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20 Years of Selling Wheelchair Ramps Online

I’ve just noticed that my wheelchair ramps site – https://www.wheelchair-ramps.co.uk/ was 20 years old last month.

I was working on the building industry at the time, saw all the new building regulations coming in regarding disabled access and the DDA, noticed a lot of it was being ignored, soon realised that finding wheelchair ramps online was tricky so decided to build my own website.

I only knew how to build very simple static HTML pages, didn’t have any ramps and didn’t even have a business set up.

I initially just got some photos from a ramp supplier, built a little demo website, didn’t think much more about it until the phone rang with someone wanting to buy a ramp.

I had to explain I didn’t actually sell them and it was just a demo site and left it at that

A week later the phone rang again, then again and again. I thought this is stupid I really ought to do something about it, contacted a ramp manufacturer, set the website up a bit better then formed my 1st business Access Appraisals Ltd

The 1st 3 or 4 years I was still working full time on the building and running my ramps business in the evenings and at weekends

Things gradually got busier though I started selling more ramps from a new supplier and in 2004 I gave up work to work on my Disabled Access Ramps website and business full time.

A lot has changed in that time, with the business and the website
I had about a decade of being number 1 on Google for Wheelchair Ramps and similar phrases, was selling a dozen ramps a week and making some good money.

Ramps started getting more competitive, there were lots of cheaper alternatives, manufacturers selling very similar ramps to me were selling direct and undercutting me by a lot.

I started to lose interest, my Google rankings started dropping, but I had no incentive to do much optimising as what’s the point in being number 1 in Google if your products are far more expensive than anyone else on the front page and even more importantly wheelchair ramps were starting to show up in Google shopping on eBay and on Amazon for far cheaper than mine.

I just let the site drift for a few years, just giving it a bit of a tidy up every now and then but then came up with the idea of making it more of a wheelchair information site with pages on wheelchair ramp gradients, wheelchair ramp regulations, Wheelchair Ramps Guidelines, etc.

I still sell the odd ramp, mainly to the service sector – Wheelchair Ramps for the Service Sector mainly because they have to be a lot more careful and can’t risk buying some of the cheap unreliable ramps that are out there.

The main reason I keep the site going though is it was my baby that started everything and I still enjoy working on it every now and then 🙂

20 Years of Selling Wheelchair Ramps Online

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