Knitterly has been a brick and mortar yarn shop in Petaluma, CA for 10 years. We have been trying to launch an e-commerce shop for the past four years on, believe it or not, 2 other e-commerce platforms and 1 other POS systems. It wasn't until shopify, and the functionality of sharing inventory between the shops, that we could successfully do it.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
Our first sales came through reaching out to our current customers via our blog, facebook, and newsletter. For the next 3 months, we focussed on SEO and getting our ducks in a row for each page. Recently we have been running google ads and just this week running google merchant account shopping ads, which are proving to be a giant success.
Tell us about the back-end of your business. What tools and apps do you use to run your store? How do you handle shipping and fulfillment?
We use the powertools app for a side menu filtering system that allows our customers to easily sift through quite a complicated and vast inventory. We get a lot of compliments on how easy it is to navigate our site. We also use an invoice printing app to print out pretty invoices and we have our web sales email our printer, which alerts us when a new order is in.
What are your top recommendations for new ecommerce entrepreneurs?
Do not underestimate how long and how important the inventory task is. Make sure you understand how SEO relates to page content when you are entering your inventory. Save money for advertising and learn all of the google analytics, merchant accounts, adwords, etc. that you can. It's complicated but very effective.