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Jewellery ecommerce site

by Elevoution
8 replies
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I am considering setting up a Jewellery ecommerce site. Setting up a fully functional ecommerce site is something that is probably better left to a website designer who I would employ. I am considering things like Magento - Home - Open Source eCommerce Evolved

Has anybody had any experience with magentocommerce or would anybody recommend alternatives? I think I would still need a web designer to set it up, but I basically want something that I can add products to through a control panel.

I am based in the UK, and have suppliers in place. One avenue is importing from abroad, and it will be my responsibility to register the Jewellery with the relevant UK organisations which ensure the quality to the consumer. Another is a UK supplier who cans dropship. With that option, it means that I can get a lot of products on my site for no outlay. On the Imports, I will make huge margins.

Another option I have considered as an add on to the ecommerce site is selling Jewellery with classic sales copy. I started working on an example ad the other day, it's only a rough draft and far from complete but take a look - New Page 1

This is my website where I am just uploading my work. The templates and all the graphics were created using photoshop which I only started using recently. I have found that you can usually find a tutorial on the web which gives instructions on anything you want to do.

I am based in the UK, and looking to hook up and maybe work with people with similar interests to mine. My background is in procurement and I am able to source a wide variety of products.


Matt
#e-commrece #jewellery
  • Profile picture of the author Elevoution
    Oh by the way, I don't lie the headline graphic of my sales page. I think building a headline with a graphics program is perhaps a bad idea. Firstly, It could distract the reader away from the headline, and secondly there is a danger that it might load slowly.

    Simple "Impact" style text headlines just have a punchy call to attention feel about them.
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    • Profile picture of the author Tirmizi
      well never used magneto , however, joomla with ecommerce plugin could do the magic for you and it would be fairly easy to manage...
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      • Profile picture of the author Max Capener
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        • Profile picture of the author Elevoution
          Hi Max thanks for your reply…
          Interesting……I was also planning to outsource the development of the site to India. How much does Magento cost? I do like the look of some Magento sites I have seen.
          I definitely agree with you about the store – the one page sales letter is just an idea I had floating around in my head that I could use to push the Imported products on which the price can be very competitive. I agree it does look pretty “Ghetto” like but I was possibly considering using a similar sales copy on something like a “featured products” page type of thing.
          Jewellery (Jewelry!)* does have high product margins but these are warranted when you consider that the products are a comparatively slow turnover product and High Street Stores really do have to have a lot of money tied up in stock. For the web store vendor who has a drop shipper in place the stockholding problem is of course nullified. Obviously the supplier takes all these problems on and these are reflected in the margins. However, since I also have the option to import Jewellery *, my margins on these particular products would be very attractive.
          Up until recently I had not had any experience in Jewellery*. However, I was involved with procurement of products that had to meet all kinds of regulations, so obviously I have gone through all the research of what it takes to get Jewellery “Hallmarked” once it is imported into the UK, in fact, I have a contract in place with my supplier to ensure that the Jewellery meets the relevant standards. I have not found it a problem to aquire necessary knowledge to function in the Jewellery industry. Whilst I can’t claim to be a Gemoloist, I do understand the basics etc.
          I will PM you with some further stuff..
          Matt
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          • Profile picture of the author Elevoution
            Also, I was wondering if a Jewellery site would be difficult to market with Adwords due the to the competitiveness of the keywords? Another method I could use is affiliate marketing...
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            • Profile picture of the author derekwong28
              I would recommend x-cart, litecommerce, or cubecart.

              The jewelry niche is extremely difficult to market and I would recommend that you keep the costs down as much as possible at first.

              -Derek
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              Do not get between a wombat and a chocolate biscuit; you will regret it dearly!

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            • Profile picture of the author lamiles
              Hi Matt,

              I am not a web developer, in fact I am a gemstone buyer for a British jeweller who sells jewellery online. But I do have experience in online jewellery and gemstone e-commerce. Anyway, the online jewellery market is heavily saturated, especially for diamond jewellery. I doubt that you will be able to generate many sales for commercial diamond jewellery. Advertising is expensive - AdWords for "jewellery" or "diamonds" can easily go up to 300 GBP per day, and PPC (like Bizrate) are about 500-700 GBP a month.

              With the option of importing jewellery from abroad, you will face many issues, like returns processing (and trust me, you will have returns) which you must offer to your customers according to EU distance selling regulations, but I doubt that you will be able to return it to your supplier. Also when you will import jewellery, you will pay VAT ("temporary import" doesn't work anymore, at least it doesn't with FedEx).

              The biggest problem for online jewellery e-commerce websites will be jewellery photos, not a commerce platform you are planning to use (after all, none of the open source or commercial platforms are suitable for serious jewellery e-commerce and on the other hand, people using blogs to sell jewellery).

              Producing good jewellery photographs is a pain! A proper lab setup in-house goes for about 5.000 GBP and years of experience. Outsourcing starts at 10 GBP per mediocre jewellery photo.

              But I must say, that your sales copy is good (design and presentation is not) and with a little tuning and attention to SEO you will probably make more money by advertising someone else's jewellery or running your own blog/content site and charging jewellery shops for one way links or blog-posts.

              To sum up. A very basic jewellery e-commerce site in the UK will cost you about 2000 - 2.500 GBP (a serious jewellery e-commerce budget starts at 50K GBP and you will have a hard time finding an agency who knows how to do it anyway). Outsourcing somewhere will cut this cost in half probably, but in both cases you end-up with a very mediocre online shop. And there are millions of them around. Since you are not a jeweller, and you are going to use someone else's jewellery - I doubt that you will have a strong enough product line. On the another hand, if you invest this money and your time in a jewellery content website (blog/guide/forum), you only need to worry about your SERP and traffic, and at least this you can sell if you decide to leave the business.
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  • Profile picture of the author sara963
    Thank you very much very useful information
    SARA
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    http://www.hummernews.net
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