Polished Bliss

Based in north-east Scotland, Polished Bliss is a small business run by three passionate individuals, husband and wife, Richard & Angela Cooper plus Clark Aitken, who have carved out a niche in the car maintenance sector. In just four years the business has grown from a vision to a very successful specialist car care business turning over £500,000, with growth forecast to £650,000 next year. And the recession has had no impact on their growth, in fact it has probably helped with more owners keeping their cars longer and taking an interest in keeping them looking smart.

This is a multi-channel business but ecommerce (using Actinic software) is key for product sales which bring in 90% of revenue. It supplies a top quality range of 400 car care products (including many exclusive brands), plus offers car detailing (extremely high-end valeting) services for local owners with prestige cars, all backed by free expert advice. The case looks at the secrets of their success that include:

• Unique business model for the sector
• The right customer mix
• Sourcing quality, non-high street products
• Focus on ecommerce to maximise reach in UK and beyond
• Getting marketing right
• Having a team with the perfect combo of personalities and skills.

Richard Cooper also gives advice for web start-ups.

Website: www.polishedbliss.co.uk Location: Kintore, Aberdeenshire

(Full story is 1295 words + box out)

Luna Spas

Whirlpool baths, heated towel rails, bathroom mirrors, cast iron radiators, column radiators, fireplaces and granite hearths: who’d have thought people would be buying such bulky, expensive and hard-to-ship items online even a few years ago? But these are just some of the products sold daily by the two brothers, Nic and James Auckland, from their rapidly expanding chain of ecommerce stores: Luna Spas, Luna Home Store, Trade Radiators and Tap Buyer, all powered by Actinic Business Plus.

This case study tells how the pair turned £1 into a multi-million pound business empire. And it also illustrates the advantages of adopting a niche ecommerce strategy and examines the impact of the recession.

Website: www.lunaspas.com Location: Nottingham & Glasgow.

(Full story is 1244 words)

The Cotton Patch

It’s one thing to run a successful shop, but these days you need to look at reaching your market through multiple channels to maximise profit and stay abreast of your competitors. The impact of this approach is well illustrated by the Sewell family. They have grown their quilting and patchwork supplies business, The Cotton Patch, into just such a multi-channel operation with the addition of regular catalogue and flyer mailings, telephone ordering and a website with an international following.

Together these channels account for 78% of total sales and ecommerce accounts for over 80% of mail order.

Jean and Geoff Sewell started the business in 1990 as a small shop & it was an immediate hit with its US-sourced fabrics & stitching products that are still the most comprehensive in the UK today. 1993 saw the introduction of a mail-order catalogue that broadened the customer base & ten years later their children, Liz, David & Nik, took the business international by opening a web store using Actinic Catalog. They sell to 56 countries now & have regular visits from overseas quilters on holiday.

David Sewell developed the ecommerce site & redesigned it in 2009; it now stocks 5,000 products. Web sales grew by 22% in that year. 2009 also saw the launch of three specialist, micro-sites to target specific markets for scissors, rotary cutters and task lighting.

The Sewells show that a business can be very niche, but still have a worldwide clientele. Used effectively, the combination of a shop with a web site, mail order and telephone keeps customers well informed, and enables them to make enquiries and place orders by whichever channel they choose.

Website: www.cottonpatch.co.uk Location: Birmingham

(Full story 996 words)

Anything Left-handed

Established in 1968, Anything Left-handed is a family business offering products, services and advice for left-handed people. Owner and MD, Keith Milsom sells over 250 products online which have been tested & approved by his small left-handed team. The case tells how the business recovered from a disastrous overhaul of the ecommerce website & learnt the importance of keeping control of core IT functions in-house.

The reliability & appearance of Anything Left-handed's website are of paramount importance as it now accounts for all of turnover, since the London shop was closed in 2006. Keith therefore despaired when an apparently sound decision to outsource website development and create a sophisticated, bespoke site, backfired. He lost control of the company's key marketing channel and sales plummeted before he fought back with a superb relaunch site built in-house with ecommerce package Actinic Developer. The bespoke budget was over £30,000 and failed to deliver, whereas Keith now owns and maintains the site he envisioned - all for around £4,000. Immediately it began taking almost 50% more orders and Keith achieved sales closer to 700k in 2007.

Website: www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk Location: Surrey.

(Full story is 1531 words).

The Gentleman's Shop

The Gentleman's Shop has tried three different approaches to ecommerce: web-based, bespoke and boxed software. Robert and Charlotte Johnston are now keen advocates of the control and value offered by a web store based on their PC network. Robert has run a successful barber's shop in the market town of Hungerford since 1988. In 1997 his wife Charlotte set up The Gentleman's Shop as a physical shop, and two years later as an e-store. It sells luxury shaving and grooming products as well as accessories and gifts for men from the top brands. Orders are shipped worldwide, with the Americans being especially keen customers. Online trade now accounts for 40-50% of the rapidly growing total turnover.

Selling online started in 1999 with what proved an expensive mistake using a web-based shopping mall. They could see themselves spending up to £2,000 p.a. while being locked in to the site and having to start again from scratch if they moved hosts. Updating was out of their hands too and at Christmas the programmer went on holiday and the site disappeared.

A spell with Actinic's boxed software came next and worked for several years, giving them their best 12 month trading period ever with 50% growth in web sales. But in 2003 Robert was seduced by the promises of a new media company. He agreed to pay about £45,000 over two years for a bespoke website, with the aim of increasing the number of visitors and the order value. The result was well received by customers, but unfortunately it took less money. After 2 more expensive years, in April 2005 the couple were told that the website would no longer be supported and they could not find anyone willing to take it on.

Then the couple turned back to Actinic and now have a site that has the looks of a custom-made site but yields the sales they expect. The Johnstons invested in the latest Actinic Business Multi User product because they wanted to maintain the site and process orders from two separate networked machines. The software also enables them to entice customers with various types of special offers and in the first two weeks' online sales beat the previous performance by 40%. Having tried web-based, bespoke and boxed ecommerce solutions, Robert and Charlotte are now confident that their present approach has the right balance of cost, flexibility and functionality. The case includes lessons learnt/advice to other e-tailers.

Website: www.gentlemans-shop.com Location: Hungerford, Berkshire.

(Full story is 1425 words)

Nigel's Eco Store

Caring about the environment has been a passion for Nigel Berman for over 20 years and he was always keen to run a business more ecologically. In 2005 he was able to launch a new business - Nigel's Eco Store - that both sold eco-products and used an eco-friendly business model: ecommerce. The site has now won best shopping site in the Yahoo! UK Finds of the Year awards.

From an accounting and publishing background, he initially set up his web store as a sideline using a basic, web-based cart. Within 3 days a national newspaper enquired about his Eco-kettle which was hard to source at the time. By year end Nigel was flat out with a home full of stock and had decided to go part-time at his publishing company.

He moved to Actinic's ecommerce software to cope with the business growth of 40% and now turns over about £200k selling 200 products including coffins, razors with yogurt pot handles and state-of-the-art VOIP video phones (to cut the need to fly). A major step up for the Eco Store was getting the key pages optimised for search engines. Immediately traffic went up by 30% and within two months sales had doubled. The rapid growth presented other challenges: how to juggle all the jobs he needed to be on top of. The answer was outsourcing. Customers get a faster service now he's delegated the fulfilment process and telephone answering to small local specialists.

Website: www.nigelsecostore.com Location: Hove, E Sussex.

(Full story is 1030 words)

Classic-leisure, Trampolines4Fun, Classic-lawns

Peter Mulcock gave up a salary to start what appears to be a typical family business selling garden-related equipment on three interlinked, Actinic-powered websites: Classic-lawns, Classic-leisure and Trampolines4fun. But the trampoline sites designer is actually Peter's15-year-old son, Oliver who was still at school at the time.

Ecommerce has also enabled them to follow their dream and split their homes between the South of France and Gloucestershire. Oliver built the site with Actinic Developer in a week on a budget of £4000. Now he maintains the pages for his father while away at school. Peter has found that operating multiple niche sites works better than having a broad range in one store. E.g. Trampolines4fun sold 100 trampolines in 2 months when it opened in October 2004, whereas it took Classic-leisure the whole summer to sell a hundred.

The total business turns over around £800,000 p.a. and is in profit. Peter expects to top £1 million in the next year. The seasonality of all of the websites will be addressed next with something to plug the gap in the winter months. However, the idea of living solely in France had to be revised because of the UK & French fiscal systems and red tape, so now they spend 3-4 months abroad.

Other practicalities militated against basing the business overseas: customers often phone and are confused by the foreign ring tone and so far there's no way round this.

Website: www.classic-leisure.co.uk Location: France and Glos

(Full story is 1144 words)

Snowlines

Retailing mostly in the diverse areas of running and winter sports, Snowlines established an Edinburgh high street shop in 1999. The ecommerce site, launched in summer 2000, now helps it to sell across Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. The internet has increased business by about 40%, with the web accounting for around 25% of the present £600,000+ turnover.

From the start MD, Colin McPhail saw the need to integrate the EPOS Top to Toe system with the ecommerce site running on Actinic Catalog. He commissioned an interface program, NorCat, that means he only has to keep one database up-to-date and not two. Synchronising the stock data and the web database with a single keystroke takes the computers 10 minutes a day.

Sales of winter sports and running equipment are 50:50 but the average order values are very different at £150 and £15 respectively, and it is the trainers and other running gear which are the core market year round. Ways Colin has differentiated his site are by keeping records of each customer's shoe requirements and including links with physiotherapists and a podiatrist. It seems to be working and he's also promoting a separate domain, www.marathonrunning.co.uk that's easier to remember.

A big issue facing Snowlines was how to get rid of old lines to make room for new stock. Colin found an easy answer in online auctions and now has to process 20-30 orders a day. However, often the only profit he makes on these bargains is in the P&P, so this avenue won't be replacing his dedicated web store for current lines.

Website: www.snowlines.co.uk Location: Edinburgh.

(Full story is 917 words)

Chewbz

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.

Website: www.chewbz.co.uk Location:Southampton

(Full story is 1066 words)

Comic Domain

As avid collectors of sci-fi comics, Dave Cresswell and his brother, Steve, realised that there was money to be made out of their hobby. Thus Comic Domain was born in January 2000 and still runs from two home offices. The annual turnover has gone from a couple of thousand to over £50,000 combining online and offline sales, yet it is still an adjunct to their day jobs.

Along the way Dave learnt a few lessons, like the importance of choosing the right ecommerce solution - ASP or desktop. It made a difference to his wallet as well as sales. Dave tried both and strongly favours Actinic Ecommerce software which has scaled with the business's needs and gives him full control of the design and maintenance.

Marketing needn't cost a packet. Dave finds using flyers and exhibiting at weekend sci-fi conventions works. Advertising is second, in cult magazines and also cinema campaigns. Online marketing makes use of the ecommerce software's inbuilt search engine optimised design to keep them near the top of the listings. Seasonal slumps have been eliminated by timely special offers emailed to customers, and visitors come back regularly to input to the message board. The result is visitors have grown to over 40,000 per month.

Website: www.ComicDomain.co.uk Location: South London.

(Full story is 1124 words)