I have been in love with the saltwater hobby for about 15 years now. One day I was thinking "what could be better then helping others in the hobby by making a business out of it and saving fellow aquarists lots of money".
I started small with only a few aquariums to sell out of and now we are one of the most popular online stores to purchase from in this industry.
Before Shopify we had a small basic website, Ebay, and promoted a little bit on Facebook. Since going with Shopify our sales have literally increased over 1000%
With the crisp clean professional design, the ease of use in adding and editing products, and the ease of use for our customers to purchase items makes it a win win for all of us.
The apps that Shopify has are also incredible and make life so much easier by integrating them with our storefront. The accounting apps saves lots of time and basically does the numbers for us, the email app allows us to easily set up custom emails to send out to all on our lists.
Its like when you switched over to a smart phone for the first time, you can't believe you went without one for so long.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
Our first sale was a memorable one. We launched a big grand opening sale for our new shopify website to get all our customers used to the new site. We sold over 150 products within a few hour time span. We were in shock!
Tell us about the back-end of your business. What tools and apps do you use to run your store? How do you handle shipping and fulfillment?
Some of the apps we use are Chimpified, DeepMine, Order Printer, and the Facebook Store App.
Chimpified is Awesome, I send out weekly emails to all the customers on our list and each email shows pictures and descriptions of new products.
Deep Mine is great for accounting, it keeps track of all sales and profits and it saves us a lot of time.
Order Printer helps alot in being able to print out only certain orders all at once. Two weeks ago we did a group order of coral that was shipping cross country. 22 orders where involved in this group order and rather then printing out every pending order I was able to just print out those 22 orders.
The Facebook App is pretty incredible, somehow they are able to list all my items, pictures, and prices to every product I have right on my Facebook home page. The facebook community brings us lots of business so that is a very important tool to us.
Our business is selling and shipping exotic Corals and Fish that we bring in from all over the world. Everything ships priority overnight and shopify makes shipping pricing very easy for our customers.
What are your top recommendations for new ecommerce entrepreneurs?
I would highly recommend Shopify to any business that wants to increase business. The shopify team is amazing and you will speak to a live person everytime. I have even spoke to their web developers a few times to tweak my website with the exact modifications that I felt would be best for my type of business.
I am 100% impressed with everything Shopify has to offer. I guarantee you will say "I can't believe I went all this time without Shopify".