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How is the appraisal process handled?
At this time, IDS does not provide an appraisal directly. Rather, Customers who purchase on your website are encouraged to go into your store to get the appraisal. Alternatively, if you wish we will provide a list of independent appraisers (not affiliated with any retail store) as provided by the National Association of Jewelry Appraisers.
Do you ship product in my boxes? Is the invoice and packaging customized?
Yes, if you provide us with your custom boxes. We will store the boxes and ship to your customers using them. As we run low we will ask you to send replacements. We will also print letterheads identifying your store as well as IDS as the fulfillment agent.
How can we be sure that the product quality will fairly represent our store?
It is our intention to use only high quality product to assure customer satisfaction. For product which requires delivery in less than a few days like engagement rings and many bands, we utilize large casting houses like Unique Settings and Ingwer. You are welcome to add any and all of your vendors to our system at no cost to the vendor so that your online inventory better reflects your in-store offering
Where do the diamonds come from?
We are sourcing the list of diamonds directly from large manufacturers and cutters who are primarily located in New York and Europe. We have established customizable "feeds" from IDEX which includes integration into their new 100% Guaranteed Diamond Transaction platform. These feeds provide continuous updates on the availability of diamonds on the list. You are welcome to customize the diamond list to reflect the vendors you like to work with or you can leave the filtering up to us.
What kind of control do I have over the diamond inventory displayed on my website?
Diamond Inventory displayed on your website can be tailored to fit your specific requirements, You will have the ability to filter out by Size, Shape, Color and Clarity and also Cut grade and Certification Laboratory. In short the Diamond database will be fully customized by you.
What will it mean to mean if I am selling diamonds cheaper on my website than I do in my store?
If you want to sell diamonds online then you must be competitive with the online prices. The question is how can you sell the same diamond in store for more money than you sell it online. The answer is that if all the customer wants is a diamond at a price, then you should refer them to your website and let IDS handle the fulfillment so that you do not have to spend the time and resources for the low margin sales. If the customer wants your expertise, wants to see a choice of stones on consignment, or wants your expertise guidance and time, then they must be informed that they will have to pay an in-store premium which should be 10-20% higher than the online price.
How much business can I expect to do from my e-commerce web site?
According to industry statistics online jewelry sales were about 4% of total industry sales. So all things being equal, if you had a standard e-commerce site you should expect to do your fair share of this volume. For example, if you do $1,000,000 in total sales your fair share of online sales should be around $40,000, and growing with the trend each year. However, the IDS platform website is far from a standard site and with proper online marketing you should expect to do far more than the average website volume. The one thing that we can guarantee is to keep you ahead of the curve in terms of bringing traffic to your web site should choose to participate in one of our SEO programs.
What if I already have a web site?
If you already have a web site then you have a choice. The preferred alternative is to have an IDS site built which simply incorporate information and images from your existing site. If the site is old and does not do much then we’d recommend just letting IDS supply a new site to your old URL domain address. The older the domain name the better any site will rank in the search engines. If the site is somewhat current and you want to keep it, then we’d recommend adding a "Shop Online" button to the existing site which would send visitors to the new web site provided by IDS which would be hosted under a new domain name. For example, if you operate a site called "mainstreetjewelers.com" then we would recommend the IDS web site be hosted on something like "mainstreetjewelersonline.com." Down the road we can merge traffic from both domain names to the e-commerce site if desired.
What good is a great web site if no one knows it’s there? How will people find my web site?
Good question. There are only two ways for people to find your web site. The first way is that you actually tell them where your web site is. You list your URL address in your traditional print media, business cards, and radio, and of course you tell people personally to go to it.
The second way is for someone to utilize a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, type a search request and then see you on page 1 of the search results. But online marketing is much different than traditional print media marketing, and so a separate online marketing budget for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and e-mail blast campaigns must first be established
Why does your website need external Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services?
85% of all website traffic originates from the search engines, with the majority coming from Google Yahoo and MSN. If you have an online presence but are not among the top 10 search results for your targeted phrases then you're losing money every single day.
IDS ensures that your website attains high rankings for each targeted keyword phrase that will drive the greatest traffic to your website. We do this through in-depth keyword analysis and quality link-building and efficient online marketing strategies combined with the highest level of commitment to ranking your website on page 1 for the targeting phrases.
What are the different types of "online marketing" available to me?
Online marketing is a catch all phrase for the many different kinds of online marketing vehicles which are proven ways of driving traffic to web sites. These include the following:
How does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work?
SEO is traditionally a 2 step process that involves (i) internal site optimization and (ii) external site optimization.
(i) Internal Site Optimization has 2 components:
The good news when it comes to internal site optimization is that all IDS web sites come to you internally optimized, and we’re not talking about middle of the road onsite optimization, IDS site are provided with state of the art internal optimization which maximizes search engine indexing.
(ii) External Site Optimization refers to link building which are the number of websites linking to your site.
The more related links pointing to a website and the more valuable the links, the stronger the site will be considered by the major search engines. Building links into your website is the only way that we can affect the authority of your website, and the value that the existing content has in the eyes of the search engines. To conceptualize link building think of your website as if it was a person. The more popular a person is the more authoritative what they have to say is to their target audience--the big difference being that our target audience is Google, and the other major search engines, and having quality links on other sites equates to your websites "popularity".
Now keep in mind that, like people, no two links are exactly the same. When Google calculates the value of a link it looks at several important things to determine its strength. Here are just a few:
Keep in mind all of these factors are irrelevant if Google hasn't indexed the page with the link, which is why internal site optimization is so important. The stronger the strength of the page your link is on the more strength you will get in return. The more outgoing links there are on a page the more that strength will be divided between all the linked sites.
A link with a "rel=nofollow" attribute is virtually useless to your website other then increasing your overall link count to give your competitors a scare. "Nofollow" attributes are mostly associated with Blog Comments, Website Advertisers/Sponsors, Paid Links, or links to competitors.
When a link is built very few search engines will give us the full strength of that link right away. This is done to maintain the quality of the search engine results--if everyone could just go out build 1000s of links and rank, there would be no quality to the search engines. Instead they slowly give you more strength as these links age up until around the 6 month period.
Lastly you will constantly see something called Google Pagerank (which is the visual PageRank displayed in the little green bar, not the actual PageRank that Google uses internally to calculate the value of a page). Pagerank is an arbitrary Google measurement assigned to a website/page to denote that pages strength. Some people consider this measurement to be the end all be all, but in truth it means very little other than an indicator of the web site’s health. Pagerank only updates every 3 - 6 months, and ultimately the proof is in the search engine results not some number in the toolbar.
In sum, link building is a form of online marketing, and it is one of the primary vehicles which search engines use to determine if a web site has what it takes to get to page 1 of the search results. Please talk to an IDS representative to discuss a strategy and budget for achieving an efficient link building SEO strategy.
How much should I spend on SEO and online marketing?
The key to online marketing is to develop a formula that works and then to expand upon it after it proves itself. Starting with an SEO budget as low as $250/month target lower competition phrases we can achieve high search engine ranking and drive traffic to your site. Of course the higher the starting budget the faster the whole process grows. In any case, after the initial marketing provides a solid return on investment and you are making money from your site would, we recommend increasing the SEO budget to target the higher competition phrases. This is referred to as a "staged promotion" and they have proven to be highly effective in establishing search engine dominance for a variety of phrases, while keeping immediate costs manageable, and producing a return on investment as the promotion unfolds.
How can you do SEO for both me and another jeweler in the next town?
It is easier than you think. First of all, there are literally tens of thousands of search terms or key word combinations that drive traffic enabling us to easily differentiate SEO for retailers in the same market. Second, since IDS is doing the SEO for both retailers we can control the marketing to avoid many overlaps. On the rare occasion where retailers want the same key phrase we can get both sites into the top 10, and the positioning will vary based on who has been online longer.
How important are meta tags?
Meta tags have lost a lot of their weight in recent years. Since meta tags do not appear as visible text to a site visitor they have been subject to misuse from unethical SEO's and webmasters and thus, the weight they are now given is extremely low. Nonetheless meta tag optimization is a part of a thorough positioning strategy to keep pages in your site from ending up in the supplemental index.
How long does the optimization process take?
This depends on the competitiveness of the terms for which ranking is desired. Generally speaking however, an average promotion with moderate competition would take approximately a month or so for link-building and up to 3 months or so to attain rankings as the added weight of the incoming links won't be applied for a month or so after they are established. To achieve ranking for very competitive key word phrases may take between 6 to 18months, but we would only recommend targeting such phrases as [art of a more advanced long term campaign.