Hot Hot Hot Web Sales Sizzle

This interview with Hot Hot Hot co-owner Monica Bosserman Lopez took place in 1996. Online since 1994, the small California mail order and retailer was one of the first successful e-commerce sites. As the costs of paper, printing and postage skyrocketed, the owners sought ways to control costs. With its ability to reach millions of people, the Web offered one solution. For aspiring Web entrepreneurs, Monica offers some good advice.

As its name suggests, Hot Hot Hot specializes in fiery products from around the world. The 300 square foot store, located in Old Town, Pasadena, carries over 500 varieties of hot sauces - spicy products with names like Road to Hell. With its loyal following of culinary adventurers, business has been good for owners Monica and Perry Lopez. But it got better when Tom Soulanille, owner of Presence Information Design and a frequent customer, convinced them to build a website.

MBL: We have about a thousand to 1,500 visitors to the site every day, which considering we have a 300 square foot shop, we could never possibly fit in here.

About 1% of the people that visit the site actually order, which is the same as direct mail.

I think that people on the Web tend to be adventurous anyway. So I think that people who might never have thought of ordering hot and spicy foods, because they see it on the Web, take the opportunity to do it. It's something that's never occurred to them, but it's something totally new.

For us the pros of a website is that we're a very small, tiny shop. We get orders from all over the world. We have a guy from Germany who ordered for a friend in England. We have a guy from Guam who sends gifts to his family in the United States. That's something that from a small retail establishment we could never do in any other way.

Essentially we sell 150 hot sauces, which to someone who doesn't know anything about hot sauces would be a 150 of the same thing. It was up to us to come up with the way of dividing them up, and in a logical pattern for them to follow. Many websites can be labyrinthine. You can go from one space to the next to the next to the next, and never find out the information you needed. So we divided them up in, in four fairly logical ways. One would be by heat level. One would be by place of origin. One alphabetical listing. And one we were, we were, we had a lot of customers in the shop that ask us for sauces that have no salt or no sugar or a 100% natural. So we set that up too, so you could look for any kind of health reasons you had to have no salt, you could find all the ones with no salt.

We always wanted it to be up and fun. I mean hot sauces are by their very nature fun. They're the only food products you're going to find on the shelves that try to actively scare you. That are making a point of saying this is going to kill you. They're death sauce or hell sauce or anything like this. The site had to reflect that. It had to have that kind of personality. It had to be there for people who aren't going to be afraid of this kind of food.

I think that the Internet is a tremendously new place to do business. It's the first new place anybody can go to to explore marketing. It's also a new medium. It's a totally new unexplored creative area for people. We happen to use it as a selling tool. You can see it used very creatively as an advertising tool, as a marketing tool, as a communications tool. I think it's really a fascinating new place for people to explore.

I don't know that it's growing, that business is growing to the degree to which people are getting on the Internet, because I think that as the same time that people are logging onto the Internet, websites are going up. So at this point there are tons of websites for people to maneuver through. I think that that will start to just dissipate. That unless you're, people are putting up websites without thinking about them. They're not trying to use them for anything great. Everybody's just clamoring to get on there and not have any thought about what they're doing up there. I think those will go away. And then there'll be a more even keel for it. And it will grow with the amount of people that are on it.

To start a business on the Internet, there are lots of things that you need to think about. For us, if you're selling something, you have to remember that you're now a worldwide company. You will be shipping overseas. You will get orders from overseas, be prepared for that. You will need to be prepared to fully involve it in the rest of your business. Customers on the Net are much more likely to want to contact you than any sort of catalog business. Most catalog businesses have very little contact with their customers. But e-mail is easy. They can e-mail you questions. Customers feel more comfortable doing it. So you have to be prepared to be, spend a fair amount of time responding to them.

The Internet currently is about 20% of our business that we can attribute directly to sales. I think there's another 10% that brings people in here into the shop that we can't directly attribute but people that know us because of the website. I've had customers come in from Germany. I've had customers come in from England because they saw the website.

In our particular case, when we started the site, we were just at the same time doing a catalog. So we had set up all that. Aside from setting up the site, cost wise you have to be prepared with the manpower to do some marketing. You can't just rely on putting up a site, that people are going to find you. You have to do some traditional marketing. And, that will cost you some money.

People navigate through the site and find you by way of many indexes. Some of which are Yahoo or Web Crawler and you need to be listed in them. That's how people can find you, by your URL, basically your address. It's really the only way to find your address without calling the shop or, or if you're looking for hot sauces and you don't know who has them, you can look it up by the different tracking mechanisms.

Word of mouth is the best kind of business you can ever do. It's the best form of advertising. Doing a good site will get you good word of mouth. People will like you and people put links to you. A big part of the Internet and a big part of the World Wide Web in particular it is based on sharing. It's based on sharing of information. So someone might put their own website up, they like our site, so they add us to the sites that they like, someone's at their website and they say oh, we'll check out Hot Hot Hot, and they can link directly to us. There's lots of different ways of going about where you position your site at this point. There's different theories on where you'd like to be, same as if you were setting up a standard retail business. You know, there are different costs involved with being in a mall, but they're also doing some marketing for you. Versus being on your own where you have to do all the marketing.

The company that helped us to design the website also maintains our server. The orders are processed directly through them. They get the orders and then they send them to us from there.

We have a daily rapport, but we actually don't speak to each other. I mean the orders are immediately faxed to us. So we get a fax and an e-mail copy of the order as soon as they get it. So it's not a process where we wait for orders to come in as a list later on. There's a real immediacy to it.

I think that anybody that wants to get on the Internet should have a purpose. Even if that purpose is just to learn about it. Establish your goals for it in the first place. If you think that you're going to get up there and you're suddenly going to make a ton of money, it's not a good goal. It just doesn't work that way yet. It's too new. But if you want to get up there and try something that's totally new, then that's a fine goal. Establish what you want to do. It's a company decision and you can't just put it up and ignore it. You have to keep putting things into your site. You can't leave it up there and let it be stagnant.

Every month we have a new sauce of the month as well as a comment of the month. We change sauces periodically. We put new ones in as we get them, we'll take a couple out. We don't like to just keep adding more sauces because we don't want it to be too complicated. We also have added some new features at Christmas time and every season we have a seasonal hot box and gift pack. So we might have a summer one, we might have a fall one. We might have one that was specifically designed for Father's Day.

I think all websites are a work in progress. They need to be a constantly evolving thing. If you want people to come back to your site, there has to be something new for them. If it's the same stuff then there's nothing for them to come back for even if you're selling a product. If you were any other kind of shop or catalog, you change it and your website has to change in that fashion.

Our plans are to continue expanding the website. We have a definite interest in growing and changing with this medium. We would like to add more features and actually add more types of products, rather than hot sauces -- salsas and barbecue sauces and other items.

Having a website you have to be aware of the technological advances. And there's lots of new things that come about all the time. Real audio, VRML which is the virtual reality type things, we'd love to incorporate all types of new technologies into it as we progress.

We get lots of e-mail response. They could be anything from people telling us stories about how they've utilized the sauces, to ah probably the one time we've had some bad e-mail where someone was mad at us for not being a porno site, to people asking us if we can find them a particular sauce, to people who want to sell us sauces.

When we first put up the site, we realized that when people placed orders it was like placing an order into a black hole, they didn't know if an order was really placed. So the first people who placed orders would place an order and then they'd call us on the 800 number to make sure we got it. Which we figured was kind of irrelevant. We immediately set up an e-mail backup so when they place an order, they get an automatic response saying we received it and it tells them what their order is.

There are certain aspects of it that do save you time and money. Setting up a website isn't necessarily going to save you money per se. It is going to cost you some money and you are going to want to see something out of it. If it's advertising that you want out of it, these are your advertising dollars as a business. It does save you money as far as your 800 phone bills. Or just being able to communicate with people. As a communications tools, it is really an inexpensive tool. I can communicate with somebody in England about their order as easily as I can communicate with somebody across the street and it costs the same which is very little. I can talk back and forth with the guy in England about his order, tell him something's back ordered, or he can ask me questions, and it's not paying for tremendous overseas costs. There are, as far as putting up a website and seeing instant dollars, I think that that's a big fallacy that's going around at this point. It does take work.

Once you've spent the money on your website, as far as changing it, it should be something that's incorporated into what you're doing. It is a lot cheaper at that point to just change your website, to update it, to do some subtle changes or even some larger changes than it would be ever to resend a catalog to everybody. Our catalog costs 78 cents just in postage. A thousand people a day, that's, you know, $780 just in postage, let alone the printing. As, as far as the changes to it are concerned, it is a cheaper form of a catalog.

When we set up our deal with Presence, the company that designed our site, we set it up on a percentage basis. It was very new, we started this very, very early in the website business. So we worked on a percentage basis.

You know, it's really hard to choose a typical cost. You hear people who say oh, I can get a website for $250 a year, but so what. I think that if we had had to produce a catalog and reach as many people as we did, we could not have possibly done it for the amount of money that the website cost us. We would never have received as much press. Just cost effectiveness in that fashion absolutely, it's very clear that it saved us a lot of money as far as the reach we had.

Last update: Feb 22, 1996