Here’s a quick video I did yesterday morning showing why it’s wrong to overthink your website when planning for it. I see too many retailers, including newsagents, overthink their website, wanting everything to be perfect, thinking they know exactly what people will buy.
We created www.hugsandlove.com.au for one of my own shops in suburban Melbourne. It took less than two weeks to go from idea to being live. We’ve spent nothing on marketing and we have quadrupled the product range since launch. We have been deliberately frugal in our investment in the website and lazy in terms of chasing sales – to show others what they could achieve even being time poor.
Also, we did not add any tech skills to the business to make the website happen.
In this video I step you through some of the transactions and explain how seeing these helped us evolve the website. I hope some find it useful.
How you approach creating and running a website for your shop is 100% up to you. This video is my experience for this website and this shop. It’s one of ten websites we have created over the years for my shops. Again, the goal was to mirror something any newsagent could do.
We are at a point in retail where having a website for your business is as essential as having a fax machine was decades ago – every business had one.
As I note in the video, this quick and dirty website of ours for this suburban shop will add $50,000 in retail sales in the first year. I can see that doubling the next year with small effort. $50,000 in sales is close to $25,000 in GP, for no additional labour or retail space overhead. That’s good for business. Double it and you’re at $50,000 hitting the bottom line profit of the business.
These results are coming from shoppers the business cannot easily reach by opening the front door of the shop. Every retailer would be happy for this type of growth on top of what the physical shop is achieving.
I know of newsagents doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year online. This is the financial opportunity anyone can chase. It starts with your first website and leaning into what it shows you.