Pressies4princesses.co.uk started out as an affiliate website in 2002. It offered a multiple-retailer gift wish list service.

When I started pressies4princesses, I saw it as a learning opportunity. My first business had failed and I was looking for new opportunities in new areas. The internet seemed the newest, most exciting place!

Armed with an O’Reilly PERL reference manual, Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours and Elizabeth Castro’s Perl and CGI for The World Wide Web, I learnt to code and built the first incarnation in my spare time. Then with a bit of help from my brother David, the IT professional, a database-driven content management system was added.

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After a while, I got fed up with seeing all my affiliate commissions swallowed up by adwords fees. So, I started hanging around at WebMasterWorld – back in the day when Google ‘Danced’ and threads about updates ran to 300 pages or so.

That was how it stayed for a couple of years. I took on a basket case of a house and fixed it up. During what little sparetime I had, I found time to work on pressies4princesses. Mainly updating the gift range, swapping links and writing content.

After the house was done, I got married and now my wife and I wanted to start a family. We looked at pressies4princesses, which was pulling 35,000 uniques a month, and wondered whether it could enable her to quit her job.

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In January 2005, we decided to go for it. I spent 5 months solid, redesigning the website, writing a custom shopping basket and researching gift suppliers. In May 2005 – a couple of days after my birthday, I seem to remember – we launched with 35 or so products.

That first month we only took a few hundred pounds but we stuck with it, adding more products and tweaking page designs. June was better, July was better still – our growth was running in the multiple hundreds of percents every month. By the end of the financial year, somewhat amazingly, we had achieved our 6-figure turnover target and made a very healthy profit. The potential was proven.

My wife had our first child 16 months after we started trading; she never returned to work. Pressies4princesses has been growing at an average of nearly 100% per annum ever since.

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In September 2006, my brother David quit his job as Technical Design Authority at Dell (the computer giant) to takeover development of pressies4princesses. At the same time, we switched to Rackspace hosting. Our professionalism stepped up several levels. Between then and now the whole technology of the website has been transformed to make it faster, friendly, better, more fully-featured. We’ve also redesigned it three times.

Thanks to David, we have website functionality that other businesses two or three times our since can only dream of. Our purpose over the last 18 months has been to rigorously improve conversion and order value. We have redesigned and tested over and again. Plus, we’ve added functionality like immediate or deferred personalisation choices, tag clouds, industrial-strength search and sophisticated discount and coupons capabilities.

The result is that we are now converting very strongly on a pretty mixed bag of search traffic, quality-wise. And, that’s why we have decided the time is right to launch our affiliate marketing programme. This was always the end point of our labours. But, we knew that without strong conversion performance, affiliates would feel let down and desert.

Sign-up now at Paid On Results to discover just how far we’ve come.

All the best,

Steve Sugden
Managing Partner