Background of the client:

Jean is an e-commerce entrepreneur from France. Since 2019 he has been selling online. OMIKA is an emerging beauty brand that was established by him in 2021, and its main product is electric hairdressing styler.

Initial situation before starting to work with us:

He had been doing Drop-shipping and selling around $8,000.00 turnover per month, only himself in the team.

The challenges that he was encountering:

He had been doing well with his online store by drop-shipping products from AliExpress vendors in 2019. But since 2020 he continuously encountered a lot of fierce competition and challenges when he would like to scale his online business.

• The generic products sourced from AliExpress vendors were not competitive anymore due to the growing competition. Because of the low barrier to entry, everyone could dropship trending products from AliExpress and there was always a cheaper one that he could not compete with.
• He made low profit margins due to the growing competition. Competition had been increasing his expenses and operating costs for marketing/advertising and SEO since he needed to get traffic for sales. Meanwhile, it also droveup product costs due to an increase in demand on the supply market.
• He had no control over his supply chain. He had been increasingly running out of stock that really hurt his effort on promoting sales in the middle of a marketing campaign and resulted in reduced customer satisfaction and lower loyalty levels.
• It was difficult for him to build a brand with the AliExpress vendors. Branding became more important than ever if he wanted to stand out from the competition. But the vendors couldn’t help him with private-labeling nor with custom packaging, thank-you card nor with any branded kits.

So, he had difficulty to scale up his sales due to the uncertain supply and couldn’t build a brand with the incapable AliExpress vendors to cope with the growing competition.

The strategy and solution that we provided him to solve the issues:

When Jean came to E-commerce Express, we had a few strategic calls and we delved into his business and discussed the issues he had been encountering. After our analysis, we provided him with the following solutions:

• We helped him find the original manufacturers who had been producing his product, locked them down with a client-oriented purchase contract, and wiped off the middleman he had before. This ensured him good product quality, sufficient stocks for scaling and lowered down his product costs by 20%.
• Jean would like to have his logo on the products. We helped him communicate with the manufacturer in terms of MOQ, logo position on the product, and logo’s size and color. We ensured that the manufacturer didn’t misinterpret Jean’s message so that he got exactly what he wanted with his logo on the products.
• We ordered a product sample with custom packaging and sent to Jean for quality check. Since he feedbacked that the packaging quality was not solid and the print resolution was low, we helped him source custom packaging from our verified packaging factory. We communicated between Jean and the packaging factory about his design file format, colors, fonts, material, and let the factory present him an effect picture to get his approval before making a sample.
• All his products were sent to our warehouse in Shenzhen China for preparation before he started with the marketing promotions. We removed the product’s manufacturer’s packaging, replaced it with the custom packaging, and inserted a thank-you card in each packaging. And we did 100% inspection on the external condition of the stock and barcoded them before putting them in storage.
• Jean would like to have professional product photos for his online store. We designated him an account manager to listen to the objectives of his brand and collect his requirements on the product photos and choose his favorable models to present his products in the photos. His account manager communicated with the photographer accurately so that Jean got the most of all the right elements of his product and captured the customer’s focus.
• We integrated our ERP with his Shopify store and retrieved his orders daily. Our fulfilment center helped him process his orders within 24 hours automatically. This increased the effectiveness and efficiency of order processing. And once the orders were fulfilled, the tracking numbers would be automatically synchronized to his store and the notifications wouldbe sent to his customers accordingly.

Results Generated:

When Jean started to work with E-commerce Express, he could build his own brand without barriers. He had a really good understanding of when his products would be delivered, and he had a feeling of control that he didn’t have before with his previous suppliers. And he has been saving at least 15% money on sourcing, 90% time on order processing and increasing to 100% accuracy of order fulfilment.

The saving on the cost and time allowed him to focus on what he was best at such as marketing and finding new trending products. By working with a professional fulfilment center like E-commerce Express, his sales went from 8k US dollar per month to 40k US dollar per month in 3 months.