Candle Store: the official online candle vendor
Candle Store has positioned itself as ‘the official online candle vendor’ with a young and trendy clientele who’ve become completely obsessed with their products in just a few months. Two weeks after its launch, the store had already generated a turnover of nearly a thousand euros, and 6 months later they’ve reached several thousand euros turnover a month! A runaway success for their second Oxatis e-Commerce site; Emilie and Guillaume Desportes are already the proud owners of the flourishing GdBoBalcon.com, selling artificial plants and flowers.
The road to success
Emilie Desportes tells us her three key tactics for quickly creating a profitable online store:
> A multichannel strategy suited to our target audience
> An attractive and well organised e-Commerce website to quickly generate sales
> Loyalty and referral schemes to encourage repeat buys
Our customers are digital savvies and very present on social networks: in one click we posted our shop on Facebook and made our products available to a few extra thousand potential buyers. We now have more than 2,700 active followers, who comment regularly and share our news, new products and special offers. They’re with us every step of the way and on the go with our mobile site, which generates 15% of our turnover. Customising our mobile site design was a real asset: our customers immediately recognise our brand’s universe and can quickly find their favourite items.
To attract new customers, we’ve just released part of our catalogue on Amazon and the results were instant: the first month on the Amazon marketplace represented 15% of our sales revenue, and this figure hasn’t dropped! A multi-channel development strategy, coupled with great SEO, means we have over 8,000 visitors to our estore every month.
Quality traffic and a high-performing home page help customers find the items they want quickly and then head straight to the checkout. Our online store performance is incredible: we have a conversion rate of 3.65%, almost double the average for our sector!
Support from the Oxatis experts was invaluable in achieving these results. The first piece of advice was to optimise the homepage and better organise our catalogue. Having our template customised by the Oxatis graphic studio gave us a sleek and effective website. A smart design with a wide slide that promotes our new and star products with one quick glance. We’re really impressed with how effective it’s been: 20% of our products represent 40% of our turnover! A detailed menu, complemented by striking images has made site navigation easier and more effective, our visitors look at twice as many items since we made these changes.
We also give our customers peace of mind from the get-go; our contact details (phone, email, contact form, bricks-and-mortar shop in Lyon, France) are prominently displayed on our homepage, as are our four payment options (credit card, bank transfer, PayPal, check), 2 delivery options (standard or fast) and our breakage warranty (if it’s broken, it’s replaced). These aren’t just in plain view on the homepage but on every page of our drop down menu, which we’re sure has helped us achieve our high conversion rate. The fact that our genuine, online customer reviews average 4.8 out of 5 – just off excellent, doesn’t hurt either!
To thank our customers and encourage them to order again, we have a loyalty program that’s activated from the first purchase: one point per euro spent. This incentive is paying off with our average basket spend reaching 30€, so customers start seeing the benefits from the second or third order and 10% of our customers order 2 to 3 times a month. To keep in touch with our clients, we send out a newsletter twice a month, highlighting our new products and promotions. The impact is significant, 5 days after sending we’ve doubled our sales!
The performance of our online shop has totally exceeded our expectations: we take nearly 300 orders a month and are confident we’ll reach 500 by the end of the year. Our online store has also had a significant impact on our overall sales: nearly 80% of customers who come to our high street store heard about us online!
Oxatis' Advantages
- Oxatis is a complete solution (catalogue organisation, multi-channel distribution, automated inventory and order management, a variety of payment and delivery options that can be adapted to your products and customer expectations...) that helped us create two profitable shops, quickly, in completely different sectors.
- With the advanced analytics options, we can evaluate our performance and optimise our marketing actions: highlighting certain products, adjusting our promotional offers, email and SMS campaigns and our loyalty and referral programs.
- We know can count on the Oxatis experts, day to day, through their online support (they generally answer our questions within 30 minutes) and at every stage of our growth (redesign, UX, SEO).
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