Advice wanted please

[Spudded]

Hi,

I am about to launch my 2nd limited company. Although I have solid experience in business this is my 1st retail venture.

I'm keen to get opinions on whether it's best to have a website with a large range of products but only 1 or 2 in stock or hold more items and have a much smaller choice.

Also I would like thoughts on whether it's best to do one range of products at a time and work on promoting that or have lots of ranges but only a couple of items in each range.

I'm intending to grow the company by reinvesting any sales revenue.

 

I would start with a variety of products to make your website look busy and interesting - a destination for my potential customers to browse and choose.

A half empty eCommerce website looks awful.. they put me off buying from them in the same way a half empty shop does. Categories with only one or two products on an eCommerce system page designed to show dozens of products just looks wrong to me.

On the other hand you don't want to overdo it. You need to be able to handle the number of lines you carry and if you stock thousands of lines but none of them are ever in stock then you will alienate your customers. They will end up feeling they can never get what they want from your site and they won't come back.

You want to stock more of what sells well and stock less (or nothing) of what doesn't sell. You need to regularly monitor your sales and be tactical about your products and stocks to maximise your business.

I think the best piece of advice is that you should sit down and really get to know your eCommerce system. I know people who use their eCommerce system simply as a storefront and to handle payments and ordering processing but a good eCommerce system can give you a huge amount of information about your business and if it is run well the quality of that information gets better over time.

It's tough to begin with because the information in the system is limited but it can start to help you and will improve from day 1.

For example, if you want to know how much stock of a particular line to order for the coming week you can ask your eCommerce system to tell you how many you sold the previous week (or weeks or even say, the same period last year) and base your buying decision on those figures. It could show you which products are seasonal, which product sales are increasing or falling, which product lines aren't selling at all.

After a while you may discover that sales of some products are quite consistent and by ordering a month's worth of stock at a time you can get bulk discounts and improve your profit margins.

It is the management information from your eCommerce system that should inform you decisions about the lines and quantities to stock, rather than having a fixed view of "more products less stock" or vice versa.

If your eCommerce system has the facilitiy then I'd say it's also worth taking the time to track your suppliers' lead times, and if your eCommerce system cannot do that, take the time to track it by some other method. By using low stock level alerts and knowing the lead times from your suppliers you can get into a routine of ordering in new stock that will arrive shortly before your existing stock runs out. That way you minimise the possibility that you will run out of stock and you won't have to keep stock levels larger than necessary giving you extra space to stock other lines.

Tracking your suppliers' lead times also give you more flexibility on your site. As I mentioned earlier it's very frustrating when a product is just "out of stock". Unless I needed something really urgently I don't mind ordering a product that is listed as 'depsatched in 2 days' or similar. It's the information I want. "Out of Stock" is just not good enough for me as a customer. If you have the information about supplier lead times then you would have the flexibility to put availability information onto your website and even to have product lines on your site that you don't generally stock. You could put that they are ordered in specially, or just put that they are "despatched in x days"

That might be getting to a level of functionality and complexity that you're not interested in. I'm just really trying to emphasise just how much information your eCommerce system potentially could provide to you.

sorry to go on so long.. I hope that helps.

 

[Spudded]

Thanks for the advice.

My company retails sterling silver jewellery.

I think I may bring out a large range of ballet jewellery for example and exhaust promoting these then add a new horse range and do the same again.

I can get over 10,000 different designs, covering 250 topics. So my point was do I get one charm in each range or get 20 different designs in one range?

 

[pricegunlabels]

Hi,

To add to PieterDyson's post I'd say if you're going to have huge quantities of items on there it can get unwieldy but try and get as much information about each product on the website as you can. This will not only help with search optimisation but help your customers.

Also try not to repeat the same text, as hard as this may be, as search engines such as Google, etc, don't like this.

The more products the better though as the more pages you have will increase your websites presence on the internet.

 

[MrsF]

As I mentioned earlier it's very frustrating when a product is just "out of stock". Unless I needed something really urgently I don't mind ordering a product that is listed as 'depsatched in 2 days' or similar. It's the information I want. "Out of Stock" is just not good enough for me as a customer.

Having enough stock is good as you need to get it despatched asap to keep the customer happy, there is nothing worse than having to wait once you've bought something IMHO. Does your website have a facility so that if something is out of stock it automatically is removed from the site? With so many items you will need a good back-end stock control system in place.

Get in touch with the wholesalers or go to Jewellery shows, the reps are usually full of decent advice on what to stock. Bear in mind the cost of it all though and make sure it is insured!

 

Thanks for the advice.

My company retails sterling silver jewellery.

I think I may bring out a large range of ballet jewellery for example and exhaust promoting these then add a new horse range and do the same again.

I can get over 10,000 different designs, covering 250 topics. So my point was do I get one charm in each range or get 20 different designs in one range?

It's your choice really .. a whole range might be easier to market as a package but you will be limiting your potential customer base whereas lots of different topics on your website will attract different sorts of customers who themselves might come looking for one thing but then be attracted to something else.

What I would say as I mentioned before is that I would avoid having 250 categories each with only a couple of items in .. Try having fewer but broader categorise, like "sport" rather than "football", "tennis","cycling" etc etc, or "animals" rather than "cats","dogs", "horses" etc... it makes your site look fuller, and it doesn't affect customers' experience - you don't necessarily need a category called horse as long as your product descriptions are good enough that when someone does a search for horse any horse related products will come up.

Hope that helps .. and (because I forgot to say last time) good luck!!