How do I keep an online business steadily growing?

[cloudpow]

Hello everyone. I own an online business that has been around since 2009. Right now, we have over 1,000 items in our stock. However, this has always been a very slow-going business, with things picking up during the holidays.

Do you guys have any advice on how to keep it going strong even after the holidays? We sell bath and body products as well as clothing accessories with a small jewelry section. Our business is also strong in social media with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

Our main goal is to have consistent business with the customers (all the while increasing the incoming revenue) and stepping away from the rest of the year being slow-moving.

[Harold Mansfield]

Have the best website, sell great products, have great customer service, build and communicate with your base via newsletters, and spend money efficiently on ads.

[billbenson]

Harold covered it pretty well although how each of those things may be done differently for different types of business products. You have a lot of stuff in inventory. Is that really necessary during other parts of the year or can you use a fulfillment company? Could you slowly move your company to a more upscale product line with higher margins?

It sounds like you business is primarily B2C. My personal opinion is B2B is more profitable and orders are more consistent throughout the year. Again that is going to be product dependent.

Who are you buying your products from. Manufacturers, master distributors, distributors or wholesalers? The further up the food chain you can move up the better off you will be.

It sounds like you are doing very well. It also sounds like you should bring in a VERY GOOD management consultant to streamline your business processes. It may take more than one with different business specialties.

[vangogh]

Welcome to the forum cloudpow. I'm assuming by holidays you mean the coming season. Could you promote your products at other holidays throughout the year? I'm thinking Valentine's Day and Mother's Day would work well. It's not the full year, but it's beyond the one set of holidays were' heading into now.

Otherwise it really is about making connections with people. On your current checkout form do you offer a way for people to stay informed about future sales and things like that? Maybe a checkbox that for anyone who wants to be contacted. Most people probably won't check it, but some probably will. It's a way to stay in touch and build an email list where you can send newsletters and special offers. Just be upfront about what you'll be sending people before they check the checkbox.

Could you post a link to your site (or better add a signature to your forum profile with a link) so we could see the products? That might help generate some ideas.

Do you know if most of your purchases now are gifts or is the buyer the ultimate user of the products? Do the billing and shipping addresses match or are they more often different? Do you offer to wrap items marked as gifts? If it's more gifts it would seem reasonable to expand into other holidays. If it's more people buying for themselves, I'd probably look to offering more specials to people who sign up for the mailing list.

Do you offer the ability for customers to create wishlists? Do you show related products or customers who bought X bought Y? All the typical things you see on shopping carts?

What's your particular story? Why should someone specifically buy from you as opposed to other businesses selling similar products? Do you make it clear why you? If not how could you do it?

Hope something in there helps.

[shrinkme]

It's usually easier to work with the seasons rather than against them. Make sure to stock up ahead of the fall, reduce your inventory ahead of the decline in business. Drop ship anything you can during the slow time.

To continue to grow, you must add items and content to your web site. You need to add eyeballs. Keep following up with your existing customers.

[HooktoWin]

Hello everyone. I own an online business that has been around since 2009. Right now, we have over 1,000 items in our stock. However, this has always been a very slow-going business, with things picking up during the holidays.

Do you guys have any advice on how to keep it going strong even after the holidays? We sell bath and body products as well as clothing accessories with a small jewelry section. Our business is also strong in social media with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

Our main goal is to have consistent business with the customers (all the while increasing the incoming revenue) and stepping away from the rest of the year being slow-moving.


Hi Cloudpow, As you've seen there are lots of things you can (and should) do. The question is where do you start?
If you're looking for quick wins and fast momentum here are a few things you can do.


Frustrate your customers (https://blog.kissmetrics.com/frustrate-your-customers/) (I elaborate more on that in the article). Identify their "big" problems and bring them up.
Present your solution once they understand the problem. A solution without a problem is an annoyance.
Get them to consume the products they buy from you. The more they use your product the more they'll buy.


Customers have problems they want fixed. And every product they buy introduces new problems. When it's done well, upsells are simple, and effective.
The problems are there, even if your products are an impulse buy (if they are, you'll need to rely more on emotion).

You can do it! :)

[SmallBizOrg]

I am not an online retail expert but here are just a few thoughts, perhaps you will find some things to think about...

Sales are driven by your marketing efforts, not sure how familiar you are with the classic 4 Ps of marketing (product, price, promotion, place).... YOU need to make decisions on all these 4 dimensions:

Products - find and focus on the products that sell the best and that give you the best margins
Price - if your clients are price sensitive, offer discounts to gain market share, alternatively for the high end products where price is not an issue increase the prices
Promotion - decide what are the best ways to promote your products (where to advertise, where do you get the best ROI for your advertising dollars? if you offer discounts (which are another form of promotion) do you get more profit overall? can you offer samples or coupons for future sales?). You can find lists of different promotion methods if you search online, we have put together a fairly comprehensive list on our website as well.
Place - is it worth perhaps to focus on a particular market, say your city or your state and spend all your marketing dollars there (ads in local papers, local google ads etc) or you get better bang for the buck if you advertise nationwide.

By now you probably know what works best and what doesn't as far as your marketing goes. If there are any profitable marketing methods that work for you you can just do more of those.

You can potentially look at your margins and costs and compare them with other online retailers and see what are they doing differently, maybe you need to spend more on marketing and/or maybe you need to increase the prices to have more marketing dollars available.

If you do not have some marketing methods that are scalable and that give you positive ROI perhaps you need to step back and look for some new promotion ideas to try. In marketing, it is important to track each method, see how much you spend and how much you make so you can stop spending money on methods that don't work and spend more of the ones that work best. And there is no right answer, there is a lot of trial and error, what works for somebody else may not work for you.

And lastly, in business in general, there are 2 ways to be successful:
1) through differentiation, offer something new, hot, unique where you can jack-up the margins (think Apple) - this involves innovating or
2) be a cost leader which will allow you to offer best prices (think Walmart, Amazon) - this involves having very streamlined and efficient management and business processes.

Hope this helps.

[zetajenn]

We offer discounts after the holidays to boost sales. And anytime during the year that is usually slow for us. We actively use social media to promote our items and offer discount codes. We also schedule pictures to be posted of different items on our social media to keep our products in our customer's minds!

[billbenson]

I'd actually start another website with a different non seasonal product. Ideally someone who can drop ship for you. Personally I like expensive niche products with a good margin. Something you can sell a few of to make up the gap.