Increased sales after Trusted Shops accreditation – Interview with e-z buy.com

What started with selling imported grandfathers clocks on eBay has now developed into an appealing online-shop run by Mr. Anderton and his family. As e-z buy is a family run business customers always get to speak to one of the directors in case of an inquiry. The shop offers a big variety of products, full support and a professional service.

Mr. Anderson from e-z buy talks about his experience as an e-retailer.

What is the idea behind your online store?
The idea behind our online store is to offer our past and present customers a more professional and easy shopping alternative to our age old eBay store.  On top of this we wanted the option of keep our loyal customers coming back for more so we needed a site which could handle offering discounts to our Loyal Registered Customers.

Why did you decide to start an e-commerce business?
Our Small Family Run Business initially started up in 1999 as an Engineering Parts Sourcing Company.  Basically, customers would come to us with a drawing for a Metal Casting and we would have it produced by one of our numerous suppliers in China. As you can imagine this involved many trips/meetings in China which opened our eyes to many, many other products.

The very first thing that caught our eye was a Terrific Grandfather Clock which stood almost 7 feet high!  We thought what the heck if you don’t take the risk we’ll never know.  So we went ahead and ordered a 20’ Container of 2 different models of Grandfather Clocks without thinking how we would sell them. We thought we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it!  Anyway, it took us nearly 3 years to sell them! We tried all sorts of ways, advertising in magazines, local auctions, leaflet drops and then we hit on an online Auction. But even on there things where extremely slow until one Lady in the South of Wales purchased one. As we were setting the clock up for her in her home when she just happened to mention “why do you not sell them on eBay”? To be honest we never really used or heard of eBay…. yes I know what you’re thinking but its true. Within months we had sold out and had enquires for more and more. All thanks to the Lady In Wales.

Since then we have moved into many other products, good products bad products, of all kinds. All of which where being sold on eBay. Now we have tried to settle to what we know best we have my Father who specialises in Clocks and Furniture, me who specialises is anything Electrical or Mechanical and then there’s my Wife who like any other woman is an Expert on anything that sparkles! Now we don’t sell just anything we sell products that we understood and we have a great knowledge of. In this way we can give our customer full support and a professional service.

As any business we wanted to grow, wanted more sales and reduced cost so we decided to try and move away from eBay due to the fees and started looking at web stores. While still selling on eBay we found a small cheap web store which we could offer up to 20 items. We opened the store and basically sold next to nothing over a period of about 12 months we also had nothing but trouble with it. So we closed the shop and continued to use eBay.

As many of you may know lots of things have changed recently on eBay one of them being there fees! Due to this we decided to find another Web Store, a better quality one than we’d previously had and hopefully something that could integrate with eBay and other shopping channels. We found BT Trader Pack Shop which is hosted by ePages. We registered back in August 2008 but due to the lack of time we really only got our store up and running early this year 2009.
We where getting the odd sale here and there but still not what we expected.  While setting the store up we had noticed the setup for Trusted Shops but at the time this didn’t seem very important to us. A couple of months later and still with low sales we decided to look more into the Trusted Shops Seal to see if this would improve our sales because we where getting the hits but not the sales. Since this time we are getting much more sales and much more enquires so we think it’s been a worthwhile exercise.

Could you tell us about your professional life before you started your online store?
I’m a full trained Motor Vehicle Technician with a Distinction In Micro-Processing and Electronics in Motor Vehicles. My father is a Fully Trained Engineer who has work for Large Multi National Companies. My wife has always been a Secretary and her specialist interests are Jewellery.

Do you work full-time or part-time for your online business?
Me & My father work Full Time, My Wife and Mother are part timers. 4 in Total

Where are your customers located?
Majority of our sales are to UK customer but we do get a few sales every month to EU Countries and some times the USA. We would like to increase our sales to EU customers due to the strength of the Euro but our web store can’t currently handle it.

Which shop-system are you currently using?
We use a BT Web Shop provided by ePages. Its template based but I designed and implemented everything in the store.

Which payment systems does your Shop offer?
We currently Offer PayPal and Google Checkout but today I’m filling out the application form for Sage Pay… Formally Protex. This will allow us to take mail order/telephone sales.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
We only have a warehouse, most high street stores have a warehouse a shop front and mountains of staff. We are a small family run business which have to make sure product are right and customers are very happy.  If we don’t we stand to loose our business. Unlike high street stores if a problem arises you are speaking to a company Director not just a paid employee who most of the time just turns up to work to get paid. You are speaking to the highest authority within a business and it’s us the Directors who make the final decisions. You don’t get passed around/fobbed off you get results, positive results, results which keep our customers happy and hopefully coming back for more.

Do you also run a high street store?
No, no high street store.

Does your store have any special features or functions?
Email Marketing, Cross Promotion, Product Recommendations, and User Accounts where the customer can track their orders and also store their information. We are currently looking at offering a 5% discount to all registered customers.

What measures have you taken to increase consumer confidence?
Applied the Trusted Shops Seal of Approval. Also everything which we send out is opened check and repacked to ensure it leaves us in perfect condition.

What did you do to increase the visibility of your shop?
I submit a data feeds weekly to Google Shopping and also advertise with Google Adwords. We are currently looking into other shopping comparison sites. We also send flyers out with every eBay sale.

Are you using web 2.0 approaches for your online business?
I’m not 100% sure what Web 2.0 is, I have read something about it on another site which offers ecommerce sites. I think it may be soothing to do with Search Engine Friendly Sites.  Sites which have a Page for every Product instead of dynamically producing a page when the product is called.

Which recommendations would you give to other e-tailers?
To invest in a good system early on which can handle multi channel selling from one inventory point and can handle Shopping Channel submission automatically. Also have a good brad a brand which will be recognisable from any of the shopping channels they find you on.

What are you currently working on?
As above. We want to implement a system which will handle multichannel shopping from one central inventory. We want to direct more sales to our web store rather than on eBay.  Also we want to introduce more products.

What is your favourite online-shop as a consumer?
I think that would have to be Play.com because I have used this more than any other.