Currently...

Hello Baby is an online nursery business which sells a wide range of baby products such as prams, car seats and nursery furniture. As well as our own website (http://www.hellobabydirect.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">www.hellobabydirect.co.uk), we also sell through eBay and Amazon.

Before I escaped...

Previous to starting Hello Baby, I was working as an eCommerce consultant, helping companies boost their sales by using platforms such as Google and eBay. With eCommerce growing at around 20% per year, my clients were experiencing strong growth and this frustrated me as I felt that I knew much more about online marketing than they did. So I decided to put my money where my mouth was and launch my own online business.

My moment of truth...

After working for three companies which went bust, I concluded that I could do a much better job myself and was itching to give it a try!

Also, in my last job I came into contact with a lot of online retailers and I thought that many of them seemed to be doing well with fairly mediocre offerings. This made me feel certain that with my experience and drive, I would be successful.

Planning for it...

Before launching the market, I did a lot of research into different retail sectors in order to decide on the vertical in which to start a business. The data we used was mainly eBay historical data as this gives actual sales data at the product level.

I had a number of different criteria for choosing a sector; for example, it had to be something I knew about, be non-seasonal and have the opportunity for good margins. My research led me to believe that the nursery industry presented the best opportunity.

The worst and best bits...

Worst: Our biggest hiccup in the first year has been falling foul of credit card fraud.  Credit cards are a lot less secure than I had realised and accepting online payment requires constant vigilance. It is important for online merchants to understand all the security checks which are available for credit cards so that fraud can be minimised. We lost £3500 to fraudsters, but thankfully managed to get this all back from our payment gateway.

Best: On the positive side, we recently moved into a new warehouse which is twice the size of our last premisses and I am so excited about the potential for expansion this will give us.

Best advice...

The most useful advice I have been given has been about really simple things to do with the day-to-day running of the business. Using mailing bags, for example, instead of brown paper might not sound earth-shattering but saved an enormous amount of time. I am always looking to improve processes and it is little things like this which make all the difference.