Chewbz

www.chewbz.com

Chewbz was launched in October 2008 by Emily Denyer after she had been working for many years in digital agencies handling ecommerce site development and online marketing strategy. The idea for selling a range of retro sweets supplied in gift boxes, jars and hampers came whilst working on a corporate gifting strategy for an online florist business. In this case study Emily talks about her experience of using Actinic ecommerce software.

Up to 2008 ecommerce and online branding had been Emily’s career for ten years, so site design and development felt very natural. Likewise, she had worked with Actinic in the past so it was the obvious platform choice, particularly as she had a limited budget. In fact the majority of her £5,000 start-up costs went on stock and photography.

Chewbz sells approximately 100 lines which range in price from £2.50 to £42.95 with the new “small Tubz” and the original “Chewbz” being its most popular lines.

When Chewbz first launched it used a web design agency Webfaced to help with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). As a result, at launch it saw 2,500 unique visits (UVs) to the site per month without breaking the bank with PPC. Now it averages 28,000, although during promotional months this climbs to 100,000 UVs per month.

Chewbz now employs eight members of staff although this increases by about 300% around busy trading periods like Christmas.

The sweet smell of success

In her own words Emily explains what has contributed to Chewbz's success,

“We blog, write articles, use email marketing and various social media platforms for promotion. One member of the team works specifically in online marketing. Through channels such as Facebook and Twitter it allows us to speak on a different level to Chewbz fans. They see what happens behind the scenes and they feel part of the business. This is important for us as Chewbz is a fun brand and not a faceless corporation. Social media works very well for us because it fits our demographic well and complements our brand and our own approach to communication.

We run weekly competitions to encourage interaction with customers and we reward customers for sharing stories, anecdotes and photos with us.

Ecommerce offers the ability to not only sell online ,but to learn from our customers and further improve our offering; Actinic is central to this.

We also place customer service ahead of everything to ensure that regardless of the stage in the order process a Chewbz customer feels part of a very special group.

Actinic as an ecommerce platform has really enabled our business to grow. We also use Actinic Payments and find The 3rd Man fraud protection has helped us combat fraudulent transactions over the busy trading periods saving us many thousands of pounds in charge-backs.

Webfaced has had a huge impact on the size of our customer database and the amount of buzz our brand creates online.”

In December 2010 Chewbz relaunched its website and upgraded to Actinic Business Plus V10. With assistance from Webfaced the conversion rate went from 3.8% to 10% overnight. It is now taking just over 2,500 orders per month.

What has hampered you?

As with every business, there are challenges and Emily describes hers: “Fulfilment, particularly at peak times is difficult just because of the sheer volume of orders we were taking which is a nice problem to have. As a testament to the flexibility of Actinic we had a system written for us by Webfaced that integrates the software with other systems and provides automated processing and printing of label sheets for pick, pack and postage which has saved hours of admin every day. The system also provides a graphical dashboard of progress to allow us to see how many orders have been taken along with weekly graphs, discount redemptions, etc.” 

Looking ahead

Emily explains what is in store in the future: “As the team grows we will have more time to implement some of the crazy ideas that we had at the start. Likewise, with a growing customer database, high levels of interaction online and a very sharp and well performing site we want to continue on some of the viral ideas we have been joking about for some time!

"We are also about to undertake an integration with Sage 50 Accounts, something that Actinic makes very easy.”

Chewing it over

Emily provides some final words of wisdom from her experience of running a successful ecommerce business.

• Outsource PPC. We appointed an agency because after many years in the industry it is a myth that PPC and SEO can effectively be handled in-house; attention is always taken away by other things!
• Choose a package which gives you huge design flexibility. Having worked for large international digital agencies for so long, I had been used to having full design flexibility but often with a large budget to get what I wanted. Starting a business with limited funds meant an off-the-shelf ecommerce package was my only option and I had concerns that it might restrict my design ideas. However, this was far from the truth. Our site demonstrates how flexible Actinic can be in the hands of a design agency if you want to create a really professional ecommerce site.
• Choose a good web agency. You can’t create a site yourself that will perform anywhere like a professional agency’s creation -- don’t kid yourself! You can waste a lot of time and money on a website that doesn’t work and you can’t afford to compromise.
• Pick the right platform with a proven reputation. We were lucky because our knowledge of the online retailing sector is extremely good. For anyone starting out, whether coming from years of web agency experience or having never used a computer, you need the right tools and we can’t recommend Actinic enough.
• It’s all about the conversions. At the end of the day if your site is converting 5% of traffic, improve it so it converts 6%. Never stop improving the site. At the same time you are increasing your conversion rate, get as much traffic through it as possible.
• Don’t hold back. In everything that you do, do it well from the start. It costs more to hold back and be half-hearted and then have to realise 12 months down the line that you did it wrong.