Tag: ecommerce

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Written Interviews

Interview with Harry Bettencourt of Barstools.co.uk

Today I am presenting another written interview with Harry Bettencourt. Harry is an entrepreneur who imports and re-sells a wide range of furniture into the UK consumer market. Specialising in bar stools, he has become the number one harrybettencourtUK retailer of bar stools, and is considered one of the leading experts in the industry. His rapid business growth led him to developing a website dedicated to selling them, and set him on a journey of discovery with ecommerce systems, back-end ordering systems, and online marketing. In this interview he shares some of his story.

1. What got you started with Barstools.co.uk? Why this niche? Share your story.

I spent a lot of time in Italy working with interior designers over the last decade. At that time bar stools were making a little bit of a resurgence in many different forms, in particular in kitchen refurbishments. I could see an opportunity to bring some of these amazing bar stool designs back to the UK and get them popular in my home country.

I set the Bar Stools Company up a few years back, and haven’t really looked back since. From the off I had a huge learning curve discovering how to set up my ecommerce website, how to drive traffic and sales, and developing a bespoke ordering system integrated with my warehouse.

2. What’s working for you today to bring traffic to your site?

I work with an SEO agency who advise me on weekly tasks in terms of online marketing initiatives and traffic building strategies. To be honest though, I’ve self-taught myself a lot of stuff too. Selling bar stools online is quite a competitive business, with a huge amount of potential customers.

Being able to create new compelling and interesting content about bar stools isn’t an easy task, so I am having to constantly think up new creative ideas on how to generate new website traffic. Recently I’ve been looking at re-targeting methods as well as Facebook advertising to try to drive highly targeted traffic from people who could be interesting in buying bar stools. It’s a steep learning curve but am definitely getting there!

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3. Do you utilize other sales channels such as Amazon and eBay? If so what are your thoughts on selling on multiple channels?

Yes I do. In fact I tend to test some product lines on eBay first to see if they sell. It’s very easy to list a new bar stool on eBay and get quite quick feedback on whether it will be popular or not.

I also tend to sell end of season stock on these channels too. We have a large warehouse full with different bar stools and designs and sometimes it’s quite a quick win to get them on eBay and Amazon – especially when selling in bulk discounts to trade buyers who need large consignments of bar stools quickly and cheaply.

4. What type of CMS (Content Management System) does your site run and why did you choose it to build your eCommerce site?

At the moment the Bar Stools UK website is run on the Magento platform. We also integrate WordPress into it as our blogging platform. We had a couple of issues with Magento recently from an SEO perspective so are currently working through that to optimise it best for all he different bar stools keyword searches that occur in the UK market.

5. What are your future plans for 2014 and beyond?

We are planning on releasing a whole new line of retro designs which I am hoping will prove popular with the British public! There are also plans to expand out into tables and chairs on a new ecommerce website – basically taking everything that we learnt from the Bar Stools UK project and repeating those successes in a different niche.

Categories
Written Interviews

Interview with Elena Travis of TheFunkyChair.co.uk

Today I present another written interview with Elena Travis. Elena is the eCommerce manager of The Funky Chair website. The website specializes in importing and reselling bar stools into the the funky chairUK market and has recently been re-designed in order to cater for a growing market in the UK for bar stools being used in interior design. Elena has many years of experience working as an online marketing manager for eCommerce websites.

What got you interested in selling bar stools and running your own online store? Share your story.

For many years I worked as an online marketing manager for a large fashion house, and was spending almost 12 hours a day working on someone else’s brand, someone else’s website, and ultimately earning online profits for someone else’s pocket. Like many online entrepreneurs I had an “a-ha” moment and started to think that I should really be doing this for myself.

I’d always been interested in interior design and had seen bar stools being used in modern kitchen designs. The prices for bar stools seemed quite high so I thought to myself surely I could look at importing cheaply, and re-selling back in the UK via my own funky bar stools website. That’s how it all started off a couple of years ago and I haven’t looked back since!

What are a few challenges you have faced during the initial growth of your eCommerce business?

Set-up costs primarily. It costs quite a lot up-front to run an effective eCommerce platform… especially if you don’t have any income coming in yet in terms of online sales! Another challenge was settling on a brand look and feel – we went through so many iterations with The Funky Chair until we finally settled on a the design. Admittedly I still don’t think I am 100% happy with it – but I guess every business owner probably feels the same!

The most important thing is to make people correlate The Funky Chair brand with buying bar stools online… if we can get that done in the next 12 months then that will be the biggest challenge overcome. Hopefully interviews like this and our online advertising efforts will make that happen as we want to be the number 1 bar stool retailer in the UK, and eventually for Europe and the United States too.

Do you also sell on other platforms such as eBay or Amazon? What are your thoughts on using these platforms?

I did initially yes. I tested out the profitability of importing bar stools and selling on both of those platforms. Although the profits were small, I could see it could work. I still have a presence on both eBay and Amazon but hopefully those will become less and less important to the business over time as our website traffic increases as well as our online visibility in the search engines for when people search for bar stool related terms.

What are 2 or 3 useful tools you use daily to run your eCommerce business that you couldn’t live without?

I have a tool to automate image prepping and cropping which is essential. We tend to add about 10 to 20 new bar stool designs every week so being able to do that quickly and in the same format each time is key to be productive and quick in terms of a turnaround.

We also have an online stock control system linked into the warehouse where we keep all of our bar stools and furniture stock. Without that I wouldn’t’ have a clue how the business was performing.

What are your future plans for 2014 and beyond?

To roll out new sections in the website for things like cool chairs and office furniture. I have noticed a trend where offices are now starting to look for functional furniture that actually looks cool… I am currently looking at overseas manufacturers to look for new lines to start importing alongside the bar stools part of the business.

Categories
Written Interviews

Interview with John Monti of YourVaporizers.com

Today I present another written interview with John Monti of YourVaporizers.com06092014

1. What got you interested in selling vaporizers online? Share your story.

I’ve been doing SEO for almost 10 years and ecommerce for 3 years. One of my friends were mentioning how lucrative the vaporizer business was. I had done some research on my own and found out he was right. I found three good US suppliers that generate millions of dollars a year, have good phone support and large variety of name brand products. I get them at vendor price and make over 60% profit margins between each sale. The best part is vaporizers are a large growing business, especially with medical marijuana becoming legal for recreational use in over 3 states and 20 others with medical marijuana. So people are always looking for healthier alternatives to smoking and vaporizers are expensive with good margins.

2. How is your inventory managed online in terms of distribution and fulfillment? Do you drop ship the products?

We Drop Ship. Customer orders, money is sent to an account, I call the supplier to make sure they have it in stock, I log in the backend of my suppliers and place the order, they send it to the customer. Product usually comes to customer within 2-3 business days.

3. What are some strategies you use to boost traffic to your site and help generate more sales?

It is all about quality links. I strive to contact every webmaster in my industry for a link to the site. The sites I look for have to have good Domain Authority, Page Authority, Citation score and trust score. I either write on high quality blogs as comments, post blog posts for high quality sites, build tons of articles, complete unique content for my site and my blogs content. I have 10 tiers of a link pyramid which give strong link juice as well as using a big Private Blog Network. The main thing is from money site to tier 3 links I write 100% unique content for them.

4. What are 3 of your favorite tools for running your eCommerce business? This could be anything from productivity to promotion, inventory management etc.

My site uses Magento and it manages everything real well. Some software I use on tier 4-10 link levels are; scrapebox, GSA, Ultimate Demon, Kontent Machine & Market Samurai.

5. What are your future plans for 2014 and beyond?

I’m working on opening up a vaporizer shop / Cafe for people to be able to buy vaporizers, rent them out and use them in the lounge area of the store. I’m also going to add a vaporizer repair service as well as developing my own custom vaporizers to send to retail stores for bulk purchase blocks. My store is going to be in Orlando, FL where medical marijuana is approved for the “Charlottes web strain”.