Blue Lagoon Products
- Category: Home & Garden
- Challenge: Manual processes, multichannel
- Results: Doubled revenues 2 years in a row
- Benefits: Save 2 staff
Nick Jones, Managing Director, Blue Lagoon Products: “We started out and grew as many thousands of online merchants do. In the beginning we were buying stuff from discount stores that we thought there was a good market for, and selling on eBay. We carried on and started going to other shops. I was working as a taxi driver at the time, and my mother, who was working part time, was also helping out in the business. The business became a living, and we became directors of the company. We went further afield and started importing from China. I remember one year we imported and sold 20,000 headphones.
“As is common, we were doing all this ourselves. I was using eBay Blackthorne for listing, going into Paypal and downloading a transaction log, exporting to excel, then to an access database, printing off picking slips, printing labels and so on. We were experiencing the classic growing pains. It was a tough time. I was manually updating every listing and juggling this with all the customer service emails. We wanted to go onto Amazon, but there was no way we were going to be able to manually synch the stock levels with Amazon too. That was when we started looking for outside help.”
“My three favourite things about Volo? The first is the channel profiler, the fact that I can list items quickly and deploy them right away across my marketplaces. The second is kits and bundles. We sold a lot of kits before Volo came along, and stock control was a nightmare, there’s no other way to put it. Volo knows what two plus two is, it knows the who and the what, we don’t have to worry about that any more. Third is the fact that our pick and pack process has been completely streamlined. This especially helps us with our cross border trading.
“I’d recommend Volo very highly. They are very forward thinking and they always have great stuff coming down the pipeline. I would advise companies to go for it, you won’t regret it. I’m very doubtful I’d be able to achieve the growth I’ve seen without Volo. It’s really helped us.”
