Cheapest Electrical

Volo Commerce - Listing to eBay and Amazon Software

Cheapest Electrical is a successful, online provider of electrical goods that has seen strong growth and profitability in the last couple of years. But it hasn’t always been plain sailing – or rather plain retailing. Cheapest Electrical has been selling to the public via the Internet since July 2001 and has over 100,000 happy customers under its belt. Specialising in refurbished and ex-mail order products, the company buys top brand manufacturer returns and refurbishes them where necessary to graded standard for sale to the public or retailers. Cheapest Electrical majors on certain brands so it’s able to offer accurate and helpful presale advice and a second-to-none after sale service. All products sold carry a 7-day ‘no quibble’ money back guarantee and a 12-month warranty provided by the company.

Category: Electronics
Challenge: Margins, manual processes
Results: Top 3 seller on eBay
Benefits: Save 2 members of staff

Scaling the Business

Paul Lever, Director of Cheapest Electrical: “We were doing everything pretty much manually, from listing through to order taking, fulfillment and adjusting stock levels. We wanted to grow the business but we knew we needed to scale efficiently and that meant getting a program to manage everything. We looked at a range of providers. We were recommended to  go with Volo by eBay and we found that the Volo platform did more than the other providers and could do 100% of what we wanted.

“From the outset it changed the way we worked, and the benefits to my staff who are in the system all day every day were instant. The customer service team loves the integrated eBay questions. They don’t have to answer questions outside Volo, and this makes it much easier to manage on a daily basis.

The Value of Efficiency

“The courier labels are all integrated too. They just press a button and the label is done. This is a huge time saver for us. The labels alone would take one person a full day to get printed and now these are all done in less than an hour. Listing is much easier and quicker too. We really like the paragraph builder. We grade all our stock A to D and we can just drop in the templated content for whatever the grade is.

“We also manage all of our refunds through Volo. If we didn’t, it would be really hard to find the right transaction somewhere in Paypal and do it manually. From my side, I can see the daily sales and the best sellers and this helps me manage our orders from our suppliers more accurately.”

Numbers and Margins

“We’ve been with Volo since April 2012. We are now a top 3 technology seller on eBay. The growth has been great and we’ve been able to improve our profitability too. For example, I can see at a glance that in March 2013 we increased sales 70% on March 2012, and in March 2014 we increased sales a further 29%. Year on year figures are just as impressive. August 2013 was up 80% on the same period in 2012, and Christmas 2013 was up 38% on Christmas 2012. I would estimate the move from manual to automation  through Volo saves 2 members of staff, which obviously is  good for margins.”

“In my experience, other marketplace platforms don’t do as much  as Volo. It does everything we need, and more. For example, we like to bundle things like cases with our products – and sometimes we won’t charge the customer for the accessory – and this helps us improve customer satisfaction as well as increase our margins. We’re doing this ourselves, but soon we plan to use the kits and bundles capability within Volo. We know that as we continue to grow we’ll be able to grow into more of the platform as well.”