The $131.3 Billion gift industry is seeing annual sales cross $22 Billion in the United States alone, and it's natural to wonder how to start an online gift store and make good money for your gifts business.
It's a decision that can steer your gifts business into money and fame. Everyone is buying gifts online, be it for birthdays, weddings, or religious festivities.
Today, a good gift has become synonymous with a good relationship, and customers are willing to pay anything for quality gifts!
Whether you wish to start an online gift store or set up a physical gift store is a personal decision.
Nevertheless, we strongly recommend setting up an online gift store that exposes your business to a global market that is increasingly tending towards online shopping.
Welcome to Kaivalya.me, and in this post, you’ll learn how to start an online gift store to sell gifts online and make money for your business! Let’s get right in!
How to Start An Online Gift Store
What’s Your Focus?
Maintaining a specific theme of gifts will allow your gift store to build a strong customer base and follow an effective marketing policy.
When you start an online gift store, your focus could be to sell handmade gifts or personalized gifts.
It could be an age group, a profession such as businessmen, or special events such as Christmas or Birthdays. If you dwell on the extremes, it can be the ultimate gag gift store!
It may appear that having a focus could limit your market potential. However, it would give you a niche!
All successful businesses follow a niche. Before they get big enough, they maintain this focus. Amazon was a bookstore for nearly a decade.
Having a niche not only makes your target audience and marketing more defined, but it also makes your line of production more specific - if you’re targeting businessmen, you know you’ll produce pens and not teddy bears!
That means, it makes it easier to start an online gift store!
In case you’re the expansionist type, you could change your focus depending on the season, such as a Christmas gift store in December and a students’ gift store in summer. Just keep in mind, while you learn how to start an online gift store, that focus is key.
Know Where You Sell Before What You Sell
Although online shopping has significantly cut down the geographical barrier, it’s still highly recommended that you start locally and think globally, especially when wondering how to start an online gift store.
For instance, start with the city your business is in and understand the demands in the gift market.
This would not only dictate the focus of your gifts business, but it would also help you build a stronger audience who know you know their demands!
As your demand grows in your city, you’ll see residents of other areas coming to your website, and that’s when you market research their city, then expand there. The cycle goes on.
This specific marketing strategy is cost-effective and promises exponential growth.
Do The Cost Calculations
Whether your business is manufacturing its gifts or buying in bulk and retailing, learning how to start an online gift store must begin with calculating your production/purchasing cost per unit gift.
Decide upon a margin that’s a sweet spot between your pocket and the customer’s bargaining instinct, and thereby dictate your final MRP. Keep in mind that there are taxes, maintenance costs, marketing costs, and various other factors at play.
If you’re having trouble deciding how much margin to set or how to get the right cost calculations through, we’re providing Free Audit and Consultation which could help you find your way!Learn From Others
When you learn how to start an online gift store, you learn by more than just reading blogs!
If you look out there, you’ll see hundreds of online gift stores that have succeeded quite profoundly.
Visit their websites, study their marketing techniques, understand the structure of their eCommerce gift store, and try to implement things they’re doing right into your online gift store.
But that’s not the best part. What you should have an eye for are the negative reviews. See what the others are doing wrong and you do it the right way!
The fact that you’re a small online gift store works to your advantage! You have all the examples you need, and you have all the support our free consultation can provide, the ball’s in your court.Building the Online Store
Now that you have a focus, you know what you’re going to sell, you have produced great financial calculations, and you’ve studied the market and the competition (all without spending a dime), it’s time to learn how to start an online gift store development.
A gift store that profits needs to develop a solid web interface! We’ve broken it down into 5 simple steps:
1 Store Aesthetics
Well, the first thing you need to nail is store aesthetics. Aesthetics generates an emotional response from the customer, it connects your target audience to your products… it is your home on the internet, better keep it aesthetic!
Read our dedicated post to Store Aesthetics to gain insight into exactly what patterns and themes you follow, and especially what you DON’T follow!2 Shopping Experience
While the store aesthetics pleases the heart, the shopping experience comforts the mind. It is of paramount importance that searching for, filtering, inspecting, purchasing, and any other thing a user does on your online store is easy and user-friendly.
Knowing how to generate a perfect shopping experience is of equal importance to the quality of your gift itself!3 Search Engine Optimization
Don’t let this term daunt you. Almost all marketing agents perhaps overdo the significance of SEO which can often undermine our self-confidence!
That’s not to say it’s not critical (in fact, it’s the most critical), but it’s also very achievable! SEO ensures that people surfing Google for gift stores online see your store there and encourages them to visit!
We’ve written a great, easy to follow post on how you could Ace SEO for your gift store!4 Security
The first thing that comes to our head when we hear “online” is “security”!
Indeed, hackers will get smarter as you will sell more gifts, and the difference between your inventory records being bamboozled or not could indeed be a slight firewall misconfiguration!
The good news is, our security consultation is a step ahead of the hackers, we’re the good guys after all! Read our Store Security post that details major and minor technical details that keeps your servers healthy and safe!5 Speed And Efficiency
47% of web shoppers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% of all your customers will leave the website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds! That’s quite a lot of customers, eh?
You know better than watching your payment cheques fly away because your online gift store didn’t load fast enough! Get some great tips and easy techniques on store speed to prevent this travesty from ever occurring!Inventory To Start A Gift Store
To start an online gift store that appeals to many people, you will need a great inventory management mechanism that doesn’t eat up too much of your time yet efficiently keeps track your activities. You could start by reading this beautiful guide from HubSpot.
Make sure that you have a good space that stores your gifts safely and has enough carpet area to house all your goods.
This is the only piece of the puzzle that demands some investment, but if you’re willing to compromise a bit of your living space, that won’t be too expensive either! Nike started by storing their shoes in a servant quarter.
That’s nice! Now, we’ve learnt how to start an online gift store on a shoestring budget! So,
What’s Next…
Now’s the turn to start making your gifts or purchasing them from a bulk trader, and selling them online!
This could perhaps be the most tricky part, especially if you’re new to this industry.
No worries! We at Kaivalya.me are here to help. With years of experience and a successful track record, we can provide the best consultation for you to start an online gift store, big or small. All it takes is to book a session.