Hi. I am new to the forum and I have to say, I am very impressed with the responces that I have read so far. I have been searching for ideas to help grow my buisiness and it is nice to find aplace where other business owners can share ideas without fear of being taken to the cleaners. I have a garage door company, and things have really started to slow down. It is family owned and the only 2 employees are my son and myself. We have a web site that has pretty good showings on both yahoo and google if you type in " garage doors melbourne fl" or any other city in the Brevard county FL area. We have been thinking about adding a "shopping cart" feature to our site to offer selling and shipping some of the "do it yourself" items that we sell, ex..remote controles, storage racks and so forth. The problem that we just can't seem to figure out is, the rails that go with our garage door openers are longer than 8ft. long. UPS and Fed Ex won't ship them because of their length and the common carriers wont ship to residential addresses. We carry a higher qulity product to ensure that the customer is getting nothing but the best. Any advice on solving the shipping problem would be great. Also, any comments on the website,(good or bad) would be great as well. Thank you so very much in advance. www.BrevardGarageDoors.com

Hi,
I think you have a great looking site. If it were me, I would bring out a camera (video and stills) to installations and take pictures that self installers could reference or become more comfortable with. I would post the videos on youtube and instructables.com. The landing pages would have email links to ask questions about installation or get quotes on the whole set up. I have worked with a bunch of different shipping companies and a few will ship to residences. If I remember right, check out Adcom worldwide. They have points all over the country. The problem is that you can't really put something 8' long on a liftgate which may be required for the weight of the shipment. The only answer I can think of is to have the carrier call before delivery and schedule a time when the home owner can have a few helpers to either pull the shipment off or break it down quickly.

The phrase "how to install a garage door" is very poorly targeted in the search engines. With very little work, you could see some more traffic from this phrase. They would also bring very targeted customers.

I would also check out something like a local "habitat for humanity" http://www.brevardhabitat.com/
and see about how you could be a part of it. Maybe you could offer them garage doors for no profit. If you were to offer the installation, it could put you in contact with a lot of other subcontractors to network with, or contractors to use your doors.

I hope all goes well!

Hi Joe. Thank you for the advice. I will definately get to work on the video and picture idea. As far as the shipping goes, I am not real interested in shipping garage doors other than locally. The operater rails are relativaely light (10-15 lbs) just long in length. I will check out Adcom. Thank you so very much for the reply.

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I would suggest you get out and meet the general contractors in your area. Try to seel him the garage doors along with a low cost installation. This way you will be able to sell in bulk, and shipping this way should eliminate your problem.
THe only other way I can see to do this is to get in to independant stores. this way you can make one shipment to their warehouse and thay can do the distribution from there.
Hope this is of some use to you.
Cheers,


Bill
http://leprechaunlumber.com