Introducing #EcomLaunch: Diary of Launching An Ecommerce Business

Hey! Nick here. I’ve been writing for the Sellbrite ecommerce blog for the better part of a year now. However, in my “free time” I also run a successful multi-channel ecommerce business, which naturally inspires a lot of the things I write about on the blog.

Now it’s time for a new twist: I’ve started another ecommerce business, but this time I’m going to take you along on my journey. Over the past few months I’ve been planning and prepping to launch a new site, and I’ve kept a “diary” along the way, so you can see what goes into launching an ecommerce business.

Quick background on me: I sold my first item online at the age of 10, and I’ve loved the concept of ecommerce ever since. Throughout my teenage years I looked for things to buy and sell online, particular on eBay. During university I found a B2B site in Asia where you could buy virtually anything in huge quantities, and that’s how my ecommerce business got started.

My specific areas of expertise are marketing focused; particularly PPC and PR, but I’m fairly savvy in logistics, sourcing, and pricing. I think it’s important to know your stuff when it comes to marketing as an ecommerce website owner; there are too many companies out there who will happily take your money for “marketing” services – but never deliver the goods.

Instead, it made sense for me to learn myself, and ultimately that has allowed me to excel in the world of ecommerce. After all, you can have the best website in the world, but if no one knows it exists and if it gets no traffic, it’s pretty much useless!

Today I mainly sell beauty products. If you’d told me ten years ago that I would be making a living selling beauty products, I would have laughed at you. The simple fact is however, there’s a lot of demand for beauty products in the UK, Europe and worldwide – and there’s an awful lot of money to be made.

My new project

My latest project is a website called NailPolish.co.uk. I already own a website in the beauty niche, and I’ve decided I quite like that particular industry. However to expand my business on my existing website, FalseEyelashes.co.uk, would require having over 600 styles of eyelash in stock. That would be a little overkill.

The best way to expand my business further was to look for a new niche – while keeping FalseEyelashes.co.uk ticking smoothly in the background.

I decided to start a store stocking nail polish for a few reasons:

1. According to the tools I use to estimate demand and market size, the nail polish market is probably 10-20 times bigger than the false eyelash market. That should make the business easy to scale – it’ll take a while before I hit a ceiling where I find growth hard to achieve.
2. Nail polish brands are quite snooty. Procuring genuine stock is extremely difficult – but it can be done. My reckoning is that because stock is so hard to come by, the industry should remain fairly uncompetitive well into the future. Competition is a good thing, of course, but some niches out there are saturated like crazy – nail polish isn’t.
3. I wanted to run another website in the beauty niche so I can explore cross selling between FalseEyelashes.co.uk and NailPolish.co.uk. My other idea was to run a website selling bass fishing supplies – somehow I doubt eyelash wearers would be too receptive to emails about the latest in bass lure technology.
4. Relationships are hard to build in life and in business. A lot of the eyelash brands I work with already have their own nail polish ranges, so it’s a case of killing two birds with one stone (and making my own life just a little bit easier).

In essence, my new project is to launch NailPolish.co.uk and make it the number one online outlet for nail polish. We want to be the “go to” place for people looking to buy nail polish online.

I want to stock a large selection of brands and an even bigger range of colors and shades. My vision is very simple really, but it won’t be easy to realize due to the sheer enormity of the nail polish industry – there are so many brands and tens of thousands of different colors.

What am I going to share with you?

If I’m being totally honest, I’ve not decided exactly what I’m going to share. Of course this is a real business that has cost me tens of thousands of dollars to setup – so I won’t be sharing things like monthly turnover to the dollar, or who my best suppliers are. That said, I think there’s a ton of stuff you will be able take from reading my blog posts and following my journey, here are some of the areas I will be looking at closely:

• A deeper insight into why I chose nail polish
• How I procured stock
• The thought process behind choosing a CMS
• Populating the website
• Putting infrastructure in place to support and sustain the business
• How I plan to market the website on an on-going basis
• Dealing with initial orders
• Ironing out launch bugs and issues
• The on-going maintenance and operation of the website
• How I’m going to achieve growth in terms of traffic and sales

I hope you enjoy reading my #EcomLaunch series as much as I have enjoyed planning it and will continue to enjoy writing it. Sometimes it’s easy to read articles and blog posts written by “experts”, but it’s hard to put into practice the information they offer, because they never reveal their own websites. I want to run this series so you can actively look over my website and see the things I’m doing on the website itself in order to generate traffic and sales. Hopefully, by showing you a real, live example of launching an ecommerce business, you will find the motivation and inspiration to start your own.

I’ll be back in two weeks time with the next post from #EcomLaunch.

Next in the Series: #EcomLaunch 1: Choosing My Niche and Procuring Stock