Newbie to Business HELP!

[GooGaaGoo]

Hi all,

Let me tell you a little about me and my new site....Ok I'm Gemma and I'm 25 married to my hubby for 18months now, we have two children a girl and boy. So amongst juggling a 3 year old and a 1year old, I had the insane idea of setting up my own business, so GooGaaGoo was born!!

I found a few toy stockist that aren't well know to the "major" stores, but there aren't a huge amount and i'm using 3 at the moment so need to expand that area! Any ideas??

My other question is...site traffic? How do i increase it? I've done a few market stalls but it was worse than pulling teeth, don't get me wrong I enjoyed every minute of it but i don't think the market is the best place for me!

I also have registered with search engines, and i have been handing out leaflets in town and through pre-schools, how else can i promote my online business?!

My hubby has done all of the web design and is currently incorporating a shopping cart - which he's doing at the moment!

Many Thanks

Gemma
GooGaaGoo

 

[GooGaaGoo]

Anyone please??

 

[baby&kids]

Hi Gemma,

Welcome. Congratulations on starting up your own business. What is the website?

I'm no expert but perhaps you can do reciprocal links with other family websites?

Online, search engine can take a while and bit of money to get up the ranking page.

You need to keep your site fresh with lots of relevant content for search engine friendly.

Make sure you have good keywords, description in your code.

How about drop-shipping?

Visit other business mummy forum.

Leaflet in your local schools/nursery is a good start.

Where abouts are you?


All the best

 

[GooGaaGoo]

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to reply....

My website is www . googaagoo . co . uk (won't let me post an actual link yet)

Thanks for the information, I am currently looking into some more products, and dropshipping - typically many distributors are only dropshipping the larger products which is fine for me and space but it would be useful for them to have smaller products on dropship!!

I'm based in dorset and fortunately a member of my daughter's pre-school commitee (well i'm chair) so manage to organise some fundraisers which include me and my business!!

I am currently sorting some events at toddler groups and pre-schools, and awaiting delivery of catalogues and order forms.

Thanks again

Gemma

 

[cycloneuk]

You need to work on seo to increase your search engine rankings, without seo you will be very lucky to get much traffic, and little traffic equals little sales. You could consider using Google Adwords for now to get some sales in, but even that requires some skill to get right or you end up flushing money away, takes on average around 4-6 months to begin getting steady traffic from Google.

 

[MyAccountantOnline]

First of all I must wish you good luck in your new venture.

You'll find people on here who can help with marketing and websites much better than I can.

I would most definitely use your local contacts - other Mums, schools etc.

If you need any accounting and taxation advice just ask - you are welcome to PM me. I am an accountant based in Wiltshire covering mainly Wiltshire and Dorset and assist many business start-ups.

 

[Bathead]

The first thing that is a major issue with your site is that I can't find a landline telephone number or an address. I would not give you my money without that at least.

 

[MyAccountantOnline]

The first thing that is a major issue with your site is that I can't find a landline telephone number or an address. I would not give you my money without that at least.

Yes I've just looked at the site and agree.

Its a great looking site but you need a contact number and address. If you dont want to use your home maybe look at a PO box address and you can easily get another landline at home for the business.

 

[Bathead]

Yes I've just looked at the site and agree.

Its a great looking site but you need a contact number and address. If you dont want to use your home maybe look at a PO box address and you can easily get another landline at home for the business.

Even a virtual business address. For the phone have a look at voipfone - cjd is a member here, the cost is pennies for a simple solution.

 

[The Topcopy]

Absolutely agree about the telephone number and address - there is no way I would buy without either of those two. The contact us button should be far more prominent too.

In fact, you really need an 'About Us' page telling the reader about you and your husband, why you set up the business etc, with photographs. If people feel like they know you, they will trust you and therefore buy from you. You do give some good info on the homepage about your products etc, but re-iterating these points and more on an About Us page will help.

You should also specify p&p before people put the item into the cart.

Overall though, I like the site design, it's clear, bright and colourful. I love the site name!

 

[Jeremy08]

i signed up to 1&1

purchased a domain and hosting, got a yearly deal for a good price

the key thing i received was all these tools to help promote my site and drive traffic, it's all included in the package. Maybe it's something you can tell your husband and he can look into?

I never done this, but its something i plan to do, which is to target an email out to potential customers.

You can buy data of contacts and do an email out to them, if the email is interesting they might click through and visit your site, best of all you can suggest the criteria of the data you need

Worth a shot..there are also other things such as creating a banner and promoting yourself in other sites, emagazines

 

[GooGaaGoo]

Thanks again for all this valuable information!

As we speak my husband is working on a contact page with our home number and address, and also an about us page. He's changing it all around at the moment, on the plus side i'm in the process of ordering some new stock!!

He's going to work on the adwords as well need to update things and change words apparently! I'm working on some product idea's to sell multiple items as a pack for different items!

I know i've missed this Christmas but hoping that we can get going for next year!

Thanks Jeremy will check his emails as we're using 1&1 as well, realised that after you mentioned it, also the shopping cart facility have sent some tools and spent an hour on the phone talking to Dave this afternoon - not about shopping carts but about general business and how to promote it - how random, they didn't try and sell the product to him at all! He initially rang to see about the gateways they use and it's either standard paypal or payments pro and we currently have payments standard whihc is all we need but it looks like we might have to upgrade to paypal payments pro?!

Enough rambling from me! - Can you tell how naive i am to business!

 

[Rainbow Chasers']

I agree with the About Us section. You do need to market yourself as a small family run business. It takes you out of the multi national appearance into a far more comfortable family scenario, which is who you are selling to. It's just giving people an idea that you would give a more personable service, and are effectively 'one of them'.

As for payment system, get a merchant account with abbey or alliance as they have free banking for business, then use a card machine such as handepay. I find this is more guaranteed than anything run by ebay! It seems that paypal are getting scammed by the ruthless ordering things and claiming it was damaged, paypal seem to return the money and ask questions later!

Had a few problems myself with them like that, cost over a thousand in lost goods and revenue. The charges for them are quite high also, and the helpline is a premium rate one - if you are selling alot the chances of you needing that helpline are high.

Far better running with a machine to start with, keeps it simple, cuts the middle man out and is far more secure. Thats my opinion anyway! I am sure there are those that will disagree - but research it first, see who are happy with paypal and who aren't.

 

[sysops]

As for payment system, get a merchant account with abbey or alliance as they have free banking for business, then use a card machine such as handepay. I find this is more guaranteed than anything run by ebay!
...
Far better running with a machine to start with, keeps it simple, cuts the middle man out and is far more secure. Thats my opinion anyway!

This advice is irresponsible and quite stupid. The worst thing you can do as far as online payments go is save the CC details and key them in manually.

You can do this while complying with PCI, but it's a *huge* amount of work (and I'm willing to be 100% of people who do it don't comply with PCI anyway).

If you are taking payment online, the credit card transaction should be carried out online. It's that simple.

 

[cjd]

Hi Gemma and welcome,

As others have said you must have proper contact details, it's a confidence thing; why would anyone give their credit card details to someone who doesn't have an address and telephone number?

To those of us here, it also shouts "start-up".

Apart from that it's a legal requirement to show them - see:
http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/business_leaflets/general/oft698.pdf

(You don't necessarily have to show a telephone number but if you don't customers ask themselves why).

But this is the hard part, I can't see any reason how anyone will find you on the internet, and if they do, I can't see any reason why they would buy from you.

There are a million web sites in the UK set-up by mothers (and fathers) with young children. They think it is something that they can do from home whilst looking after their children and they think that they have unique knowledge because they have young children.

They can't and they don't - it's a massively competive and seasonal market run by people that have been doing it for many years. Unless you have something unique, that is also newsworthy there's simply no way you can make a go of it. Particularly just retailing 30 or so of other people's products.

I'm sorry if this seems harsh and I'd love to sell you a telephone number - but I've seen this too many times not to give you an honest opinion.

Have a word with Hedgehog Toys - he's been there and done that.

 

[Rainbow Chasers']

Point taken- you are right! It's just the way i do things, i contact them and take payment manually as i am dealing with larger sums.

But yes it would be a little impractical with smaller value items. I still say that online payment should always be researched first for security reasons, and also many do not like or allow commercial use.

 

[sysops]

I'm sorry if this seems harsh and I'd love to sell you a telephone number - but I've seen this too many times not to give you an honest opinion.

CJD - you are of course 100% correct on this, but I've given up telling it how it is to new online shops, because I just get called mean and unhelpful.

So stop being mean!

 

[cjd]

CJD - you are of course 100% correct on this, but I've given up telling it how it is to new online shops, because I just get called mean and unhelpful.

So stop being mean!

Pah! As you know, if people are thinking about the ship's colour scheme whilst the radar is reporting an iceberg dead ahead, they're rather missing the point.

I - like you - reckon it's the purpose of this forum to point out occasionally that the king may have no clothes and that the sea is cold - regardless of how painful.

But there is a valid question about how it's done.

(Sorry Gemma, that was an insider discussion - regardless, we do all wish you luck).

 

[chiggs]

you can put your website in your profile so we can find your site easier. I agree about an 'about us' page , I like to see one on a site, an address and phone number is a must for me to purchase from a site, and I also like to see postage rates so there are no nasty suprises at checkout

you may want to have a look at a site called MumsClub there's lots of info on there about starting and running a business from home, there's a wahm forum there too which I'm sure will give you ideas about how to progress your business.

 

[kencai88]

Hello GemmaThis is Ken from China.Would you like to do your business with China? If yes,please contact me,Thank you!