The Big Mistake
I make a big mistake in starting of my Anokhi Ada and I am now regretting it.
When I started this venture, I know only two things one is how to teach and another is programming. Me and my friend Adnan discussed on so many things to start.
We thought about selling online and we discussed and brain storm what to sell online. Then how we zeroed on jewellery it was a complete story for another day.
Finally we decided that we will sell hair accessories online. But the hair accessory is a low cost item, how can we sell it online, how can we delivered, who will buy.
Initially, I make a website and upload some 100 products on it. Of course these are low cost items. Who will buy a plastic hairband for 200 Rs when it is available in local market for 30 Rs and at mall with a price tag of 50 Rs? Who will buy accessories online when these are the most bargained products and Indian people love to bargain?
And the ultimate question is "Who will pay 50 Rs. shipping for a 30 Rs. product?
Making a website is easy, getting customers on it is an uphill task. We did not get much visits on our website and no one ordered from it. At that time I have a very less idea about advertising online.
One of my friend told me about marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal (Snapdeal was no. 2 at that time) and PayTM.
I put my items there and ball starts rolling and people starts buying headbands online. We got busy in marketplace because we were getting a good amount of orders. We completely forget about our own website.
One day, I checked the backend of my website and found two orders came on it. Unfortunately, some of the items were already out of stock. Anyway, we completed the orders partially with apology and take down items from our website.
The Restart
In 2017, we again refurbished our website which was hosted on woocommerce and the orders started coming again. We even sold a 10 Rs. item on our website for which customer gave us 60 Rs for delivery.
From 2017 till the end of 2020, we did not advertise our website. Although we keep our inventory updated on our website. We got 10-12 orders monthly on our website which we fulfilled with utmost urgency. We did not get much effort to generate sale from our website.
In Dec 2020, we thought to focus on our website and completely revamped it. We put our hair accessories at very affordable price (of course we are still getting profit from them) and added 2000 items in last 2 months. Some we make by ourselves and some of them are sourced from open market.
The Regret
Now are doing good from our website (We sold almost 500 scrunchies, 300 hair clips, 100s of headbands and many more items). We are a huge range of daily use hair accessories which are priced at 30 Rs and people are buying it.
But still we have a regret. Had we started and continued from 2015, the story will be entirely different today.
Anyway Der Ayad Durust Ayad (Better late than never), we are doing good, have a very user friendly policies and people are loving us for it. If you are buying something from us or planning to buy, do it with confidence, we are here for your and are committed to your service.
If you have a pre sales query, feel free to connect with us. We are available on all major platforms especially Instagram and WhatsApp. We may be unable to give reply during odd hours, but we never ignored our admirers.
Thanks