Introduce your business and tell us your story: How did you decide on what to sell, and how did you source your products?
We’ve been working in creative marketing and branding for more than 20 years, and we were increasingly being asked by clients to develop brand names that had a perfect .com domain. We realised that the vast majority of startups really struggle to find a good business name with a domain that didn’t rely on awkward compromises. Although there are countless domain sellers out there, we couldn’t find anyone who seemed to take branding as a start-point. The names that were available to buy were mostly bizarre creations that had no realistic potential as brand names for real businesses. So we decided to fill the gap ourselves. We make the naming process less painful for startups by providing a pragmatic and straightforward branding solution that is more like a retail experience than an agency experience. We have a real advantage here. Because we’re experienced branding creatives, we develop all of the business names on our store ourselves and design all of the logos, too.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
We’ve run a limited amount of pay-per-click Google advertising since we launched, and our first sales came from that. About 50% of our traffic still comes from pay-per-click advertising, but we are active on Twitter and do a lot of writing for business publications and blogs, so nearly 30% comes from referrals. The rest comes from our email campaigns and from natural, organic search. We’ve made sale though all of these channels.
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 some online SEO tools, which give us some great insights which are helping us to slowly increase our traffic. We’ve installed the MailChimp and Modify Promotional Lightbox apps which helps to gain subscribers to our regular emails. We’ve also just installed Tidio Chat to add a live chat function to the site which is already proving useful. Needless to say, the Shopify app is invaluable, and gives us easy access and control over all parts of our store, wherever we are. Our business model means that we don’t have a physical product to deliver. When a customer purchases a business name from us, we send them a unique code which allows for the transfer of the .com domain from us, to them. We also email them a full set of logos in a range of digital formats. So all fulfilment is handled by email!
What are your top recommendations for new store owners?
We’re improving our site all of the time, and we’re getting better at managing the site and driving traffic to it. So we’d say that best thing to do is to get up and running with a good product or service - then start making it better. Don’t wait until everything is perfect. Shopify is great for this, because from day one, everything works and looks great. We’d also say that Shopify isn’t just for retail businesses! I think we’re proving that it’s also great as a business-to-business platform, too!