Today I present another written interview with Kevin Scrimgeour who is the owner of Popular Gifts and Toys. Kevin has over a decade of experience spotting hot new product trends and selling online gifts.
1. What special or promotion have you found to be most successful with your store?
The best promotion has been free shipping. Simple and straight forward, consumers get it and often will buy more or become a repeat customer.
2. What’s one misconception you think people have about running your own business?
That you have to have be rich. We started on a shoe-string, buying at garage sales and selling on eBay and we grew our business from there. We are now able to buy direct from importers and manufacturers with the purchases going on our credit card, allowing us 30 days to sell and pay for the items.
3. What’s a mistake that you made in your small business, and how did you recover?
Not properly managing our inventory as it grew. We had items that were not listed for sale on our shelves or we were not reordering fast sellers quick enough. We moved to an online inventory management and re-pricing tool, which provides detailed reports. Now fast sellers get reordered before an out-of-stock situation arises.
4. What’s next for Popular Gifts and Toys?
We plan on adding a robust mobile site to our online store. Most of our traffic is now coming to our site from mobile or tablet devices. We expect higher conversion rates as we improve the mobile users experience and ease of searching and checking out. To increase sales volume we plan on integrating a drop-shipper to the inventory mix in the future.
Kevin Scrimgeour may be contacted at [email protected]
