A Definitive Guide to Selling Jewelry Online

by alex| in Web to Print on August 23, 2019 9:27 am 2192 /

by alex

0/ 2192/ /

The jewelry industry is continuously growing at a rapid pace, especially online. Today nearly 30% of global jewelry sales come from online sources i.e. eCommerce sales. If you too want to tap into this huge market of online jewelry you will not be let down from this blog post. Here, you will have all the necessary information necessary to build and grow an online jewelry store. In this blog, I will cover how you can build an eCommerce store for your own jewelry brand.

The jewelry industry is strong, today it is worth around $3 million in the U.S. The online share of accessories market is expected to reach 33% by 2021, which is a huge deal and good news for those in the industry. The global online jewelry sales are expected to reach nearly $350 billion by 2023 and nearly $650 billion by 2035.

Today, jewelry is a great fit for e-commerce because it is lightweight and easy to ship, on top of that it can be customized which opens up new opportunities for store owners.

How Established Jewelry Businesses Can Go Online?

Although complicated, owners can grow their business with the right eCommerce strategy and tools. Here’s a set of strategy store owners can follow to start selling online.

Research Other eCommerce Stores Who Sell Jewelry Online

Even before thinking of launching your online jewelry store, you should do some research by looking at the current top performers in the online space. Current top market players such as “Dogeared” and “Dana Rebecca Designs” have stunning websites to present, on top of it is designed to be user-friendly and has seamless checkout functionality. You also have to consider its mobile responsiveness, campaign management and not to forget the high-quality product they provide.

The top-notch companies enable their users to navigate easily and make the customer’s shopping journey, i.e. from product to checkout, simple and easy to follow through.

Their marketing content highlights their promotions, new product launches, and other seasonal collections, whereas their detail pages offer more in-depth data on review, product info and specs.

Their designs inspire the customer journey with an awesome content experience. The catalog is coupled with multiple brand messages of the quality of the product and their practicality.

After customers arrive at the product detail page, they will find various product variation such as color, size as well as financing option which really makes the customers interested in their products. Plus their return policies make things even easier.

Determining Essential Website Functionalities

To make sure that your customers love your website and enjoy browsing your online store, you need to have these functionalities on your website:

Intuitive and user-friendly design
Mobile responsiveness
High-resolution product images
Social media integration
SEO features and customizable URLs
Product management tool
Features to cross-sell and up-sell
Campaign management
Comprehensive shipping details
Next-gen security features
The easy and secure payment process
Easy return policy

These functionalities are necessary for your online business as they will support your marketing ventures as well as backend operation. With these functionalities, you are sure to impress your online customers.

Integrated Payment System With Your Store

Your payment integration to your website will depend largely on whether your business is multi-channel or omnichannel. If you have an online store as well, you will have to consider the omni-channel system and make way for both online and offline payments.

A multi-channel business is when a company is selling products on various online mediums such as Amazon, Facebook, and other marketplaces. Whereas an omnichannel business is a company who is selling products both online and offline.

In case you have an omnichannel business, it is advisable to integrate online sales with the existing POS system. Make sure to implement multiple payment options such as credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay, etc.

Next, you have to make sure to have a key stakeholder who will oversee the online order process in your business. The individual will be responsible for getting the checkout journey right for the customers as well as solve issues and maintain a customer service strategy.

Creating a System for Product Inventory

It is necessary to have an effective product inventory management because jewelry sales, in particular, get fluctuating sales depending on the seasonality. Although other niches such as fashion clothing items remain consistent throughout the year niches like fine jewelry and other fashion accessories get higher volume orders during special days such as a holiday, wedding season, Mother’s Day, etc.

You have to study on month-on-month sales to determine the right time when the sales was the highest and so was the demand. Next step would be to implement this system for integration of inventory to take advantage of that time frame.

Sales monitoring will give an insight as to how your supply and demand is growing over time. Next time you develop your product inventory system consider this demand growth.

Two easier ways of product inventory integrations are:

For a small product catalog, you could use the inventory management tool using the eCommerce platform of your choice. Most of the times, it is a simple process, you just have to upload items in bulk and edit the ongoing process.
For a large product catalog you should consider using a POS system for inventory management; it is especially true if you are operating an omnichannel system. This way, you will be able to monitor all your sales as well as get enough data on the online business is performing compared to the offline one.

Figuring Out the Shipping and Fulfillment Process

For this, first you have to choose a carrier and then pick a shipping service; something that works best for your business. Next, depending on the size of the team, catalog and order flow you can handle shipping and fulfillment completely in-house.

Other cost effective options would be 3PL (third party logistics) and dropshipping. You could also combine both in-house and drop ship fulfillment services to manage your time.

Furthermore, you have to decide how you will package your items which will vary depending on the fulfillment type. To communicate brand values and connect to a customer better, most companies give more attention to their packaging. This is also because of the fact that today, Unboxing experiences have become popular in the internet.

Figuring Out the Ecommerce Platform for Your Business

We have completely separate blog post to help you decide on the best eCommerce platform for your business. This will determine how you will build and empower the website, which in turn will impact the way you manage and optimize your online store.

So, what should be the right eCommerce platform for you? Here are some tips:

It must support all core website functionalities
It should allow a large amount of API calls
It should provide PCI compliance
It should provide breakthrough solution to your business problems
It should accept plugins such as social media integration, email marketing integration etc.

You might as well go for a SaaS-based eCommerce platform which is hosted in the cloud and are easy to update and manage several complexities for your brand. You could look into options such as WooCommerce, Shopify and BigCommerce. If you are planning for a full-fledged professional store, you could look into Magento.

Hiring a Web Developer

Investing in a web developer is completely up to you and depends on the kind of eCommerce store you want to set up. If you have a small inventory and have a simple design for your website, you may not need to invest in a web developer.

On the other hand, if you have planned for a large scale set up and a custom website, you might need a developer who has the technical knowledge to set up and update a store for you. That said, having a professional to address your server problems will definitely save you tons of headaches and time.

Launching the Jewelry Ecommerce Site

Now that you are all set, it’s time to launch that online jewelry store and watch how it performs. By now you should be prepared to address and respond to customer queries, fulfill orders fast, work in increasing website traffic and engage with your customers and fans in a meaningful way.

Make sure to integrate analytics tools in place right from the time you launch the website. This is how you can monitor you success from the start.

Handling online Sales and Customer Service

Now that your website is live, be sure to get a lot of sales queries and problems from your customers. This is where you have to engage and provide a good customer service. Make it easier for the users to contact you for product and delivery related queries. The most common mode of communication is phone assistance of email and chat on Skype.

You can also implement an AI-powered live chat feature on the store homepage itself. You should be able to provide 24×7 support as well as give fast replies. This will help you to increase conversion and eliminate a lot of abandoned carts; in-short a good customer service you will definitely boost your sales.

Devising a Marketing Strategy for Your Store

You can’t just sit around expecting the customer to pour into you website, obviously, you have to have a strategic marketing plan for the upcoming months. Without driving traffic to the site, there’s just no way to make the business a success.

Create a marketing plan that leverages the brand and consumer loyalty to make both new and returning customers on your website. This should include both online and offline strategies.

A few strategies to include would be social media marketing, digital ads, email marketing, event marketing. You could start by creating a list of key performance indicators or KPIs to get the best out of your campaign.

You KPIs would include:

Pageview, both total and unique
Active users
Bounce rate
Returning customer rates
Landing page

How to Build Your Jewelry Brand’s Online Presence

The first step to building a brand is to be genuine, true to the customers and a strong message to the mass.

Social Media Marketing

Nearly 95% of the millennials are more likely to follow a brand they like on social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Nearly 75% of consumers say that social media plays a vital role in their buying process. Creating a massive social media following will definitely pay you back i.e. by increasing your product discovery and driving more traffic to your website as well as increasing conversion rate.

Decide on which social media platforms will you use to post your content that works for your brand. For jewelry we believe Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook would be a great option.

You could try becoming a little creative by posting creative fashion photos for your jewelry line. Make sure to highlight your key selling points and your benefits in all your content. Take advantage of Instagram Stories and Facebook Live for your brand.

Paid Marketing

Consumers are bombarded by various forms of content from various competitors on the digital platform and they are already bored and don’t have much time; so you have to do something that gets their attention quickly and before anyone gets their first. An easy way would be to start paid marketing campaigns.

You can use Instagram, and Facebook Ads, along with Google paid campaigns to boost traffic and sales. You can also partner with other websites to run display ads. Here, you can use analytics to find the best paid ads and opportunities to understand your customer’s interests.

Email Subscriptions

Email marketing is one of the important channels for lead generation. According to a study, nearly 95% of the time use visits a website they are not ready to make a purchase. This is why you need to garner their emails by encouraging them for email subscriptions. This is how you will expand your customer base as well as increase online sales.

In order to opt-in to emails you can incentivize your users by offering a small benefit that they would like to have and what you can give. Most online brands provide some one-time discounts for email sign-ups. Some offer an informative newsletter for email subscriptions.

After you have garnered enough emails and you have a massive email list, you can selectively deliver high-quality and personalized content to each of your users.

Website Optimization

SEO or search engine optimization is necessary for ranking above among your competitors. When optimizing your website consider the quality and originality of the product descriptions, URL building, reviews, using other media channels among other things.

The key here to provide more value to the customers that your competitors. Content marketing plays an important role in optimizing the website for Google rankings. It’s all about building customer trust and brand loyalty. Here, you should be creating blog posts, social media, and other media that are customized to serve a particular goal of giving value to your customers. You also have to make sure that you get enough return in terms of traffic and pageviews.

Like I said, content marketing is an important part of the marketing strategy so is contributing to other sites. By this we mean you can strategically partner with another website to increase your brand awareness. You can contribute to their website by adding valuable content on their website. You could look into guest posting where you can post your content on a high-authority blog site; it will get you a boost in traffic and possibly sales.

Another way to contribute to another website would be to offer accessory styling advice on fashion and apparel on a relevant blog site. You can chip in your own experience and insights into this. If you get an opportunity to publish a piece in high-fashion magazines or websites such as Vogue, Details, GQ, etc, you are sure to get a lot of traffic within a few days of publication.

Join Hands with Influencers

Next priority would be to create a relationship with top influencers in your niche industry so that you can promote your jewelry and brand through them. Because they already have a huge fan following, you are more likely to get a boost in your traffic with influencers.

However, make sure that you are true to you product because the influencer is trusted by thousands of followers and the influencers wouldn’t like to endorse something that is based on a lie. If done right, it will give you increased brand awareness and sales in your ecommerce store.

If you have a small budget, you may choose to work with micro-influencers or you can go for influencers with the larger following if you have that kind of investment. The focus is on the engagement rate when selecting who to partner with.

Using Established Customers to Create Brand Awareness

There are customers who want to be a part of your brand story and want to convey your values and messages across the board. They understand that you have their interests while developing the products. In the jewelry business, you have the opportunity to connect with the customers because there are many who appreciate fashion and jewelry.

You can connect to popular individuals who are popular on YouTube who can endorse your brand. There are many individuals in Vines and Instagram who can market your brand on behalf of you for a small price.

You can ask your customers to post their photo with your products on special events such as Mother’s Day, their wedding etc. This will not cost you a penny to ask. It will increase engagement and increase brand loyalty as real customers will be endorsing your product.

Connect and celebrate your customer’s special moments on your own social media channels; use brand-specific hashtags on social channels. Publish user-generated content on your website and digital channel after taking their consent.

Conclusion

All in all we can say that setting up an eCommerce store for selling jewelry is pretty challenging for new owners. It is even more difficult for offline stores to go online and then employ omni-channel. You can build you online jewelry store as well as digital brand presence if you can make some investment and focus on providing value to the customers.

You have to select the right ecommerce platform, the right tools and the right team for the job. If needed, you should hire professional developers and designers who will handle this stuff. Get into a customer-centric through the process so that all your efforts are towards helping your customers. This way you will never fail to make sales and grow and brand.