Press Release
Bodybuilding.com – Going From Weakling to
E-Commerce Heavyweight in 5 Years
7/6/2004 Blue Bell, PA - Deep in his heart back in April 1999, Ryan
DeLuca, founder of Bodybuilding.com, knew he wasn’t going to remain a skinny
little e-store for long. You know the drill, upstart puny e-store shows up on
the virtual beach and before you can shout “bottom line profitability” one of
those heavily funded dot.com giants is kicking sand in his face and walking off
with his beach bunny girlfriend. So what if Bodybuilding.com wasn’t born with a
wall of muscle. Turns out those other dot.coms were all venture capital fat and
when the fat burned off they disappeared faster than a body-building ad in the
back of an old comic book.
“I was 20 years old when I started the company in
my parent’s garage. That first week, I had 30 orders. I never wanted to go the
venture capital route. My plan has always been to combine my two favorite things
since high school – body building and computers,” said Ryan. “That’s what I’ve
done.”
Like many of its customers, Bodybuilding.com has
muscled up over the years. “Now, we’re getting more than 800 orders a day. My
father works for me, so does my mom and two brothers and one sister. We have a
total of 35 employees. We work out of two warehouses, one here in Boise, Idaho
and one in Tallahassee, Florida,” reported Ryan.
One of the reasons customers choose
Bodybuilding.com is the heavy focus on providing valuable content for its niche
market, America’s army of body building enthusiasts. The site contains nearly
7,500 pages of content. “We also provide solid product-specific information in
the online store itself,” Ryan said. “For example, you may see a picture of a
product with a paragraph of copy and a price. That’s a pretty typical e-commerce
product presentation. But we don’t stop there. Instead of clicking over to a
shopping cart, when the buyer clicks, they go to a full page, detailed product
presentation. We want our customers to have the facts about our products before
they buy. Then if they decide to go ahead with the purchase, they can add it to
the shopping cart.”
What happens after clicking into the shopping
cart and completing the purchase is as important to the success of
Bodybuilders.com as what happens before. “One of the key distinguishers for our
e-store is we truly practice good customer service. That means we ship 100
percent of orders within 24 hours and we promptly credit any returns, no
questions asked,” said Ryan.
The back office of Bodybuilding.com is a modern
two-location warehouse system tied together electronically using Order Manager
software supplied by Blue Bell, PA-based Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
“We couldn’t have done it without Stone Edge.
We’ve used Order Manager since it was in beta version back when we first started
our business.”
One of the reasons Ryan likes Order Manager is
the company’s flexibility in developing new features to serve its customers.
“I’m constantly calling Barney Stone (Stone Edge Technologies CEO) and asking
him if his people can make Order Manger do something special for us. As we grow,
our back office grows and so far Order Manager has grown with us. I don’t see
that ending anytime soon,” said Ryan.
One of the special assignments Bodybuilders.com
asked Stone Edge Technologies to help with was the electronic integration of its
two warehouses. Stone Edge added features to Order Manager that allowed
Bodybuilders.com to track its inventory and automatically determine which
warehouse to ship an order from based on the product’s weight, lowest available
shipping cost and availability in stock.
“Sometimes we’ll split a single order to reduce
shipping costs or because a certain item might only be available in one
location. For example, if the buyer lives near Florida, we ship the order from
Tallahassee, but if one of the products the customer ordered is not in the
Florida inventory, we’ll ship it separately to the customer from Boise,”
explained Ryan.
Tailoring its Order Manager software to meet
customer requirements is a big part of Stone Edge’s approach to serving
customers. Stone Edge’s Barney Stone said, “We’re not a typical software
company. Customers like Bodybuilders.com help drive the advances in our
technology. Our niche is the small to mid-size e-commerce business and so we let
our customers tell us what they need based on their real-world experience. Then
we build the solution into our software and make it available to all of our
customers through the next upgrade. That way, customers benefit from the
experience of other customers and can purchase a back office solution with
robust features that they otherwise would never be able to afford.”
Today when Bodybuilders.com struts its stuff on
the virtual beach, it’s the other guys who get out of the way. “We’re just
having fun, working together as a family, and serving the body-building industry
we love,” said Ryan. “It’s a great way to make a living.”
Bodybuilding.com is a privately held company
headquartered in Boise, Idaho. In addition to its website, the company recently
opened four brick and mortar retail stores.
Stone Edge Technologies is a privately owned
company that specializes in developing affordable e-commerce software products
for small business. Barney Stone, a pioneer developer of relational database
management software for desktop computers, founded the company in 1983.
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Stone Edge Technologies, Inc
6198 Butler Pike, Ste #151
Blue Bell PA, 19422
Telephone: (877) 786-6393
Fax: (215) 641-1837
