Now more than ever before, it is essential for your jewellery company to have a robust presence online. Typically, this involves selling products on many platforms in addition to simply your website.
Keeping tabs on everything, whether through your social network accounts or a marketplace like Etsy or Amazon, may be challenging at times.
I went out to various jewellery designers to seek some advice on how they manage all of their platforms and sell jewellery online. Specifically, I was interested in how they do inventory management.
The day when it was possible to run a company without having any sort of internet presence at all are long gone. The development of smart phones allowed us to be constantly connected to the internet.
Subsequently, the pandemic solidified the situation by compelling all of our enterprises to start selling jewellery via the internet.
We are all aware that operating a small jewellery business requires you to wear a variety of hats and take on a variety of responsibilities, including but not limited to bookkeeping, shipping, designing, selling, and the list goes on.
In addition to all of this, having a robust and varied online presence requires you to offer your wares on more than one platform.
How exactly do you coordinate the management of all of these platforms? I spoke with Aisha Formanski, Mary Karg, and Rocky Pardo, and they provided me with some insights and ideas on how they maintain track of their inventory and sales, as well as which platforms are the simplest to use and most successful.
Platforms for Making Sales Via the Internet
There is a wide variety of marketplaces and approaches available for selling jewellery online. Think about how you spend your time and how many different platforms you can reasonably manage before making a decision on which ones will work for you.
Some people may believe that having more locations is preferable, but you should not stretch yourself too thin if you are unable to manage more than two or three of them.
To my mind, quality is more important than quantity. Not only do you have to keep your listings, images, and other materials up to date, but you also have to make time to react to customer enquiries and interact with possible buyers.
Both Rocky and Mary have had a lot of success in the direct sales they’ve made through their own social media profiles. You may make purchases straight from Rocky Pardo’s Instagram and Facebook accounts by clicking through to her SquareSpace website, which is linked to both of those social media platforms.
She has discovered that selling using the direct messages feature on Instagram is both the simplest way for her to engage with consumers and the sales channel that brings in the greatest revenue for her business.
Mary Karg has established a Facebook community specifically for her most valuable clients. She sells her one-of-a-kind artworks at special events that her group hosts and she hosts them herself. She has had a great deal of success in sales via the use of this method.
Each of the three jewellery creators maintains their own website, but they do it using very diverse platforms. Aisha is really pleased with the results she gets from using Shopify. She has a website that is both retail and wholesale oriented.
She claims that Shopify retail is “without a doubt” the most profitable site she operates. Additionally, Formanski utilises Shopify to maintain a record of all of her goods. She does weekly reconciliations for the material that she pulls for other websites.
Aisha’s jewellery brand, Everthine Jewellery, is also available for wholesale purchase on Faire and Abound, in addition to being sold on Aisha’s own website. While Mary builds her website on Wix, Rocky employs SquareSpace for her online presence.
Stay Organized
When selling through many channels of distribution, maintaining organisation is essential. When you sell jewellery online, there are a lot of details that you need to keep an eye on. How do you plan to handle the inventory that you have? Your sales? What about communication with clients?
Make every effort to consolidate all alerts, notifications, and correspondence into a single location.
Use the same email address throughout the process of establishing your website, social profiles, and stores on various marketplaces. Create folders inside of your email to categorise your messages in accordance with the platform they came from.
When selling anything directly through a Facebook group or in the direct messages section of Instagram, this might be challenging. Rocky elaborated, “I aim to get folks moved over to e-mail as much as possible so that the majority of my interaction is in one spot, especially if it becomes a more complicated sale.”
This is because e-mail allows for easier organisation of communication (custom work, size adjustments, etc.). Because Facebook messages are the ones that are most likely to go lost, I make it a point to check them first thing in the morning.
I just lately started making use of a calendar that sits on my desk. It has been of great use to me to keep a journal in which I jot down reminders to follow up with various people on various platforms.
Because Rocky and Mary both sell most of their items on social media and create one-of-a-kind creations, it is quite simple for them to keep track of their inventory.
This might become a very difficult process for you if your collection includes a lot of ready-to-wear products or if you provide wholesale pricing.
Aisha keeps tabs on her whole stock through the use of her Shopify website, but she needs to personally update it once a week in order to take into account the revenue from her other sales channels.
Although each platform includes a mechanism to keep track of transactions such as sales, fees, and taxes, you will still need to integrate the information for your own records. Keeping track of financial matters is essential, despite the fact that accounting is not often one of the creative community’s strong suits.
Mary utilises the spreadsheets provided by Square, but she does not encourage using the sheets provided by Paypal.
Rocky is really fortunate to have a spouse who is a computer programmer since he designed an app specifically for her and she is a big fan of Google Spreadsheets.
Aisha is the first to confess that this is not one of her strong suits, which is why she has employed a bookkeeper and a CPA. The use of QuickBooks to manage a jewellery store’s finances is another method that has gained a lot of traction in recent years.
Be Consistent
It is essential to ensure that the terms, pricing, and shipping costs for all of your retail sales platforms are consistent with one another. When you sell jewellery online, it is incredibly simple for a customer to locate all of your websites and make comparisons between them.
Maintaining consistency throughout all aspects of your business not only makes it simpler for you to keep track of everything but also contributes to the development of trust between you and your clients. You never want a buyer to notice that your prices are all over the place for different items.
Additionally, ensure that your branding is consistent across all of your channels. You want each of your online “store” to have the identical atmosphere and presentation. The first step in turning admirers into customers is to ensure that people are familiar with your brand’s logo, jewellery, and picture.
Pro Tips
The following are some helpful last pointers that will assist you in selling successfully across different platforms: According to Aisha’s advice, you should “save each sales channel to your ‘bookmarks bar’ on your computer browser, and check them every day.”
It is straightforward, yet using it will assist you in remaining linked across all platforms. If you are proactive and make it a habit to check in on each platform on a regular basis, you will avoid missing any correspondence that your clients send to you.
To keep organised, I know that many creative individuals enjoy hand-writing their to-do lists or finding comfort in the use of a tangible piece of paper or planner.
Therefore, following Mary’s advice could be an excellent strategy to assist in keeping track of orders. “Because I’m a traditionalist, I still use two-part sales receipt books. Hold onto one copy with the merchandise while it is being stored in stackable trays until I finish the delivery.”
Before the year 2020, Rocky scarcely had a presence on the internet since she was so successful at selling her products in person at exhibitions. She was anxious about the unavoidable shift to selling jewellery online, and she discovered that engaging with people on Instagram was the simplest thing for her to do.
As Rocky noted, “I’ve sculpted my online presence to be more like an experience in my booth than merely online buying.” This is in contrast to the traditional model of online retail.
Because I am creating connections with the individuals as I would have in person and I am showing them the art, I feel less need to be continuously updating and sharing because I am making those connections.
Less effort expended on displaying it to the vast emptiness of the internet, and more on displaying it directly to my customers.
Everyone works in a unique way and has their own individual preferences for how to organise their work. Managing several sales channels effectively will need effort and commitment on your part while you search for the optimal solution.
It is essential to your efforts to broaden your customer base and build your company to have a sales plan that utilises several platforms. Always keep quality in mind over quantity. Therefore, you should practise time management responsibly and build platforms that accurately reflect your business.
I am grateful to the owners of these wonderful jewellery businesses for taking the time to share their insights with me.