No more champagne and the fireworks are through – time to draw up the online store balance sheet

posted in: selling jewellery online | 0

The New Year…time for every small business to tally up the scores. Time to draw up the online store balance sheet. Though my jewelry making is more of a hobby than a business to me, I like drawing up balances in every field of my life. Probably it’s my basic profession (B Ec) which gives me such a mindset, which is not a bad thing at all, especially when you know that the taxman is always watching you. So I collect every invoice for the tools, materials and shipment fees. So much for the purchasing. But what about sales? Actually these are the most important stats at all. This is why I decided to make up the stats and evaluate all sites where I sell my jewelry. And there are quite a few of them. In this table only the most important platforms are shown.

Web platform comparison chart, Zilvera Jewelry web shops
Disclaimer: except for the Alexa ranking, all other data and evaluations are based solely on my own experience and opinions.
Evaluation legend: ++ very good, + good, 0 – neutral, – need improvement, — very bad
Platform Alexa.com ranking global/local
136/ 40 US
1766/79 DE
5456/ 1262 US
24037/ 7790 US
8294/ 282 FR
Sales to traffic*) ratio
0,002
0,0018
0,00012
0
0,003
Revenue**)  to cost***) ratio
13
20
30
0
18
Technical facilities
++
+
0
+
++
Seller friendliness – admins ****)
+
0
++
+
Seller friendliness – other sellers*****)
++
0
0
++
+
Remarks
2013
all time stats, since opening the shop in December 2011
stats extra­polated based on 150 visits per week
since October 2013, only 36 items on sale
since October 2013, only 30 items on sale
*)        Traffic = shop and listing views of Zilvera shop
**)      Revenue = net of platform costs, but including PayPal and shipment costs
***)    Platform costs such as listing fees and sales commissions
****)  Terms/conditions, payment, promotion, support etc
*****) Possibility to heart/favorite, compile collections/treasuries, teams, discussions etc
I also have shops at meylah.com, storenvy.com and a Dutch site metdehand.nl but they are hardly worth evaluating. Maybe I will tell a couple of words about each of them at the end. But now let’s start with the evaluation of the most important shops.

To be continued in my next blog: Etsy vs Zibbet

Leave a Reply