We are Jessica and Hari founders of Lotus Belle USA LTD. We specialise in innovative canvas structures, namely the Lotus Belle tent which is a design Hari came up with as a teenager.
10 years later we went into production and have been going strong for 2 years selling our tents everywhere from the Cook Islands to Abu Dhabi!
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
We have a large social media following of over 40K people, we now link our Facebook page with our website. Most of our traffic comes from Facebook but with our new awesome Shopify website, we are generating more organic searches and people us are finding us easier.
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 now have a link on Facebook which directly links to our store making the transition easy for people.
We use Shipwire to integrate with our store for super easy fulfilment and shipping. We are new to the US market and we're finding Shopify and Shipwire and perfect, allowing us much more time to attend music festivals and events and help promote our tents!
What are your top recommendations for new ecommerce entrepreneurs?
Get good systems in place, if you don't have it well set up well from the get-go you'll face problems. But also see it as a learning curve, you'll find things along the way that can be done better.
Get a web developer who has a good relationship with Shopify and knows the platform inside out. Ben from Cyberworkshop completely sold us on Shopify and has now built 4 Shopify websites for us. When he showed us what could be done, we were hooked!