All Nautical Shoppe

Nautical Gifts and Home Decor

Ahoy mates!  My name is Alan Olsavsky and I am the owner of the All Nautical Shoppe.  My wife Mary Jane is the customer contact person.  We have been in the retail business online since mid 2000.  Our store features just about anything you can think of in terms of nautical decorations and gifts items.  We have well over 500 products and add new ones all the time.

The Beginning

I live on a lake in Indiana called Morse Lake.  It is actually a resevoir for the Indianapolis area.  My wife and I had recently built the home new and were looking for some nautical decorations.  I went online to find wooden ships wheels, as I thought that would be a great add to our library.  I found a few nautical sites and really liked not only the ships wheels that I found but a whole new world of really neat nautical stuff.  I worked for a large automotive supplier at the time as a manager in one of the plants.  I was thinking of retiring in the not too distant future but I wanted to have a small business to maybe grow and expand.  While I was looking for the ships wheel I realized that nautical stuff would be a great niche market and great idea for an internet business.  (After all which local store would you go to find a ships wheel?)  The problem was that not only did I know nothing about retail, I knew even less about how to start an e-commerce website, and even less about how to find products and suppliers.

Fortunately the internet is a wonderful thing.  I did a lot of research on all of the above.  I found out how to register my business with the State of Indiana, how to get a resellers certificate, where to get products (suppliers) and I even found a site that was set up so you only had to add products to the basic store and you were in business.  It took me about 3 months and by June of 2000 I was up and running.  The basic store package that comes with the website (which at the time was free) had all the functionality necessary for managing a store including interface to credit card processing and the whole nine yards!  What a deal.

My next challenge was how to attract business.  In the first 6 months it was real slow. Then I started investigating search engines and how to use them.  After paying a one time fee i was able to get high ranking and the business exploded.  Our sales went up by at least 20 times what they had been.  Since then search engine use has changed dramatically and now the "pay per click" is the standard.  It works like this; you bid on a word like "nautical gifts".  Lots of others bid on words too.  The highest bid get the highest ranking.  So for example if I bid $.10 for nautical gifts then every time a person searches on "nautical gifts" and finds my site the search engine charges me $.10.  This over the years is now the universal standard for all search engines.  It is a great money generator for them, a big cash drain on store owners.  This has gotten very expensive over the years.

I next got some inventory of the different products I wanted to sell.  In the beginning this is a huge guess when you have no experience.  Fortunately I guessed correctly and we were on our way.   I have many suppliers now who will drop ship for me.  That is to say send it directly from them to you.  This allows me to keep my prices down for our customers.   I use about 10 supply companies that I have found over the years since I started.

The Business Keeps Growing

As I was still working at the time, my wife ran the day to day operation and handled phone calls and orders.  I did the web work and accounting.  (Accounting is boring)  In 2006 I retired and was able to devote more time to the store.

We added a line of Water Trampolines in 2002.  Since we live on a lake it was a great way to demonstrate and sell these types of items.  Again a big unkown for me in the beginning in terms of whether this would even be successful.  It was and since we have sold many units.  That market has changed over the years so it has become a smaller part of our over all buiness.

We enjoyed a very successful business over the years.  However last December of 2007 the website that provided the hosting and store framework decided to discontinue their business.  In less than a month they shut down their operations and we were left without a store.  We began the re building process at that point.  It took a good 6 months to get the new site built and up and running.  Now we have to re establish ourselves with the search engines just as if we were starting from scratch.  This has been a very trying time.  Fortunately we are well into the establishing of the new site.

I hope you will enjoy the things you find here.  We have had many very nice compliments from our customers over the years on our products and service.  I do a lot of online buying myself and I have a pretty good idea of what things make the experience nice and easy and what dont.  If you have any suggestions for me dont hesitate to email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   Thanks for shopping our store.  If you cant find a particular item you are looking for just send us an email and we will help you out.  We have many of the products that we sell all around our own home as decorations.  We love them as I know you will too.