Part 1 : Competition and customer service

Hi Debbie. Silver Fantasy's parent company - Carolina Traders Wholesale Jewelry - has been in business for nearly 20 years, and the move online took place in March 1999. Can you tell us a little about the background to the decision to start an online retail store?
In this case Carolina Traders really is a 'parent company' - my parents own it. They have a showroom where they serve customers 5-6 days per week, and were looking for a way to eventually close their physical store but maintain their wholesale mail order business at the same time. Going online with a web store for retail sales (which they don't do out of their showroom) was a way to test the waters. And they had a ready-made web design team in my husband and myself. All the design, graphics, marketing, database maintenance, etc. is done in-house.

Obviously you're not the only jewelry site on the Web - how do you stand out from the competition?
The first thing a new visitor notices is the way the site looks, then they see the way the site (and the company) works. We've been designing websites as a hobby for years, but both my husband and I have experience in graphic design on a professional level. Our site is now in its third revision; each time we give it a makeover it becomes faster, cleaner, and easier to use.

Customer service is a major way of weeding out sites that last from sites that don't. We've gotten lots of compliments on our fast service, but our most important compliments come from those customers who first contacted us with a complaint. We handle problems as quickly as possible and in many cases turn an unhappy client into a return customer.

Finally, we have a great selection of charms. When we started out in 1999, we had about 400; now we have about 900. This isn't the biggest charm site on the web by far, but it's becoming one of the major ones.

Is there any advantage to being an independent small business, rather than a large corporation or chain?
The main one is that we can make changes rapidly. Whether that means updating graphics, or choosing new jewelry lines to buy, or putting together an entirely new website, we're free to act quickly to make changes as needed.

Jewelry is a very personal thing, and buying online means not actually being able to touch and see the product first-hand. Do you see this as a problem at all, and if so, do you do anything special to deal with it?
For certain higher-priced jewelry items, such as diamonds or other gemstone jewelry, I would certainly want to have an item in hand before spending a large amount of money on it. But for our products, which are mostly inexpensive sterling charms and chains, I think customers are pretty comfortable with buying them after seeing only an image and a description.

We offer a full guarantee on everything we sell, and I think that helps as well.

Continued...