10 Steps To Creating The Perfect Baby Gift Basket Business

Many people would probably be surprised to learn that it’s actually very difficult to achieve a successful online baby gift company, much more difficult than they may think.

Most of the founders of such companies are working mums, who have decided to take the plunge into self employment after the birth of their children, rather than return to their former jobs. It’s incredibly hard work balancing motherhood and running your own business – incredibly hard! But for those of us who succeed, the reward is tremendous pride and satisfaction.

We’re approaching our 10th birthday here at Baby Baskets Galore, and to celebrate we’ll be compiling a series of tips and aids on how we managed to get this far, in the hope that we can encourage other would-be mum entrepreneurs to have the confidence to start their own business too.

1. Market Research

Fundamental to building a successful online gift basket business is to know what your customer wants, how to position yourself in their sights, and how to turn them from an interested browser into a paying and happy customer that will return and also recommend you to others!
Market research in the initial stages can take many, many, many months, and it’s an ongoing and continuous process. You need to know both your market segment, and the mysteries of the world wide web inside out. Ten years on, and I’m still learning. And I’ll be continuously learning because it’s only 2011, the internet is in its infancy, and the games and rules are constantly changing – even on a daily basis!

2. Product Research

The market place is absolutely saturated with exceptionally cute products that would be perfect in our gift baskets. Much as we’d like to buy lots and surround ourselves with gorgeousness, we have to be extremely strict by only selecting items that we know will fit within the price brackets we set for our gift baskets.
Today, we still retain many of the manufacturers and products we started off with in 2001 – simply because they are the best out there in the market place. Testament to the fastidious research carried out in Step 1!

3. Offering a Quality Product

We’re are also very, very careful to lead with big brand names that we are know our customers will recognise and trust. So you won’t find any cheap non branded teddy bears in our baby gift baskets, only globally recognised brands like Russ Berrie and Gund are included. The same principle applies to our baby clothes, shoes, and skincare where we have hand selected ethically minded, organic, high quality manufacturers.

4. Differentiate Yourself from the Competition.

There are dozens of baby gift companies online, and more and more are coming online every month. The trick is to make yourself stand out from the crowd as a unique proposition, so that customers will decide to buy from you. For example we market ourselves as the original baby gift basket company in the UK & Ireland – because we were the first and therefore the original. We’re 10 years old, and believe it or not today that is considered old in internet land! Customers buy from us because we’re built up a loyal following, and we’re fast becoming a brand that they trust.

5. Invest in Packaging & Presentation.

We have always been firm believers in investing money and effort into the packaging and presentation of our gift baskets. When we were just starting out in business and only buying in smaller quantities, we used to buy our wicker baskets from a top London manufacturer. Now we have grown big enough, we outsource the manufacturer of our baskets to a partner in China, and match the high quality of the baskets we started out with – even if it costs a lot more than the mass produced wicker. As for the gift wrapping it’s still all done by hand – we just employ more staff to wrap them! The personal touch is something we built our business on, and it remains at the heart of what we do. A machine can never be a substitute for a human. That’s why all our baby baskets arrive perfectly packaged with noticeable hand wrapped finish.

6. Finding the Best Delivery Agent

A good, fully trackable delivery service is not cheap, and it’s certainly not free. From day one we decided to differentiate between product and delivery. We wanted to make our delivery rates completely transparent and honest. So we decided to charge for the delivery service separately, rather than hide it in the cost of the gift basket. A lot of other companies will offer “free delivery” but this is silly. Delivery can never be free, and anyone who tells you it is free is just hiding the cost in the product you are buying. We thought our customers would prefer to know that the £100 they were spending on the gift basket was reflective of it’s worth. After all 95% of our customers don’t even see their gift, as it is being sent directly to a loved one, and the last thing they would want is to order a £100 gift where a chunk of it is secretly being set aside to pay for the so called free delivery.

7. Building a Good Website

A good website has many levels, and is never ever based on looks alone. Of course its appearance is critically important. After all you only have 2 short seconds to convince a visitor to stay, or click away. That’s right, 2 seconds is the amount of time a potential customer will only wait to decide if they like what they see or not.

The power behind a website lies beneath its surface – much like a giant iceberg. With this in mind it is much more important to build a website on a good platform. There are quite a few ways to build a website, and the first decision you have to make is how you’re going to do it. When we first started in 2001, a friend of the family built our website for very little, pocket money really. It was incredibly basic, and built on a Dreamweaver platform. We bolted on a free shopping cart from www.mals-e.com which served us very well for 2 years until we switched to the more feature rich www.romancart.com. At the time it cost us £99 or so for the year – but was well worth it for the extra features.

In 2003 we decided we would approach web designers and get some quotes for a professional website. We were absolutely shocked at some of the quotes we were getting, and it really opened our eyes to how some companies will try to take advantage of customer’s naivety in what is a very young industry. The variation in the quotes for the same project was quite staggering. We decided in the end to go with one company who shall remain nameless. Like us they were young and seemed to be on our level – how wrong we were. Don’t get me wrong they did improve the visual appeal of our website, but that’s about all. The website we finished up with was just a design layer with absolutely no backend, content managed system, not even a shopping cart. As far SEO, that wasn’t even mentioned! The one and only thing that saved us from being completely wiped from the internet was that we insisted it continue to be written in php scripting.

We manage to scrape through Christmas 2004 with this horrendously difficult to manage website, and in 2005 decided to bite the bullet and employ someone in-house to build and manage our websites. To save on costs we used free open source software www.oscommerce.com which was a godsend. Since then we have been lucky enough to recruit absolutely brilliant IT people who have joined our crusade to continue to use fantastic open source software - we now use www.magentocommerce.com
Open source software is the future, it’s developed by groups of incredibly talented people, and it’s constantly evolving. In fact a lot of web designers use it – and then simply charge through the nose for it! So our tip would be find someone clever who can do it for you.

8. Optimising & Advertising your Website

There are literally dozens of techniques to get your website ranked online. The single most important factor to successfully selling online is search engine optimisation, or as it’s commonly known SEO. Basically these are rules your website needs to follow if it wants to be found by the major search engine spiders. After all it doesn’t matter how good your website looks if it can’t be found. Things such as having applicable incoming links from reliable sources, and lots of clear, relative content relating to the product you are selling are key here. There is lots of free information and guides to effective SEO all over the web. A very trusted source, and worth checking out first in my opinion is by Google itself - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

SEO is critical to success, above anything else anyone may try to tell you. So spend hours reading up and about it, before you even begin to think about building your website. Oh and one very big tip I’d like to give you is stay well clear of anyone who telephones you claiming they are from Google, and for X amounts of £’s they can get you to number one position for your key words. They are NOT from Google, they are con men. There are plenty of companies prepared to take your hard earned cash with promises of making you no. 1 on Google – beware these guys!


9. Offer 1st Class Customer Service

This may seem pretty obvious, but providing a good customer service is what it’s all about in internet land. You’re not a bricks and mortar store, you are simply a virtual store with little or no brand identity, that potential customers need to be able to trust in, before purchasing from you.

I can’t stress enough the value of having positive customer testimonials on your website. These are unsolicited comments that customers have provided after using your service. And many potential customers will read them before making the decision to purchase from you. It stands to reason that they want to know how customers before them have found the service. We have literally hundreds of nice comments are customers have emailed us over the years. Obviously starting out we had zero, but don’t be deterred, they can quickly build up – providing your customer service is good! One thing you should never, ever do is make them up. It’s so obvious when they’ve been made up, and it smacks of dishonesty. If you’re worried because you don’t have that many tell your customers why, that you’ve only just started in business. Ask them to help you out by sending a testimonial after you’ve provided them with the best service they’ve ever received! Make it personal –people buy from people.

Another tip is that there are lots of review sites online where customers can leave comments – good or bad! And the more cautious will invariable do a search for reviews of your company before placing an order.

Always remember that it’s much cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one, and that good customer service means word of mouth recommendations.


10. Build a Brand

The key to any successful business is successfully building a brand. This is fundamental to any business, but perhaps even more so to online businesses.

If customers remember your brand name, then you have made it to the top of the pyramid because you don’t have to rely on expensive advertising and marketing techniques to generate sales. Customers will simply type your website url into their browser, or type your brand name into the search engine of their choice to find you.

This status is the holy grail for all online companies, and obviously takes many, many years to reach. We’ll let you know if we ever manage it!

For those who are interested, here’s a link to a building a brand guide: http://tutor2u.net/business/marketing/brands_building_brands.asp

We hope this info. helps. We'll be compiling more guides so check back soon. Or if you've any questions we'd be happy to help if we can - get in touch.

Best wishes,

Lynne & the Team
Babybasketsgalore.co.uk

Our new arrival!

Last Thursday saw our dedicated baby website being re-launched with a new look & navigation. We hope you like it and would be interested to hear any feedback, epecially from customers who had shopped on the previous version. As with any new website there can be teething issues, so we are also keen to be informed of any issues you may come across please!



We hope the new layout will make it even easier & more fun to create your own baby gift basket. There are so many gorgeous items to browse through & new products are added all the time. You can create your own baby basket by using the horizontal navigation bar & clicking into the various sections such as Baby Toys & Baby Clothes. Please remember to click into the 'Baskets' section too, to pick a container for all your items. The price includes the basket/gift bag and the straw/lining, ribbons, bows & cellophane wrap which all help to turn your selected items into a beautifully packaged baby gift.

Using the vertical navigation menu on the left hand side of the screen you can view our 'readymade' sections of pre-designed baby gift baskets. These sections include New Baby Baskets, Parents & Baby Baskets and Mother & Pregnancy Gifts.

We have also introduced a 'shop by price' navigation menu so you can see all the baskets in your budget at the click of a button.

As usual next day delivery across the UK & Ireland is available, or pick the standard service for delivery in 2 days. We will email you when your gift basket is dispatched & also email you tracking details so you can follow the delivery progress.

Baby BasketsGalore also now has its own Facebook Page, so be sure to follow us for all the lastest news, updates, special offers & competitions.

We hope you enjoy shopping on Baby BasketsGalore & please just drop us an email if we can be of any assistance.

Kind regards,
The Baby BG Team

New post, new products

Well it has been a while since our last baby specific blog so I thought I would update you on what has been going on in the BasketsGalore Baby Division.

Baby Clothes Range

We have added a few more well known, luxury brands to our baby clothes range. One of our original lines is by Lollipop Lane, their 'Rosie Posie' range for baby girls and 'Fish & Chips' for baby boys in particular. This range includes soft shades of baby blue & pink, snuggly fabrics and fine designer detailing.



We have also stocked Nature's Purest for many months now, but have added a few new pieces from their range including embroidered sleepsuits and knitted cardigans. Nature's Purest use naturally coloured cotton, which is a pigmented fibre that grows in shades of green and brown. The natural colour is from the plants inherent natural genetic properties. It is also 100% free from pollution-causing fertilisers, harmful pesticides and chemicals. This helps babys skin to breathe more easily.



Olive & Moss are one of our newer suppliers, added to the range last year. They began in 2007 & design cute babywear with a retro twist. Their products have cute names such as Bella Bird and Loris Lamb & include playsuits & days sets.



Another of our favourite new suppliers are Frugi, who specialise in "scrumptious organic clothes" for babies, toddlers and older children. We carry some of their 'oh so cute' babygrows (long sleeves) and bodysuits (short sleeves). They have been proving popular in our pre-designed baby gift baskets and also when people choose to create their very own baby gift basket.



We hope you like the new additions to our baby clothes gifts. Check back soon for info on some more new baby products.

The Baby BG Team

The Best Baby Baskets in the UK & Ireland

Here at Basketsgalore, we are proud to be the chosen baby gift suppliers for some of the world’s biggest corporations such as MTV, Warner Bros, Walt Disney, NBC etc...

Because of this our Baby Baskets are often received by the rich and famous, and in turn frequently purchased by Celebrities who have received them when they need to send a newborn gift.

When you buy a Baskets Galore Baby Basket you are guaranteed quality.

Our Baby baskets stand apart from everything else on the market. They are filled with BIG brand designer names. They’re professionally wrapped & decorated to perfection. They are simply stunning.

We are constantly researching the baby gift market, visiting baby trade shows and sourcing suppliers to find the highest quality gift wear for inclusion in our baskets.
We are constantly on the lookout for the cutest and trendiest babywear, the softest shoes and booties, and the latest release award winning plush & developmental toys.

We’ve been in business for over 10 years. We’ve built our little empire up slowly and steadily and our ethos has always been to offer the best possible quality at the best possible prices. This is why we win so much repeat business, and the new parent’s that receive our baskets love them so much they in turn purchase baskets for their friends and family.
So although you may think our prices are too good to be true compared to other baby gift basket and baby hamper companies, just remember one thing. We are the original baby gift basket company in the UK & Ireland. We’re the biggest, and the best.

Just see some of the unsolicited comments our customers have made over the last 10 years:

At the end of last year, my younger sister had her first baby, my first nephew! It was a very emotional time because the delivery was not easy and I hated being so far away as I live in Japan. Choosing and ordering the 'We are Family' basket was a way for me to feel a bit closer and I had great fun picking it out. When I finally got to see my little red-haired nephew in the spring I was so happy to see him wearing the little duck boots and playing with the musical inchworm, which was certainly a big hit! Thank you for giving me a way to connect with my nephew and his proud Mum and Dad even from half way around the world!."
Rachel, Japan

Friends of ours had just had their first baby and we wanted to get them a special gift and something a little bit unusual. After searching the web we came across your website and after logging on found it really easy to use and informative. We ordered a basket (for a baby girl and mum) and the order was dealt with immediately. Unfortunately, I made a mistake and double ordered so I telephoned baskets galore and spoke to a lovely lady who helped me immediately with the order placed in error and cancelled it, refunding the overpayment and sending the correct basket. We couldn't have asked for a more helpful service and when the basket arrived it was beautifully packaged and presented. We would definitely recommend baskets galore to friends and family. Thank you for a friendly, efficient and hassle free service!

Paula, Luton

Having used your service on numerous occasions, I just want to say thank you for the wonderful gift baskets that have made my friends and family so happy! I have yet to see one of the baskets myself in the flesh (maybe some day someone will send me one!) but the feedback I always get from people I send them to is that they are absolutely amazing! Everyone comments on the exquisite presentation and quality of the contents. Also, I know from shopping around that your baskets have the best selection at the best value. So well done and keep up the good work!!

Sarah Hartnett (Ireland)

I ordered my first basket for a friend of mine for her birthday. She was a new mummy but I didn't want to buy her baby things for her own birthday so I bought her a pamper basket with lots of yummy bath goods and chocolates. She was so impressed and grateful and it arrived so well wrapped up, on time and made her cry with glee! Thank you so much Basketgalore. I will definitely be using you again, but also hope that maybe some of my own friends or family might use you to when its my birthday!

Alexis, London

If you have an idea for anything you'd like to see in a baby gift basket please get in touch.
The BG Team

Customer Delivery Announcement

Customer Announcement

Why is my next delivery date only showing as Wednesday 14th July?

BasketsGalore is expanding its office space and refurbishing the packaging & dispatch area, so unfortunately will be unable to process orders on Monday 12th July. We will start dispatching orders to the UK & Ireland again on Tuesday 13th July.

So if I order any time on Saturday, Sunday or Monday it will make no difference?

Yes, we have taken the decision to carry out all work over this weekend, as it also coincides with the 12th July Public holiday.

I understand and am happy for my Gift Basket to be dispatched by BasketsGalore on Tuesday 13th or Wednesday 14th July.

That's great & to thank you for being so understanding we'd like to offer you the following:

1) An Upgrade to the Express Delivery service at no extra cost
2) 2 x Complimentary bars of Chocolate Garden Handmade Luxury Chocolate to be included in your gift basket

This applies to ALL GIFT BASKETS ordered over this period.

Our Baby division has continued to grow & develop, especially with the success of this "Create Your Own Baby Basket" website. We want to continue offering you the best baby gift baskets around, at the best prices & so aim to make sure our systems are streamlined & effecient. After all, we need to ensure all those proud new parents receive their beautiful baby basket quickly. We thank you for your understanding at this time, as we contine to grow.

Many thanks,
The Baby BG Team

Best Baby Basket Creations

Last week saw a surge in people creating their own unique baby gift baskets. I have had a look back to see what your favourite baby items of the week were.

Many people like to include gifts for the new baby & also a little something for the new mum & dad. Our 'Mummy, Daddy & Me' range of baby & parents gifts baskets are amongst the most popular, so we included these in our 'Readymade' section, for those instances when you may not have time to select all the items yourself.



Those who chose the 'create a baby basket' option last week tended to opt for the pack of 3 Lollipop Lane bodysuits, in either blue or pink.



Little baby booties were also a popular choice, either the Dinky Donkey or Cosy Cuddles Bears by Russ Berrie.



The favourite chocolates of the week were our delicious belgian chocolate covered strawberries. You can browse the various treats for new parents in our 'Champagne & Chocolates' section.

It is interesting to see the baby baskets our customers create & if we see a particular trend, we can develop this into a ready to buy baby gift. We hope to begin posting pictures of some of the best baby gifts designed by you soon.

New Baby & Siblings Gifts

Over the years BasketsGalore has had lots of requests for baby baskets and childrens gift baskets and so we created a fantastic range of both. This range is constantly added to and updated. Recently we noticed people ordering a baby basket & a kids basket or asking us to combine 2 baskets into 1.

With this in mind we have just added a "Gifts for Siblings" section to our create your own baby basket website

This means customers can now select items for a proud big brother or sister as well as the new baby. We think sibling presents will be popular as the whole family is included and can share the gift, so no-one will feel left out or less important!

We have started by adding items like teddies, toys, jigsaws, puzzles & board games. The toys are listed with an age range so you can decide which would be most suitable for the proud sibling(s)! After all they have an important job to do now as big brother or sister.




The older childrens toys can be bulky & may not fit into the baby basket (depending on the items you select) so we gift wrap these separately & add a little gift tag addressing it to the older child. This way they get their own little present & are included in all the excitement.

Please drop us an email if you have any requests or ideas for toys, or any other products, you would like to see available to send as a baby gift.