Success Stories

We just started going and going and going and it got to the point where it was so big Stacey (significant other) left her full time job to work at what was going to become Austin Cake Ball and then it hit me last year that we've got 45 employees, big monthly payrolls, etc and I figured I should probably start paying attention to it. So I had to leave Dell and start moving forward full-time at the business.

I went first to trying it part-time and then the full re-development of Dell.com was going on at that time and it was an incredibly difficult time to be a part-time employee as well. I knew that I just needed to leave and it's been a great rollercoaster ride since then.

Austin Cake Ball was originally started because Stacey and I wanted something fun to do together and we didn't know it would become what it is today. We realized a few months ago when we woke up and had one of the largest privately owned bakeries in Austin. That we have gone wayyy past what we had dreamed of in the beginning.

We picked something to focus on. Back in the day we used to be a full service bakery - cupcakes, mini-cakes, anything "cake related" - we would do and do well. Its frightening when you're small to turn off something that might generate 10% of your business (like wedding cakes for us) that are an integral part of your revenue, but we knew that getting those time consuming products to market while still doing the full production cycle for cake balls would be detrimental to both. So it was hard, but also a great decision to focus on getting cake balls to be the premier product that we are known for today. Our product with ingredients, packaging , quality, etc is absolutely the best I've found not just here in the continental US, but internationally too!

We established our online marketplace early and now are a major player in the cake ball scene. We have a great frontend and a lot of time and money invested in our online platform and the SEO before we really even started selling anything.

We also needed to achieve a consistent process from end-to-end. By moving from the old school paper and pen systems that are commonplace in our industry we've been able to jump years ahead of our competition in a pretty short time.

One of the things we learned early on with the open source side of things is that if something breaks, there is no one except a couple forum posts to help you get back up. We weren't trying to be a technology company that sold cake balls, we were a bakery that needed to sell cake balls online. So when we needed very specific things like having zip code restricted shipping methods for our delivery service, we needed something more powerful than an open source solution that would not break when we upgraded to the new version.. UltraCart provided not only the reputation and reliability we were seeking out in a scalable system, but also was as committed to constant growth as we are.

So we looked all around at other shopping carts, from open to hosted and UltraCart was an easy decision. I'm probably only using 10% of what is available and so we know we have all the tools we need now and in the future. I love it because we have had other carts offer to get us over to them for free because of my connections in the industry, but its more worthwhile to be in UltraCart and pay for a service than to accept a lesser substitute for free.

And from what I can tell since UltraCart is continually developing we're not ever going to outgrow you. We have absolutely no intention of going anywhere else.

Our online presence is frictionless. We move our orders from the online or phone order to the kitchen for the guys to execute and then into our accounting platform. The brick and mortar side is much more variable because you don't know what your employees or your customers are going to do on any day. With online it is all the same for every experience, but with multiple brick and mortar locations, it can be a different experience. I still offer people a 5% discount on their entire order if they order online even when they just stop in to pick it up anyway. It makes that much sense because that lack of friction makes everyone's life easier.

Really in terms of the presentation of the pieces, no one makes them look as good and as consistent and eye-pleasing as we do. Plus we pay a lot for the best quality ingredients and so you are getting the absolute best product that money can buy. Finally, our trademark copper tin that we use for every order keeps people talking about us months after they get their order.

yeah we want to make sure that everyone got to experience our great packaging and ensure that would never be thrown away and give them an incentive to come back. It makes sense in a number of ways, its attractive so people want to reuse it and that helps save trash from going into our landfill, and they can reuse them for other things that people had told us they use them for like pencil holders, dog treats, tea bags, etc. And since we know that our copper tin is going to help people remember their experience and how good the cake balls are and come back. So if you bring your tin back we give them a discount to refill it. In fact one lady told us when she brings her tin in for a refill that it is right up there with her company's 401k match.

Make sure that your shipping options are clean and easy for whatever your business is setup to accomplish. Shipping for customers is always a no win deal, customers hate shipping and so do you. So try to make it line up as best you can to what can be accomplished in the cart. When we intentionally decided not to ship on particular days and during holidays cutoff days it was key to delivering what the customer expected. Because if you can't make it easy and understandable for your customer, they will call and that adds a lot of cost.. or worse, if they don't, you just lost them.

When you build your website, pull up the Amazon Seller Central Best Practices for your industry and use that as your template for building your website. I don't have a problem saying that in itself was a huge help for us in terms of guidelines that we didn't even knew existed. For example they recommend a certain size for images/ resolution, that the consume product is 80% of each image on a white background, product descriptions etc. It really validated a lot of what we thought going in and made it easy to not feel like we were reinventing the wheel. Find a website you like and copying it is not the way to go. You want to be your own company with your own brand but still make sure you are doing the right things.

What we've found so far looking back with 20/20 vision. Success is not about a the really good decisions you do make, its about all the really terrible decisions you don't make.

For example:
Betting the farm on one vendor or customer, deciding to move to a bigger space you can't currently afford on the off chance that the gamble will result in higher sales, or moving away from your core competency.