iBuyGourmet.com - Celebrating 1 year of unexpected growth
Posted by: Ryan on: 30 Apr, 2008
iBuyGourmet.com recently hit the one year mark, and we are extremely pleased with how explosive our growth has been. Honestly, we didn’t think it would have taken off quite like this, and many doubted our business model. I am proud to hereby quiet those doubters with these statistics:
1. We now boast over 110 retail gourmet food vendors/manufacturers, and over 70 wholesale gourmet food vendors (some are listed in both retail and wholesale sections). Overall, we averaged over 10 new vendor listings per month.
2. Over 900 domestic and international gourmet/specialty food products are listed for retail sale, and over 500 skus wholesale. That is an average of 117 new SKUs added per month
3. Now averaging over 50k page views per month
4. Sales conversion rate = 3.4%
5. Our vendors currently average 236% ROI
6. Over (150) first-page natural/organic search engine rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN - thanks to our proven food SEO strategies.
7. Google PageRank of 4 (what is Google Pagerank?). This is quite remarkable considering long-standing sites like GourmetFoodMall.com and iGourmet.com have rankings of 5, GourmetFoodStore.com is a 4, and 1800Gourmet.com is a 3. Each of these aforementioned sites have been in existence for 3-10 years.
8. Over 4,100 pages indexed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN
9. Over 150 inbound links (Thanks, Google Webmaster Tools!)
10. Because we didn’t have to bring in any investors or expensive programming companies, we were profitable (not just our vendors). We built the site in-house, did all of our own SEO, and managed our own marketing campaigns.
My wife and I were discussing these numbers at the dinner table today, and she made a great stock market analogy; just like buying stock early on in an emerging company’s startup days, gourmet and specialty food companies can “buy their stock” (get their products listed on our site now while we are still pretty young), and “cash out” big time in the near future by having their products already listed on our site when we grow exponentially in the years to come (at which point we will be charging much more for new companies to join our program). Similar to the way many people are kicking themselves for not picking up Google’s stock (GOOG) in 2004, I am sure many food companies will be kicking themselves for not listing their products on iBuyGourmet.com in 2008!