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ANON29512
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Happy new year fellow fastlaners.
Just wanted to give a quick sitrep. I'll be very concise:
What are the good things that happened?
1. Business. My company has had a slow start (mainly due to ordering goods conservatively to see if there's demand), but since August it was picking up, and since then we constantly have had 20-25k EUR sales per month. Not bad considering we have 20 products (4 categories). Unfortunately the growth has stopped and we're stagnating on this level of income. Luckily, we have approx. 5 diferent categories of products arriving until the end of February (all very sought after, according to our research), meaning we're doubling our inventory, which means we might just double or triple our sales soon. Not taking into account spring season, when we should see demand naturally increase.
2. (absolutely fabolous) New location. Until the end of November, we've been living in a 60m2 ground floor apartment (quite small for 3), where it was dark and the neighbourhood was full of gypsies and people who didn't care, so mentally we had a tough time, and it was definitely harder to stay motivated with all the garbage, unconscious people, shouting all the time. Working, eating and recreating on the dining room, no privacy, nada.
Now we live in a 160m2 apartment on the 9th floor, with a 30m2 balcony, illuminated, 4 rooms, IKEA furniture, close to beach and city center, with sauna, pool, squash and padel court, etc. World class home, literally for very down to earth prices (850 EUR/mo + utlity), cool owners. Of course, the process was that we had failed to get 9 other flats beforehand and had highs and downs in mood throughout the month, fearing we might don't get a flat, in Valencia houses are ugly and old. Overall, I felt very stressed and it was a tough month.
What's coming up?
1. Going all-in. Our main sponsor (our mom) has given most of her money to us, and now it's invested in merchandise, almost doubling of what we have. All products reseached and should sell better then what we currently have. The business looks pretty stable now and we are expecting great growth this spring.
2. Employee. At the same time, we foreseeing the hire of employees, which especially delights me, as I had enough of being the customer support guy and could really use the help of a native Spanish speaker when it comes to marketing and whatnot. Will focus on high-leverage tasks, such as improving webshop, marketing, processes, customer satisfaction.
3. B2B. Since Spain is still primarily an offline country, we concocted that as an importer we won't restrict ourselves only to online marketing. We have and are contacting big retailers to become their suppliers.
4. Expanding into UK. We always knew that UK was a good market (initially my partner want to go there), but after seeing the search numbers in google there is no comparison (should have done it beforehand eh?). With the same products we stand a good chance of competing in the market and we're just getting started.
Obstacles and challanges
Our webshop is, unlike 99% of webshops out there, a generalist webshop, as our goal is to become a marketplace where people will do their shopping needs, kind of like kogan.com.au, not being a particular expert niche shop. Our value proposition is saving the customer money, coupled with great customer support, great products (differentiated commodity items really), fast shipping, easy and enjoyable online buying experience or customer satisfaction. I always feel all the ecommerce ideas out there don't help me, since my webshop is not niche, our visitors are not homogenic/non-segmentable (and so marketing is hard to focus). So whenever a see an article on how to kill it with facebook marketing, email marketing, twitter, pinterest, whatnot I think "How does that shit apply for me!?"
We already give one of the best prices, so what do I send out in an email marketing campaign? -5% discount? Free shipping (doing this already)? What do I post on facebook? Quotes? Especially considering the products are technical DYI/hardware/tools category. I feel like we're not niche nor a big market place yet, so I don't see how we can improve our marketing or branding. The only growth pushers are getting more products and once we reach hundreds of products people will start recognizing as a big seller with good prices, until then I'll just continue paying for ads, selling on marketplaces.
However, everything is going great and on the long term we'll be a dominant player in the online retail ring in Spain.
Cheers
Just wanted to give a quick sitrep. I'll be very concise:
What are the good things that happened?
1. Business. My company has had a slow start (mainly due to ordering goods conservatively to see if there's demand), but since August it was picking up, and since then we constantly have had 20-25k EUR sales per month. Not bad considering we have 20 products (4 categories). Unfortunately the growth has stopped and we're stagnating on this level of income. Luckily, we have approx. 5 diferent categories of products arriving until the end of February (all very sought after, according to our research), meaning we're doubling our inventory, which means we might just double or triple our sales soon. Not taking into account spring season, when we should see demand naturally increase.
2. (absolutely fabolous) New location. Until the end of November, we've been living in a 60m2 ground floor apartment (quite small for 3), where it was dark and the neighbourhood was full of gypsies and people who didn't care, so mentally we had a tough time, and it was definitely harder to stay motivated with all the garbage, unconscious people, shouting all the time. Working, eating and recreating on the dining room, no privacy, nada.
Now we live in a 160m2 apartment on the 9th floor, with a 30m2 balcony, illuminated, 4 rooms, IKEA furniture, close to beach and city center, with sauna, pool, squash and padel court, etc. World class home, literally for very down to earth prices (850 EUR/mo + utlity), cool owners. Of course, the process was that we had failed to get 9 other flats beforehand and had highs and downs in mood throughout the month, fearing we might don't get a flat, in Valencia houses are ugly and old. Overall, I felt very stressed and it was a tough month.
What's coming up?
1. Going all-in. Our main sponsor (our mom) has given most of her money to us, and now it's invested in merchandise, almost doubling of what we have. All products reseached and should sell better then what we currently have. The business looks pretty stable now and we are expecting great growth this spring.
2. Employee. At the same time, we foreseeing the hire of employees, which especially delights me, as I had enough of being the customer support guy and could really use the help of a native Spanish speaker when it comes to marketing and whatnot. Will focus on high-leverage tasks, such as improving webshop, marketing, processes, customer satisfaction.
3. B2B. Since Spain is still primarily an offline country, we concocted that as an importer we won't restrict ourselves only to online marketing. We have and are contacting big retailers to become their suppliers.
4. Expanding into UK. We always knew that UK was a good market (initially my partner want to go there), but after seeing the search numbers in google there is no comparison (should have done it beforehand eh?). With the same products we stand a good chance of competing in the market and we're just getting started.
Obstacles and challanges
Our webshop is, unlike 99% of webshops out there, a generalist webshop, as our goal is to become a marketplace where people will do their shopping needs, kind of like kogan.com.au, not being a particular expert niche shop. Our value proposition is saving the customer money, coupled with great customer support, great products (differentiated commodity items really), fast shipping, easy and enjoyable online buying experience or customer satisfaction. I always feel all the ecommerce ideas out there don't help me, since my webshop is not niche, our visitors are not homogenic/non-segmentable (and so marketing is hard to focus). So whenever a see an article on how to kill it with facebook marketing, email marketing, twitter, pinterest, whatnot I think "How does that shit apply for me!?"
We already give one of the best prices, so what do I send out in an email marketing campaign? -5% discount? Free shipping (doing this already)? What do I post on facebook? Quotes? Especially considering the products are technical DYI/hardware/tools category. I feel like we're not niche nor a big market place yet, so I don't see how we can improve our marketing or branding. The only growth pushers are getting more products and once we reach hundreds of products people will start recognizing as a big seller with good prices, until then I'll just continue paying for ads, selling on marketplaces.
However, everything is going great and on the long term we'll be a dominant player in the online retail ring in Spain.
Cheers