How we grew our business with less effort and headaches

I run a small perfume business with my wife. We started it as a side hustle and now my wife runs the operation full time while I’m still doing it part time. We even have a physical shop now. At the moment we are still a two person team and will continue to be for now. We started selling online on Instagram and then went on Facebook because of Facebook’s advertising platform. Communication with customers and potential customers were through private messages, WhatsApp, and phone call. We just relied on our own abilities to keep the business running.

When the chaos starts

How we ran things was ok for awhile until our business started growing a little bit. A lot more inquiries started coming in and a lot more orders needed to be processed. This was when everything started going haywire. Attending to inquiries took a lot of our time because we have a lot of products. We store product images on our phones and set up albums on our Facebook, so when they ask about our products, we would share with them those images. People would even message us very late at night. I would work until late night after my day job to clear up those messages. In order for us to get sales, we had no choice but to attend to those inquiries.

Lots of manual processes

Another problem that came up was managing orders and payment. All payments were manually transferred to our bank account. After customers made payment, they would either upload the proof of payment on the private message or send through WhatsApp. We had a few communication channel going on in one time so we needed to be really careful to check who has made payment. That means checking every message one by one to see who has made payment, what they ordered, and their shipping information. We thought about hiring help but that would be very costly and we just didn’t have the resources and the time to hire employees. Plus we weren’t ready to hand over the operations without any proper systems in place. If we kept doing the same things, it would definitely stop us from growing and we wanted to grow. That’s when we decided to really make technology a part of our business strategy. We use EasyStore online store system to better manage our business and help us grow by doing less work.

A better system

Through EasyStore, we were able to create our own professional website without having to know the technical behind it. The website functions as our online catalog that is available 24/7. No more going through albums on our phones and looking for product images. We would just give a link to our website if they have inquiries on our products. This abled us to answer more inquiries in a shorter amount of time. Facebook also allow us to set up auto away message so we would just include the link to our website in the auto reply message when we are asleep or away.

Customer satisfaction

The biggest improvement was on the order and fulfillment process. With the help of EasyStore, our customer satisfaction went to another level. Orders made through the website were automatically recorded in the EasyStore system and if orders were made through other messaging channels, we would manually create orders. From there we can monitor who have made payment and who have not. All of the order information is recorded and organized. Through a more organized order system, we make less errors and fulfill orders much faster than before. Customers who make payment today, can get their items the next day. Great and fast service is definitely an advantage over our competitors. EasyStore also makes it easier for us to keep records of our customers. We know who our loyal customers are and how much customers have spent on our business. This helps us to run campaigns specifically to our loyal customers and encourage more repeat purchases.

Built for growth

By implementing EasyStore into our business strategy, we are able to grow our business by keeping costs low, having to do less manual work, and saving more time for more important marketing activities. I definitely recommend for businesses to start using a proper business management system like EasyStore as early as possible because the impact is definitely worth it.