It’s been a while since I have blogged about Inkfast, our online ink and toner business. Inkfast is two years old. We run it out the back of our newsagency. We advertised heavily online through Google, Yahoo and Yellow Pages online. All those campaigns are now off and have been since third quarter last year. Sales are strong with around 70% coming from existing customers and the rest from new business won through word of mouth. Most customers are corporate and most items purchased and not items we would usually carry in our newsagency. Thanks to our turning off of the expensive advertising spend, profitability is good, even with tight margins due to a very competitive marketplace.
I’d go out on a limb and claim that Inkfast is the most successful website created out of a newsagency. Traffic numbers are high and sales strong. It is bringing new customers to us, even though we never see them, every day. We transact more business in a week than we do in the stationery department of our shop in a month. This is in part due to our demographic. Being online, Inkfast is not bound by the demographic feeding our retail location.
The Inkfast experience is unlocking for us supplier rebates as well as an understanding about ink and toner which is helping us create a more successful offering in store for our retail customers.
What we are most proud of is that we created this ourselves from scratch and we rely on no one major supplier. The feeling of freedom is wonderful.
Congrats on the progress Mark. Actually thought about Inkfast the other day (a client spoke about potentially stopping their Google activity and it reminded me of how you guys stopped AdWords some time back).
haha good on you. You know officeworks staff refer to your site when trying to figure out what toner or cartridge a printer takes..