One thing we’ve always been cautious about is how to present the brand and items to the customer upon delivery. Do customers really care how an item is delivered? Does it need to be bagged, boxed and tied?

We recently ran a prize draw where people signed up to win a Swarovski Pearl Jewelery Set. The prize draw went well with hundreds of subscribers. We picked a winner and sent out an email to confirm some personal details before sending the item out.

A few days later, we emailed the winner to make sure they had received the item and that everything was O.K.

Feedback before we asked…

The winner said everything was present and correct with the item and that she couldn’t wait for an occasion to wear it. The winner then offered one piece of advice/feedback.

The item which the winner received was delivered in a gold box, inside of a padded envelope. The box plus the envelope apparently didn’t do the item any justice and the winner was kind enough to say that it should be changed.

Now for us, it isn’t really a problem as we have a minimal amount of the ‘gold boxes’ and were going to change them before the first item was sold on the Eliot Turner website.

Presentation is everything!

We’ve learned an important lesson before the store was up and running. We need to think more clearly about how we present our stock to the consumer, at least we know we’re on the right track with the stock!

Competitor analysis involves learning more about the businesses that function around the same target demographic as you enabling you to assess their strengths and weaknesses whilst identifying opportunities and threats to your own business.

Often businesses become obsessed with competitor analysis whilst others can ignore what their competitors are doing completely. A healthy medium would be to track competition, react to changes but focus on your own plans.  After identifying the main competition in the market, it is useful to recognize the threats they pose, their company objectives and strategies and their weaknesses, this can only add to the strength of your own business.

It is useful to create a competitor profile for each of your competitors as it enables you to gather all relevant information in one place allowing you to formulate an effective strategy to implement, monitor and adjust where needed. Competitor profiles include their background, financials, products, marketing, facilities, personnel and corporate and marketing strategies. Knowing your competition’s planned strategies allows you to plan a response through your own strategy whilst at the same time revealing strategic weaknesses.

We have identified accessorize as the main market leader for this type of jewellery, however there are many that sell handmade jewellery offering similar products to Eliot Turner that are certainly market competition.

Here are the ones I have identified as the biggest competition:

The Spotty Dog Shop

Lisa's Handmade Jewellery

FarFallina

Purple Label

Pia Jewellery

Silver Wire Designs

We plan to create competitor profiles for our competition; however, we do not want to concentrate too much on what our competition is doing instead focusing our time and energy on our own plans.

On Monday 29th June, Justin and I spoke at the SuperMondays event held at Newcastle University about the eCommerce experiment to a crowd of approximately 40 people. Thanks to Ross Cooney for inviting us to take part.

I am Alex Irwin!

I am currently working for Carrot Media as part of an eight week work placement set up by Shell Step, a placement scheme matching students and graduates with valuable work experience in relevant businesses. After several interviews with other companies, I was excited to read about this company as the project they were offering for a prospective employee was like no other; the eCommerce experiment. At a time when it is getting progressively harder to find a job,  I would have welcomed any placement offered to me, hence why I am so excited to be part of such a unique project that I know I will enjoy.

I have just completed my second year studying Media, Communications & Cultural studies at Newcastle University and I am hoping to gain valuable experience in the media industry from this placement whilst offering my own ideas. Part of the Shell Step scheme is to find a student to be awarded ‘The UK’s most enterprising student’ through consideration of what each student has offered to their host company.

I must admit my knowledge in the field of social media is somewhat limited, however I am hoping my enthusiasm in this project will make up for what I lack in technical ability and those following this blog will agree that it’s hard not to get excited about the project.

Throughout my eight weeks here I will be assisting the team with:

• Market Research to maximise sales
• Advertising the eCommerce experiment
• Social Media sites
• Social Media Marketing
• Blogging the process
• Working with the national and local print media to gain interest
• Building Connections with both suppliers, potential customers and those interested in the project
• Product Buying
• Product Advertising
• PR

I am looking forward to learning from and inputting towards this project!

We’re moving on with the eCommerce experiment and currently putting the design together for the new store. The sneak previews will be shown in the coming week. We just wanted to let everyone know that a new name will be popping up on the blog in the next few weeks.

I had the opportunity to interview a few candidates as part of the ‘Shell Step Programme‘. The Shell Step Programme brings together students and graduates who want to gain valuable experience on real work placements with companies who want an injection of fresh ideas, talent and enthusiasm to inspire and build their business.

The last interview took place last week, and we offered an 8 week placement to ‘Alexandra’ an extremely enthusiastic student from a North East University.

Alexandra will be doing some competitor analysis, social media work, marketing, advertising and generally giving me a hand with the promotion of Eliot Turner.

We will be setting some goals for Alexandra to complete before she leaves and we can’t wait to get her on board.

When we took the decision to setup an online shop/store, it was a pretty daunting thought to have. We looked at the big reasons why we were doing it and what we were going to do, it’s not everyday two guys and then two guys and one girl decide to start selling jewelery online and especially in the middle of a ‘recession’.

First things first – To hell with the recession, we’re now in a time when we can do this and when we do it well, we’ll dominate the marketplace. If you have a product or service which is worthwhile to a customer base you can do what we’re doing as well.

So that’s where the blog came into things. I wanted to give back something back to an extensive amount of readers.

As I’ve said before, time was well against us and to spend time on designing and developing our own blog as well as client work and designing and developing the ecommerce shop was just not feasible.

I’ve personally been using WooThemes for a long time now on my other blogs, and following Adii, Magnus and Marks journey with their web startup and have a lot of respect for the guys. I could have gone elsewhere to grab a theme from places like ThemeForest but none of them perfectly suited the kind of content we were going to be giving away with the eCommerce experiment. Not only that but if we ran into any kind of problems with the theme we were going to choose, I knew that WooThemes customer service is the best there is in my opinion. If you can’t find a solution in their extensive support forum then ask a question and one of the WooNinja’s usually get back to you super quick.

Prior to announcing what the eCommerce experiment was going to be I’d pondered over the idea of which theme to use. Quite literally hours later, Woo announced a forthcoming theme called ‘The Station’. Immediately the theme was the winner. It had everything we wanted. Just recently they’ve upgraded it to add in various other features which will help us when we start adding in video’s (yes they are coming…).

So that’s it, we were woo’d by woo for their awesome customer service, their bullet proof themes and rockin’ designs.

If you look at the most successful online shops in the market place you will see they rely heavily on email marketing. Therefore it’s really important that we build an opt-in email database rapidly. We are going to use quick and simple viral marketing techniques to build the database. Spam is an increasing problem for everyone using email, so it’s incredibly important that the data is gathered in a sensible and ethical way.

We are going to use an online prize draw competition to build interest in the site before launch. We will be giving away a few products and asking people to enter through an online form. The form will have an option to opt into the email distribution list to ensure only the people interest in our products receive the email.

Although we are running a pre-launch competition this is a long term market strategy and we will be running regular giveaways over the next 6 months. We are aiming to build an email marketing database of 10,000 active subscribers over this time frame.

We use what we feel is one of the best distribution systems in the market place which allows us to manage the mailing list to follow anti spam legislation. It will track sales, open rates, clickthroughs, demographics and much more. Most importantly the system will automatically allow people to unsubscribe and cleanse the data when hard bounces occur.

So the million dollar question is, “how do we get people to enter the competition en-mass?”

There are sites on the Internet that spread the word of online competitions. There are professionals who do nothing but enter online competitions and make money from doing so. For us this is very much a safety in numbers exercise of getting a huge number of people to sign up with only a certain percentage actually interested in our shop. Don’t forget that a further percentage of people will not want to be contacted by email and choose to opt out when entering the competition. Once we start sending marketing emails, we will lose further emails from hard bounces and people un-subscribing. Therefore to get 1000 active subscribers after the first email sent we need about 3500 entries per competition.

After 6 months of running the competitions we hope to have built the level of interest significantly to generate constant email sign ups. Our experience at carrotmedia has taught us this is a tried and tested technique which works fantastically for our clients.

Apparently (http://www.asos.com) holds an email list of over 2 1/2 million subscribers and costs per email address as £60. £60 being an average basket size. If you work out the numbers its quite astronomical. I’ll talk more on this in the near future.

Content management within an eCommerce site is often quite difficult to get right. The majority of eCommerce systems either skip over it entirely, or bolt on a poor / cut down CMS as more of an after thought than really planning how to make it work right. Another reason may well be that the developer simply doesn’t have the time to deal with functionality that isn’t always classed as a ‘CORE’ requirement.

A common way of dealing with this is to install a purpose built content management system along side an eCommerce system, but this makes things ultimately more complicated as the systems may differ significantly and no one (client or developer) wants to have to log into two different systems every time they want to change things.

Currently, we have our own content management system and we have our own eCommerce system. When it comes to eCommerce sites we have tried running a CMS alongside an eCommerce system, which didn’t work at all, we’ve tried putting a small ‘bolt-on’ CMS into the eCommerce system, which also didn’t work very well and required a developer to add new pages etc, the client only had a simple content box.

When we redevelop the new system, I intend to integrate a simple, yet effective and reasonably powerful CMS within the system. It will come with features along the lines of the following:

• Ability to add/remove pages and folders
• Ability to add content items to specified pages
• Ability to upload multiple images/files etc and link to them from the content.
• Will have set xhtml templates based on the design of the ecommerce site, that will be set by the developer and then the client can use them.
• Set up sections within the templates that can be edited by the user.
• Will use the same CSS as the site, but can be edited by the admin.

By working to integrate this from the start, it should make things a lot simpler.

We’re moving on quickly behind the scenes at eCommerce experiment (we’re back at the bank tomorrow) and the posts will be quickly gathering pace over the coming weeks so I’d better let you in on some vital information!

We do name generation processes for new start-ups at carrotmedia so when it came to developing the name for the handmade jewellery shop we thought it would be an easy process. How wrong we were! As always when you come to doing something for yourself you’re always in two minds of how you’re going to approach something, which angle you’re going to focus on and what would appeal to your target market.

We thought about quirky names but quickly dismissed them. There are not many large jewellery shops online and the few that are there have been around for a long time, the upper market consists of Tiffany’s, Ernst Jones, Beaverbrooks and Goldsmiths within the UK. (Feedback on outside of the UK more than welcome.)

We wanted a few things out of our company name;

• To be memorable
• To be respected
• Can age well
• Brandable

We chatted about names for a while and came up with Turner Elliott, we quickly changed this round to Elliott Turner and then slept on it until I personally changed it to Eliot Turner. The name came from combining surnames of two of the four directors, Gavin Elliott (a previous director) and Justin Turner.

The reasons for dropping it down to one ‘L’ and one ‘T’ were;

• Elliott is a very strong surname for the first part of the company name
• I wanted to created a “softer” first name

So there it is. Our online shop will be called “Eliot Turner”.

The reasons for starting the ecommerce experiment have already been disclosed by Justin, we lost a client who was offered to go somewhere else. We to this day do not know what was talked about when they were approached or what they were promised and a lot of questions run through your head;

• Were they promised more sales?
• Were they offered a better system?
• Were they cheaper?

All of the questions could be answered if we hunted around enough. Would it help us? Probably not. One thing we’ve noticed over the years of running carrotmedia is that you can never control your competition, they’ll do things when you least expect it and change them back just as fast. We’ve also noticed you have to act for yourself. If you’re good at something believe in yourself and stick to your guns, potential clients will notice and they’ll will reap the benefits.

Beyond all of that you see most people being promised the world when engaging in services with no real backup. There are hundreds if not thousands of websites across the Internet where they will tell you how to make thousands of dollars (pounds) in 20 days if you follow “this simple plan”.

When it comes to ecommerce there is no clear information set out on where to start, how to build, how to sell and how to grow your online shop. Government organisations that offer support and advice pass over sheets of so-called information that are as much use as a pocket in a sock.

Well we’re here to try and change all that. We’re based in the United Kingdom yet we’re blogging about this whole process to the world for everyone to learn from and we’re giving information away for free. We want everyone to be successful and if that means giving away “trade secrets” about marketing, sales tunnels, banking tips, usability, design and checkout procedures then so be it. The information we have at the minute is disposable, we’re going through this process to learn and provide best practices to the public. We’re looking at this being an on-going experiment so when things change and new sales tunnels open up we’ll pass those on and to that end all of the information we have is disposable to you.