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=35291SEO 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.aspWe 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
