here’s Great News . . .

Ideal Diamond Solutions, Inc.—IDS—can help you successfully compete with the online merchants
(and local competitors, too) by providing you with your own, state-of-the-art Web site — complete with an inventory of 20,000+ certified diamonds and 10,000+ other fine jewelry items—plus continuous Search Engine Optimization to generate sales you might otherwise lose!

And That’s Not All . . .

IDS is the unprecedented leader in providing Independent Retail Jewelers with a customized, fully loaded,
"turn-key" e-commerce-enabled Web Site solution in as little as 7 days, plus expert ongoing SEO.

To see the details of our offerings please click here

Dear Independent Retail Jeweler,

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re not in the jewelry business. Instead, you’re a prospective customer, looking to buy some jewelry. Specifically, a diamond ring.

Perhaps you’ve got a good idea of what you’re looking for. Perhaps not. But you do know how much you can afford to spend—or how much is available on your credit card.

So Where Should You Shop For The Ring?

There are several small, independent jewelry stores in your general area. And a couple of the larger stores—the chain stores that advertise on TV and radio—at the mall. But you don’t have the time, or desire, to visit them all, to search for the "ideal" ring and make price comparisons between stores, to ensure that you’re getting the very best price. So what do you do?

Well, if you’re like an ever-increasing number of shoppers these days, especially those looking to buy bigger-ticket items, you start searching the Web. And you probably start with Google®.

If You Were To Google Up "Diamond Rings" Guess How Many Listings Would Show Up: 10,000?  50,000?  500,000?  5,000,000?

The correct answer, the last time we checked, was a whopping 17,300,000! And on Page 1, right up there at the top, you’ll find a 500-ton gorilla named Blue Nile, which claims to be "the largest online retailer of certified diamonds." They’re the nemesis of every independent jeweler, because they sell diamonds at a significantly reduced margin, which often makes competing on price not worth the time and effort it would take an independent to source and sell a comparable diamond.

Which is Reason #1 why BN (as we’ll call them from now on) and the other online jewelry retailers are taking bites out of thousands of independents throughout the country, in big cities as well as small towns. Independent jewelers tell us they’re losing from 10% to as much as 35% of their business, because it’s simply not worth their time and effort to compete with the online prices and selection. Since they don’t sell thousands of certified diamonds each year, they can’t get the lowest prices to increase their margin.

Many retailers are simply giving up on the loose diamond sale and, instead, just mounting the customer’s Internet-purchased diamond in a ring, where they can make a full margin of profit.

The Independent Jewelers’ Problem Is Getting Worse Every Year.

According to a statement a few years ago by the CEO of BN, their annual volume at that time was comparable to that of 200 independent jewelry stores. Which means they took away all those sales and profits from 200 stores. And, undoubtedly, many of those stores were forced to close as a result.

Last year, the CEO predicted annual sales of BN could reach $1 billion within five to seven years. That’s equivalent to the annual sales of 800 independents. Will your store be one of those stores that continues to lose sales to the online merchants? Quite possibly it will be, unless you do something to protect your store now.

So not only are you losing must-have business to BN every day, you’re also missing out on repeat business. All online jewelry shoppers, since BN’s customers are likely to go back online the next time they’re in the market for something.

Now let’s return to reality. Instead of "playing customer," you are who you really are: the owner and/or manager of an independent jewelry store. Which brings up Reason #2 why—unless things change—you can never compete with BN and the other online merchants: The selection of diamonds they offer is tremendous— 17,000 or more, in all price ranges and with next-day delivery.

How Many Certified Diamonds Do You Carry Right Now?

If you’re like most retailers, you’re reducing your on-hand diamond inventory, because the carrying costs and reduced margins don’t make sense in today’s business environment. When you need a specific diamond, you call your "list" of vendors in search of it. And if you bring in stones from multiple vendors, you’re stuck paying multiple shipping costs. Even if you subscribe to Rappnet or Polygon, you still spend a lot of time searching for stones, because you can’t effectively work these databases with your customers. And so the fact remains: right now, when you compare your selection and delivery capabilities to the online merchants, there’s no contest.

So What’s The Solution? How Can You Compete — Profitably — With
BN And All The Other Internet Merchants Who Are Stealing
Your Past, Present And Future Customers?

The answer is obvious: set up your own Web site. Maybe you already have one —only it’s not performing nearly as well as you’d like. In fact, it may be costing you far more money, time and aggravation than you ever imagined. With little or no boost in sales.

On the other hand, perhaps you don’t have a Web site, because you don’t even know where to start. Or you can’t afford the massive investment it so often takes.

Either Way — Whether You Have a Web Site or Not — IDS Is Here To Help.
Much Faster, At Far Less Cost, And With The Potential For Much Greater
Success — On a 24/7 Basis — Than You Might Ever Have Thought Possible!

But before we get into details about our service, let’s consider the three primary ways you can set up and maintain a Web site to promote your jewelry store:

1. You Can Do It Yourself.

You might think that this would be the cheapest way. If you’re very computer-savvy and have lots of time to spare, it might be. Or, far more likely, it can be the most expensive and the most time-consuming way. That’s because, in order to have a Web site that effectively competes with BN and all the other online merchants, you need very sophisticated programming skills, Ajax search capabilities and Build-Your-Own functionality, a huge virtual inventory of diamonds and jewelry, and a great virtual shopping cart.

There’s so much you have to do: select the items to be displayed on your site, obtain them from your suppliers, photograph them (it’s not easy), write about them, set retail prices (after researching the competition), and so on.

And Then, When Your Site is Finally Up And It Looks Gorgeous,
What Good Is It, If No One Knows It’s There?

Turns out you also need to be an expert in Search Engine Optimization: SEO.

A search engine (a/k/a search index), as you may know, is a huge electronic database that uses software known as spiders or robots (or just plain bots) to visit Web pages and read the information stored on them. Then complex algorithms are used to index that information. As many as 50% to 80% of potential buyers of products or services begin at a search engine—such as Google or Yahoo®—to find up-to-date and relevant information about what to buy, what the best price is, and where to buy it.

By using Search Engine Optimization techniques when formatting and writing your Web site, you can improve your chances that potential buyers will find the listing for your site before, or instead of, your competitors’—because many people won’t search beyond the first page. And the closer to the top of that page you are, the better.

To become an SEO expert, you can take courses, or study books such as the 354-pager, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. You’ll learn the basics, discover the importance of links and keywords and how to build search-engine-friendly sites, and find out how to correctly add your site to indexes and directories. You’ll also need to learn all about pay-per-click (PPC)—a/k/a cost-per-click (CPC)—advertising, which can be used to supplement SEO or, under certain conditions, even replace it.

However, becoming an SEO and PPC expert isn’t easy. It requires many hours of study and effort every day, month after month. Then, once you’re an expert, and your site is at or near the top of the first page, you’ll need to work long and hard to maintain that position, as your competitors vie for it. All this means huge amounts of time away from your regular job: managing your store. So by the time you’re a Web programmer, copywriter, photographer, SEO expert and PPC expert, you may not have a store left to manage.

2. You Can Hire Someone Else To Do It For You.

If you hire an outside SEO firm to drive traffic to your Web site, the first thing they will want to do is rewrite your site, to internally optimize it. Then, and only then, can an effective outside SEO campaign begin. This initial rewrite would cost you at least $20,000, and the outside SEO campaign would cost you an additional $20,000 to as much as $50,000—or even more—every year, in order to achieve high rankings in all the important categories. But there’s much more to it than that.

You should also know this: If you’re paying an outside firm to do SEO for you, somewhere between 30% and 50% of your money will be going right into the pockets of the company’s executives, and only the balance would be used to pay the people who are actually doing the work!

Then, once your site is near or at the top of Page 1, it doesn’t automatically stay there forever. You must constantly work, day after day, all year long, to keep it there. Unfortunately, many (if not most) SEO companies will charge you a substantial monthly fee to attain new top listings in Google. Then they’ll do little or nothing more —other than continue to charge you monthly fees—to maintain those top listings.

Also, no doubt, your SEO expert will not be a diamond expert, too. So you’ll need to pay someone else—a current employee or an outsider—to work with your SEO expert to educate him or her on all searchable aspects of the jewelry business.

So to create a first class Web site yourself from scratch, with proper SEO marketing, it can easily cost you a minimum of $50,000 to as much as $150,000 the first year to set it up, and then $20,000 to $50,000 a year to maintain it.

What’s more, you’d still need to meet or beat the prices of the online merchants —or else your Web site would be ineffective as well as costly. So you’d have to do a higher online volume just to break even. Therefore, doing it all yourself—even with the help of an SEO expert—is NOT the way to go.

So What’s The Solution? It’s This: Team-Up With The Experts At IDS.

Perhaps you’ve been contacted by firms—not unlike ours—offering to set up and maintain a Web site for you, complete with thousands of certified diamonds at competitive prices. If so, that’s all well and good. In fact, before offering our services to independent jewelers like yourself, we conducted extensive research to find out exactly what our major competitors were offering, what they weren’t offering, how much they charged, how long they took to set up a new Web site, and so on.

Then we set out to be the best, to empower you, the independent retailer, with all the tools you need to take back the business you’re losing to the online players. That’s why you MUST take the time to consider our offer, before you spend another penny trying to successfully compete with the online jewelry merchants. We are simply the best at what we can do for you—and we can prove it beyond any doubt!

3. Let IDS Do Everything—And We Mean Everything (Except Run Your Store) —For You!

With ever-increasing competition from online merchants, you can’t simply bury your head in the sand and continue to do business in the same old way. Because when you take your head out of the sand to look around you, there might not be anything left of your business to look at! Like it or not, you have to change—or at least add to—the way you do business.

And IDS is highly qualified to handle everything for you...at modest cost.

First, Though, In The Interest Of Full Disclosure,
Here’s Something Else We Want You To Know . . .

We have helped several e-commerce jewelry sites compete with Blue Nile and all the others. We’ve had to learn all the Internet trade secrets and master all the tricks of the trade in order to help them compete effectively. Then we’ve had to put our know-how to actual, practical use—theory alone won’t cut it-in order to test and refine our strategies and tactics. And now we’ll be sharing all that hard-to-obtain, highly important knowledge with you, in order to help you succeed, too!

We Are Experts in Every Aspect of This Business, So You Won’t Have To Be!

Let us provide you with a fully functional, internally optimized e-commerce Web site that’s totally customized to your store’s image—including pictures, store history, and logo. Your site will be pre-loaded with over 20,000 diamonds and tens of thousands of other jewelry items to choose from. All of the branded products which you are authorized to sell—right now and in the future—can be included on your site, as well as any other in-store products you may choose to post there.

And yes, it will be YOUR site. Your name will be in the URL address—not under some other primary portal like the sites several of our competitors offer. It strikes us as strange that they actually put retailer sites under their own domain names. How can they possibly even dream of attracting natural search engine traffic?

But even though it will be YOUR site, we’ll treat it as well as we treat our own. And that’s saying a lot, because...

We are true IT (Internet Technology) experts. We employ a team of some two dozen IT specialists: database experts, server security experts, Web design experts, HTML experts, and programming experts. Plus world-class copywriters and graphic designers, and some of the top photographers of jewelry in the world.

We’ve invested over $500,000 in Web systems alone, to automatically manage a number of retailers’ sites simultaneously, rather than just one. We use PHP, MySQL, Smarty, CHMod, a custom CMS, and many other sophisticated programs to help make sure that everything needed is in place and operating perfectly, all the time.

In addition to having us create and continuously maintain your site 24/7/365, you’ll greatly benefit by letting us handle all the product fulfillment, too. For each sale, your customer will have a choice: "Buy it online, or see it in the store first."

In the latter case, the product would be sent to your store, and you would arrange an appointment with the customer to close the sale right in your store. With IDS handling the fulfillment, we would relieve you from the time-consuming aspects of searching for diamonds and coordinating everything. Yes, you would make slightly less profit than if you were able to close the sale on your own—but now we would be doing all the leg work, which can take a tremendous amount of time. And, as you well know, time is money.

Either way—"Buy it online, or see it in the store first"—you would receive a commission check from IDS at the end of each month, identifying all the customers and their purchases. Also, follow-up e-mails would be sent to these customers, thanking them for their purchase and inviting them to visit your store for future purchases. (The details of fulfillment can be further explained to you by one of our qualified sales representatives.)

We are also online marketing experts. We’ve built several e-commerce firms to eight figures per year—using SEO, PPC, TV, magazine, affiliate and other proven marketing methods.

And, of course, we’re jewelry experts, with 200+ years of combined experience. We operate a diamond brokerage, we manufacture jewelry, and we wholesale jewelry.

All our experts have come together to empower the local retailer. It’s never happened quite like this before, and it may never happen again. But that’s not all...

Here’s a 5-Point Summary of What IDS Can Do for You . . .

1. You’ll be provided with a gorgeous, custom-made, "turn-key" Web site—backed by an inventory of more than 20,000 certified diamonds and more than 10,000 other jewelry items. And all items come with a 30-day money-back guarantee!

2. You’ll be provided with a huge virtual inventory. Use it as a resource when you don’t have what the customer is looking for in your store, or to supplement your in store offerings in particular categories. If you don’t care to display certain items or certain categories of items, you won’t have to. You’ll be able to add your own jewelry items—obtained from any source you like—at any time you like. And you can set your own prices (based, we strongly suggest, on our competitive research).

3. Your Web site will have the best features of BN’s site to help you compete head-on. For instance: A design-your-own-ring module. Without this, you would be no match for BN. If you were to have an expert build just this for your own Web site, it would cost you at least $20,000 or, with advanced features, up to $50,000. But we include it at no extra charge. We also include: Ajax search limiter, wish list creation, fast delivery, special-order handling, instant financing online, insurance coverage, shopping cart, PayPal, gift certificates, ring sizing, mounting, testimonials, customer reviews, free shipping (usually), and a 30-day, no-questions-asked return policy.

What’s All This Going to Cost You? Just Petty Cash!

But You Need More Than a Great Web Site to Compete.

Once your Web site is custom-designed and all set up for you, with the initial SEO optimization included, you will need continuous offsite SEO optimization in order to stay competitive.

For example, if you were to go to Google and type in "Engagement Rings", you would see one of our sites at or near the top of Page 1. It took us two years to get that ranking. But if we were to stop working on it for even a week, our ranking would drop. SEO is a constant process. And once we start doing SEO for you, we never stop. (As long as you’re in our program, of course!)

Off-site optimization consists of many things. One of the most important of these is link-building. According to Google and the other major search engines, your Web site gets a "vote" for each other site that links to yours. It’s like an election. Whichever site gets the most "votes" gets the #1 position. It’s a stroke of genius, actually, but extremely time-consuming, because each link must be created by hand.

There are also bad "votes." If you get just one of them—e.g., for some unethical behavior—your site could be banned from the search engines. So be wary of firms that offer you SEO services and top rankings overnight. Can’t be done. But once you’re our partner, we (the SEO and diamond experts) will never steer you wrong. We’re here to help you, in every way possible, on a 24/7/365 basis, at the lowest possible cost.

And the more successful you are, the more successful we are, because we make our profit only when you make a sale—not from our SEO services. However, to provide these offsite services, all year long, we must cover our expenses. Therefore, we charge $350 a month—that’s only $11.66 a day—for continuous SEO.

Here’s Another Important Service We Provide, at No Extra Cost . . .

We call it price monitoring. We have special software that constantly monitors all the major e-commerce players to find out how they’re pricing their products. We use this to establish the suggested retail prices on each site we maintain, and we will be constantly adjusting this for you, so you won’t have to. Any markup you may add that’s above our suggested online price will stay intact when we make adjustments.

However, to compete with BN and the other sites that are stealing your business, we suggest that you stick with our suggested online retail prices. We have dedicated staff members who handle this vital, ongoing research. It’s the lifeblood of this or any other e-commerce business—especially those without exclusive products—because it’s far too easy for visitors to click off your site and go to another site in order to compare prices.

Now That You’ve Discovered What We Offer,
Here’s How You Could Benefit From Our Program . . .

Scenario #1: A prospective customer comes into your store holding diamond information sheets from bluenile.com, and the first thing he says to you is, "Can you match these prices?" He’d much rather buy locally, from a brick-and-mortar store, but he’s very price-conscious, too.

If you weren’t signed up with us, you’d have to say, "No, I’m sorry, but I can’t." Or even if you could match the prices and answered, "Yes, I probably can," it would not be easy. You would have to spend hours making arrangements to find a similar stone, establish credit with that vendor, have the stone shipped to you and pay for the shipping, contact the prospect (and hope he’s still a prospect), and then spend more time with him to close the sale and make a 10% to 15% profit (if that).

But if you were a partner with IDS, you could say, "Yes, I can match those prices—on my Web site. You can access it from your home or, better yet, just follow me over to our in-house computer and do your shopping here. You’ll get the benefit of our low online prices, because there’s no overhead we have to cover, and you can also enjoy our local, face-to-face service. Simply make your selection, we’ll order it, and you can pick it up right here—without the risk of it getting lost or stolen in transit."

It’s a simple, fast and easy way to make the sale—and a decent profit—instead of losing the sale, and any repeat sales, to an online merchant.

Scenario #2: You spend an hour or more with a prospect, showing her every piece of jewelry you have in your bridal section, but she can’t find what she’s looking for. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime investment (she hopes), so she’s very particular. If you were not an IDS partner, no doubt she’d leave and look elsewhere.

But if you were a partner with IDS, you could smile and say, "We have a much larger selection on our Web site, and you can conduct your search in the comfort of your home. Here’s my card. Our Web site address is on it. When you find what you want—and I’m sure you will, because our online selection is tremendous and it’s continually updated with the latest styles—just give me a call. Or you can order it right from our Web site. Your choice. Either way, your selection will be shipped right to our store, without the risk of it getting lost or stolen in transit. Then you can examine it, without obligation, before deciding whether or not to purchase it."

Scenario #3: Mr. Johnson is very particular about the diamond he wants. He is fairly savvy about diamonds and has done his research. He wants an I VVS1 emerald cut. You try selling him something different, but he isn’t buying it. He knows what he wants—only you don’t happen to have one in stock.

Fortunately, you’re an IDS partner. So you tell him, "Mr. Johnson, we don’t have it in our inventory at the moment, but we probably have it on our Web site. At a better price than anyone else in town could sell it to you for. Why don’t you step over here to our computer and I’ll search our Web site for you. Everything is indexed. Since you know exactly what you’re looking for, it should take me only a few minutes."

You quickly find the stone he wants, he hands you his credit card, you’ve saved another customer, and you’ve made a quick profit. What could be better?

Now Let’s Sum it All Up . . .

With IDS, you enhance your store, not replace it, with a virtual showcase and warehouse of 20,000+ certified diamonds and 10,000+ additional jewelry items.

You’ll be able to buy at our lowest price—even if you buy only one item at a time. So you can enjoy a decent profit, with the exact amount determined by you. (We’ll help you set the best selling price, based on our ongoing research of online prices.)

Your customers can search for whatever they want via their own computer at home or work, or via a desktop computer in your store set aside especially for their use.

By offering this do-it-yourself approach to customers, you’ll save a tremendous amount of costly selling time—just as supermarkets did when they introduced shopping carts and customer-accessible shelving, bins and coolers.

Via our sophisticated and automatic software for back-office procedures, and our advanced search features, you’ll be able to view both wholesale and retail prices.

You’ll stop losing all those sales to online merchants, and you’ll be able to enjoy a profitable and respectable business for many years to come.

What if You Already Have a Web Site?

So What Are You Waiting For? Get Started Now!

The longer you procrastinate...the longer you keep doing business in the same old way...the more sales you’re going to lose to BN and other online merchants. And the harder it will be for you to stay in business. By teaming up with IDS, you’ll have the best of both worlds: a brick-and-mortar store with real live people interacting, plus a state-of-the-art, SEO-optimized Web site so you can compete with the online merchants and make a decent profit. And we can set you up in just seven to ten business days!

Because we’re experts in e-commerce and specifically SEO, as well as diamonds and jewelry, you can rest easy that you’re in good hands. So there’s no learning curve to overcome...no expensive computer hardware and software to pay for and master...no high-priced IT specialists to hire and support.

No outrageous set-up and monthly service fees, either. You get an outstanding program at the lowest cost possible, which you can probably cover just by making a few sales that you wouldn’t otherwise make!

What’s more, your financial risk—if you can call it that—is extremely low. Tax-deductible, of course. And if you ever decide to drop out of our program, just give us 30 days’ notice and we’ll cancel your monthly SEO fee. Fair enough?

If, after reading and re-reading this letter, you have any questions about the IDS program, please phone us 1-646-873-7623. Then join us in our quest to provide the ultimate "turn-key" e-commerce-enabled web site solution for the independent retail jeweler: YOU!

Cordially,

Larry Chasin
Ideal Diamond Solutions, Inc.

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P.S. With an average daily cost of just $6.85 for the site and $11.50 for ongoing SEO —a mere $18.35 altogether—can you afford not to partner with IDS? Put our expertise and immense purchasing power to work for you...before the online merchants win!