Ecommerce Jewelry Business
Running an commerce jewelry business requires a lot more than a good website design, a great inventory and a fantastic advertising campaign. All those things are essential, of course, but there’s a lot more that underpins a truly successful jewelry enterprise.
There are many routes into jewelry ecommerce. For designers and craftspeople it can be about creating a showcase for their pieces. For entrepreneurs it is often a way to combine their more creative aspects with a solid ecommerce activity. For B2B sellers, jewelry ecommerce can offer a global marketplace for a specialist or niche product line.
Jewelry ecommerce is also attractive because it’s a business that can be established on a relatively low budget compared to big ticket retailing like cars or electronic goods. There’s also scope to establish an ecommerce jewelry business with a lower cost product, develop turnover and move into more expensive pieces as the business establishes itself. This route requires a real understanding of the marketplace and the ability to enter it at a level that gives you the scope to grow your business organically into the position you’re aiming for without losing your original customer base along the way.
Be ready to succeed
In the USA alone, fine jewelry sales increased by 6% in 2017. The market is predicted to continue to grow, year on year, until at least 2235 and some global events that are depressing other sectors (Brexit, Chinese expansion into manufacturing etc) are actually fuelling growth in jewelry. But it’s not a free ride. For a jewelry business to succeed, it needs to have a clear mission statement - a way of describing the purpose of the business, setting priorities, defining a broad customer base and identifying what will make you stand out from the competition.
This activity isn’t in any way a waste of time - while you may be keen to get on with running your business, having a clear picture of what makes you different from others, who your key competitors are and which brand messages you won’t compromise on will give you a more rapid and effective penetration into the jewelry sector. Not only that, it allows you to build on profitable lines, by giving you clarity about what is unique and valuable about your offering and how to capitalize on early success to increase your share of a competitive business.
It’s also valuable because it gives you the scope to ensure you have launched a business online that will hold your interest and continue to challenge and fulfil you. Everything from the selection of the jewelry pieces you will sell through to your packaging and delivery options will not only reveal the nature of your organization but it will also either thrill and engage you or bore you. If you start a business that bores you, it’s unlikely to get the time and attention it needs to succeed, so a proper mission statement helps you be sure that you’re going to find this business exciting as well as financially rewarding.
Remember the mantra: unique, commercial, affordable
These three elements must combine if you are to create a sustainable online jewelry business.
Unique products are important, but perhaps it’s not the product that needs to be unique - perhaps your storefront is going to be the unique aspect of your business? This approach works well for specialist sites such as resellers and enthusiast retailers; where a jewelry venture sells a small range of highly collectible items (often second-hand) along with their provenance and a few quirky facts. This niche, like the market in old tour T-shirts and collectible comics, is fuelled by information and geekdom, and customers often prefer to buy from sites that have high credibility and may both buy and sell back items throughout the course of their lifetime.
Commercial products are those that move with relative ease. While your enterprise might have a blend of commercial and high ticket items, it’s unlikely to succeed purely on high ticket sales unless you’re able to support cash-flow from other sources. This means that you may see your site as a pyramid, with three or four high ticket pieces being supported by twenty or thirty investment pieces and hundreds or thousands of commercially attractive items. Balancing the commercial appeal of your jewelry offerings gives you a great blend of lots of small purchases alongside a few really big ones.
Affordable products will vary depending on your target clientele. Affordable does not necessarily mean cheap! An affordable Ferrari costs four times more than a top-of-the-range Citroen, but your Ferrari buyer doesn’t care. He or she doesn’t want four cheap cars, just one affordable one. Pitching your ecommerce at the level of your ideal customer means defining affordability for them, not for the general population. That might mean that you sell necklaces for a dollar or for a thousand dollars - it doesn’t matter as long as you’ve done your market research to be sure your target market exists and your site is designed to appeal to them.
Market your business
One key mistake that people often make with an commerce jewelry business is that they end up marketing their products, not their business. Selling jewelry online is much more than just putting together a slick website, it’s about developing an online brand that potential customers find attractive and memorable. Becoming a presence, rather than a website, requires you to market your business online. The basic tasks you need to undertake are to optimize your website for Search Engines, to establish an advertising campaign that converts click-throughs to purchases and to consider referral marketing as a route to success. More nuanced approaches to marketing are:
- Creating a blog that is so compelling people want to follow it.
- Using email marketing to alert past customers to offer they can’t resist.
- Offering video tutorials on YouTube (for example how to wear, clean and store your jewelry products).
Managing inventory for your online jewelry store
Knowing that your inventory is up-to-date is essential. Where suppliers offer a live inventory feed, it’s important to be able to use it to update your real-time inventory. That means you need to be working with software that you can schedule to synchronize their inventory feed with your shop front. Similarly if your ecommerce jewelry business works B2B, it’s good to have software that shares inventory feeds to your outlets so they have fingertip information about what you can supply to them. SCE offers seamless inventory management to give your ecommerce venture instant insight into what sells and what doesn’t and also ensures your customers are never disappointed by something they want being out of stock.
Stay close
Staying in contact is vital - whether it involves updating them on special offers or seasonal deals, or mentioning that a favorite designer has won an award or is featured on social media. Building relationships is part of running a successful business. Keep close to your suppliers too - you want to be aware of changes in their business, good or bad, that might impact the way your ecommerce jewelry business operates.
Maintaining a omnichannel ecommerce jewelry business
Jewelry is a great business to be in because it’s universal. There isn’t a platform, or channel in the world that isn’t appropriate for some kind of jewelry, no matter how niche, so it’s vital to be able to sell on the maximum number of platforms. Shopping Cart Elite is able to handle: Ebay, Amazon, Walmart, Jet, Become, Bing Shopping, Google Shopping, Google Shopping Local, Nextag, Pricegrabber, Pronto, Shopping, Shopzilla, Smarter, Etsy, Houzz, Newegg, Overstock, PriceFalls and Rakuten. With this unparalleled range of platform support, SCE clients benefit from access to every possible shopping channel without having to invest in complex add-ons or adapt bespoke websites.
Never forget the competition
To really stay on top of your business, you need to be aware of what’s going on around you. Isolating yourself from your rivals just gives them every opportunity to learn from you while you’re failing to learn from them. For example you can often learn from mistakes made by competitors without having to go through the costly process of making that mistake yourself and a regal examination of their price points and marketing will show you what strategies they are using to attract customers. This helps you distinguish your business from the herd and still gives you insight into the behaviour of the market in general.