Sophia McHugh is the co-founder of oodlique.com, an online personalised gifts marketplace. This is her experience of setting up a fast growing eCommerce platform.
Our background is in eCommerce and web design. However, the idea for oodlique.com came from our previous business which was an online marketplace for independent retailers.
Running the last business for two years, Brendan and I discovered that the majority of our sales and web search queries were for one particular area – personalised gifts. We saw an opportunity.
After months of research, we discovered two major pain points for gift makers and gift buyers.
The gift makers couldn’t afford to launch eCommerce platforms, and the gift buyers couldn’t find what they wanted.
70% of the people we interviewed said they found it extremely time-consuming and frustrating to find a really “unique personalised gift” online.
We launched oodlique.com in October 2016 to meet these needs.
“Building a full-fledged platform from scratch without knowing your customer can be a real waste of money and time.”
If someone is interested in eCommerce, is there any advice you’d give?
Our advice to anyone considering building an eCommerce platform would be to get an MVP (minimal viable product) up and running as soon as possible.
Even if you don’t have all the bells and whistles, it’s important to see if there is an appetite for your business model and see how users interact with the platform.
Once you have gathered data over a few months, you will then have a much better view of your customers and improve the website to meet their needs.
“We are excited to be receiving such traction with a month-on-month growth rate of 100%.”
Your growth rate is impressive, what marketing do you employ?
The key to our growth rate is by focusing on a niche area such as “unique personalised gifts”.
If you have to market everything for everyone,
