Sparkle Club shines online thanks to eBusiness UK

Blackburn's Sparkle Club has flourished against high street competition after teaming up with ecommerce experts eBusiness UK.

eBusiness UK

Through an SEO plan that returns £10 in sales for every £1 spent, the company has been able to succeed against household names such as Debenhams and Next. Introducing an advanced inventory system has saved two days of work per week for the team and empowered the company reach its largest ever audience.

Background

“To begin with, we had all these shoes, and we knew that people wanted them because our customers had been selling them, but we didn’t know how to find the end user,” said Jane Procter, Sparkle Club’s managing director.

Today, Sparkle Club sells shoes, jewellery and dress-up items aimed at girls. “We specialise in anything that sparkles,” says Jane.

Challenges faced

Finding an audience

Competing in an extremely tough market

Sparkle Club must compete against Tier 1 retailers such as Debenhams, Monsoon and Next in the girls footwear market. While the products may be competitive, these companies have reputations built up over decades of selling, loyal customers, and multi-million-pound marketing budgets.

Growing pains

One of Sparkle Club’s most effective routes to market was embracing existing sites such as Amazon and eBay. Using these sites adds a level of customer confidence, brings a far wider audience and helps retailers reach many more customers.

“In the end, we avoided listing all of our products on all of the marketplaces,” says Jane. “If one product was out of stock, we’d have to log into each site and update it all manually. It was too much work, so we were more selective about which sites we used and which products to list.”

How eBusiness UK helped

Drawing on our own experience

At eBusiness UK, our offer is unusual because we also run our own multi-million-pound ecommerce operation and all our advice is built on what we have seen working first-hand.

“We are your test lab,” says eBusiness UK’s Nasir Kothia. “We experiment with new services and techniques so that we can pass on the best to our customers.”

Delivering a comprehensive search engine optimisation plan

One of the most cost-effective methods of building an online audience is to optimise a site to make it easily found on the major search engines - where most customer start looking. Organic SEO is low-cost, highly effective, and is particularly good at attracting customers who may not have been aware of your brand before.

Implementing a universal stock control system

When we introduced Sparkle Club to Linnworks, it changed everything. Linnworks is software designed to bring together your own ecommerce operation, your marketplaces, your stock control, your sales orders and all your essential paperwork and reporting into one, central portal.

“Installing Linnworks was like adding another member of staff, but for a fraction of the cost,” says Jane. “We have saved one day per week for one member of staff, and freed up around an hour and half a day of my time.

In addition to more listings on its current marketplaces, the multi-channel ecommerce system allows Sparkle Club to join new marketplaces with much more ease.

Results

We built an ecommerce website that ranks among Tier 1 high street retailers on major search engines including Google 75% of traffic now arrives via low-cost, organic SEO Every £1 spent on SEO represents £10 in orders Introducing Linnworks saved more than 10 hours of work per week Linnworks also opened up Sparkle Club’s products to new audiences by enabling additional listings on current sites and additional listings on new marketplaces