Ilker Beyaz is the owner-manager of Insuppa Auto Spare parts. Today on Tamebay, he describes his ecommerce journey so far with Volo Commerce and E-Motive Online who together operate the full service parts and accessories ecommerce provider ecommotors.
As well as reading his story below, Ilker was also a guest panelist at Tamabay Live and you can watch his session on how data and marketplace search work with Tamebay Live On Demand.
Scaling Insuppa for growth
I was looking to scale the business. I wanted to grow the SKUs on offer and also the online places where our customers could find them. We had a lot of manual processes which were holding us back.
The need to scale the business was made apparent by the problems we were having with our previous system provider. One of the problem areas was listings. I knew that I wanted to focus on listing automation and listing quality. Our provider pushed up a new listing template, with no back-up and testing, and 800 listings were badly affected, the styling, descriptions, everything. We had to restore them manually. I spoke to our creative agency Studioworx and they recommended the Volo system which had a feature to pull out listing descriptions in bulk, in clear html.
I’d actually come across Volo a few years before, but they were working with larger, more established merchants so I felt the fit wasn’t right. When I was ready to upgrade, I spoke with eBay who gave me a list of companies to work with, and Volo was on the list. I checked out a lot of companies. Volo had had a couple of poor reviews a while back, but that was before they were acquired. I found Volo to be the most professional in their dealings with me, that was what convinced me.
Our goals were to grow our eBay business, our website business, and also get onto OnBuy and Amazon. Volo recommended E-Motive Online who can really improve the data quality aspects. Their managed services are focused on applying their parts fitment knowledge to our eBay listings, and specifically our Item Specifics. For Amazon E-Motive is setting up the Amazon Brand Registry for us and building out our branded content.
Since we’ve gone live, our job is so much easier. We’re saving 1 person already, who before was dealing with orders and printing labels, manually, all day. We’re no longer wasting time printing labels and pick lists, so our order management and despatch is much faster. One person can now do double the work.
I’ve also discovered Vision, which can keep an eye on everything and is another time-saver. Vision lets me see the net margin I’m making on each order. It can also remove my reliance on manual purchase orders, which I can automate from the analysis of sales and stock levels. I have 3,000 lines, and I can’t watch them all every day. Vision shows me how fast my stock is selling and factors in a 6-week re-order time so I’m never out of stock. eBay restricts your visibility if you’re not showing stock, so that’s not a problem for me.
Our cross-border business was about 30% before Brexit, but it’s dipped due to the changes in customs and taxes, as well as courier issues. I’m expecting it to rebound though, and Volo’s Brexit-friendly system helps because it knows what stock is held in which region and can present the correct prices depending on the buyer’s location.
Despite Brexit our target is to double revenue this year. We have 1,000 new SKUs and we already extended our warehouse in January. I feel like we’re missing trade business too so we’re working on our website too, and streamlining all our channel operations with Volo and E-Motive. We can do all this with 5 or 6 staff.
