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I ran a mainstream e-commerce site/business for awhile. I bought from the client I made the site for as he didn't put any money into marketing it. I had the site #1 - #3 on Google for just about every important keyword ... not that I was/am an SEO guru but I built the site in '97 before everyone and their sister was trying SEO. I had good inbound links from hobby sites, listed in Yahoo/DMOZ and made sure that SEs could index the ASP-based pages. It was aquarium related and for "aquarium supplies" we were #1 for literally 2+ years - even ahead of all the biggies (Pets.com, etc.)
Unfortunately, a victim of my own success (too much time on fulfillment) and a plunging US dollar in 2002/3 killed it. Since 99% of my customers were in the US - I'm in Toronto - I was converting US funds to CDN at 1.5x initially. By early 2003 it was something like 1.35?!? Anyway, my supplier hadn't lowered his prices yet so I was getting crunched badly. Thank goodness I sold it off as now the USD is anywhere from 1.17 to 1.21 here. Ouch.
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