Meet the retailer: The Print House

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Ed Snelson and his business The Print House were finalists in the eBay for Business Awards 2017 in the ‘Job Creator’ category. Trading in a highly competitive field, he started as many eBay businesses do in a spare bedroom and has since grown with the target of becoming an ‘eBay Millionaire’ (turning over £1m+ per year on eBay) by 2019.

This is Ed’s story in his own words:

How The Print House got started

We have been selling online for a number of years now, with eBay being the first platform that we ever sold on and it is still playing a major role in our business today.

Our business started life as a bedroom project selling a variety of clothing and fashion based products. Myself and my girlfriend both held down full time careers whilst nurturing the business in the evenings after work for over a year until we decided to pack in the day jobs and take the plunge into full time online selling! This is the best decision we ever made… 4 years on and we now operate from 2 production units with plans to expand our business premises again this September.

We now employ a team of 5 full time staff and we plan to double our team size to 10 by this Christmas alone! Our eBay store now offers a huge range of unique and personalise-able printed gifts, clothing, homewares and accessories.

The Print House sales growth

Sales have been growing at a rate of 20-45% per month, every month through 2017 and we plan to maintain this growth rate throughout the next 3 year forecast. eBay has played a pivotal role in our success allowing us to showcase new products to millions of customers with ease. We have also expanded into several other online stores of our own alongside other marketplaces, all enjoying great success this year.

We pride ourselves on fantastic customer service & great products – making sure that every customer is overjoyed with their purchase. We carry this ethos through to how we treat our staff, hiring local talent from our region and offering apprenticeship based training to our younger staff in association with our local college.

We firmly believe that being an online marketplace based retailer has been a key factor in our success, as eBay set firm but fair targets on how to treat customers both pre and post sale. Striving to meet these metrics has taught us to put customer service first and I strongly believe that this focus on fantastic service has been one of the best lessons you could ask for in online selling. We have applied these learnings throughout our company and across all other outlets that we sell on to ensure that our reputation remains second to none for how we treat our customers.

We always reinvest a large portion of profits into growing our business. Now that our infrastructure is really starting to grow in terms of staff and production equipment, we feel that we are in a place where we can achieve our ambitious growth targets for the coming years and we are incredibly excited to do so!

The Print House’s aspirations for the future

Thanks to the tools and knowledge offered by eBay for business sellers, we have grown from a tiny bedroom project into a company that forecasts over £0.5million in sales this year and £1million in sales in 2019. We are proud of the successes achieved this far with our online business, and we are excited to see what the future holds for our business as we grow our eBay store alongside our various other successful online outlets.

With ecommerce, achieving real, substantial growth in your business is a genuine possibility as modern businesses such as ours are no longer limited by the same barriers that a traditional shop may be. For this reason, we strive to continue achieving month on month growth throughout the life of our business and we envisage eBay to remain a major player for us to achieve these targets.

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