Baby gift start up business update
As a small online business I thought I would write an article to take stock of where we were in the setup of the baby gift business. 4little1s.com has been up and running for around 6 months now and thought I would take stock of exactly where we are. I have broken this up into a few sections detailing with various areas of the business and some tips we have picked up along the way.
Sales & Marketing
Sales have been good over the last few months and we have been pleasantly surprised at some of the big sellers.
We have been experience with Pay Per click on Google adwords and Microsoft’s version Adcentre. Both generate a good level of traffic to the site and we are keeping a very close eye on return on investment (ROI). No point in spending £50 per day only to sell a small baby gift at £3.50.
PR has formed a part of the strategy of getting us going; fortunately having some good contacts and reading a couple of books has helped us get up to speed in this area.
I see Marketing as an area that a huge amount of investment can be lost unless controls are put into place. We will be measuring this very carefully over the coming months.
Financial
Setting up a bank account was relatively simple and painless. Setting up the process behind the website, dealing with the processing between Paypal in our case and exporting the money then to our bank account took more time to set up. Once completed, it works, but don’t let anyone fool you its simple and done in minutes.
Record keeping is paramount to keeping on top of things. Whether it’s for the Inland Revenue, expenditure or otherwise, set up files, be organised and keep up to date.
Employing an accountant has not been necessary for us at present, as we are able to do bookkeeping and basic accounts. However, we will need an accountant to do the final accounts. Again, we have the skills internally to do most of the financial work which has helped save money.
Tip – Set up files and be organised with your paperwork
Stock
We initially started out as just baby gifts and sales of baby gift hampers went particularly well, it surprised us as we had thought some of our other baby gift products would sell better than others. I guess the lesson being you need to distance yourself to a certain extent and not make it too personal in terms of what you stock.
We have a good range of suppliers and have good relationships with all of them. It’s important to get on with your suppliers to make the business successful.
We have added a new baby nursery furniture range recently. Having spoke to a number of suppliers via email and at trade fairs (Harrogate nursery fair specifically) we felt this was a good move to complement the baby gift concept of increasing the opportunity we can engage our customers. The baby gift range was aimed very much at the beginning of the baby process, e.g. during pregnancy and in the very early years as a congratulations.
The idea of then extending this period to a range of baby furniture seemed a natural progression and appears to be generating good interest.
Keeping aware of new product lines is taking more time than originally thought. Using the Internet is a great tool to find out what products are around; this includes finding suppliers but also importantly keeping an eye on your competition as to what they are doing.
Tip - Build good relationships with your suppliers, people generally like to deal with people they get on with.
Tip – Keep an eye on your competition.
Technology
The current technology stays the same, in that we are using Fasthosts as the Internet Service Provider (ISP), we are using Actinic as the shopping cart software that under pins the website and we have opted for the SSL service from Actinic to ensure our customers credit cards are secure during the transaction.
We have a couple of computers in the office, all running standard Microsoft products to keep things simply. These are used for uploaded and generally managing the site with respect to content and email. Luckily my husband works in IT so we have onsite technical support at hand when we need it.
We currently use Talk Talk as our Broadband provider and we do appear to experience a number of communication issues recently and we are considering moving to BT to improve reliability. Previously when this connection was used for home use it was OK and we could cope with connection losses periodically. However, now we are more reliant on the broadband connection its becoming more important.
Finally, we have just configured a Blackberry device to be able to stay in touch with our customers when we are out of the office.
Tip - I guess a lesson learned is that it pays to have a good ’ techy’ on hand, and if you can teach yourself, all the better as it doesn’t cost you any money.
Main challenges
Main challenge has been getting all the backend processes set up and put into place and the ever moving challenge of keeping the website rankings
Looking forward to the next 6 months we will be looking at the following
- Visiting more trade fairs and getting out there
- Sourcing new ranges
- Collaborative marketing with a partner (offline and online)
- Refining page rank and page position
www.4little1s.com is a baby gift and nursery furniture web site, please feel free to visit us if you need to buy for your little ones….
