jewellery business

Planning to Start an Online Jewellery Store? Here are the Features You Must Have.

May 11, 2021
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The global jewellery market is worth approximately $230 billion. This consists of the high margin & high-risk precious metals segment and the low-risk & high volume artificial jewellery segment. No matter what segment you choose, the decision to build an online jewellery business can change the dynamics of your entire operation.

Conventional jewellery operations can be limited with the physical location and the entire revenue acting as a function of the footfall. There are only so many people you can attract to your store, and hence there is a low ceiling to the maximum revenue you can have with one location. 

Start an online jewellery business with the right online platform, marketing strategy, and product portfolio, you can expand faster with less capital at risk. If you are planning to start an online jewellery store, this post will help you create an inventory of features you should be able to access to create a seamless buying experience for your customers. 

5 Features and Functionalities Your Online Store Must Have

If you compare online store platforms, here are the five features and functionalities an ideal online store must-have. 

1. Social Commerce, Loyalty, and Customer Support.

For most of the jewellery businesses worldwide, selling directly to the consumers is the most profitable manner to operate. This means that there has to be an organized channel for acquiring customers, retaining them, and supporting them throughout the sales lifecycle. 

If you plan to run social media ads, you must have a social media integration on your online store. This will help your customers log in with their social media account and give organic word of mouth to your brand with a few clicks. 

While you are at it, you should also create discount campaigns with coupon codes and special offers to both attract and retain customers. When you start an online jewellery store, you might not consider offering discounts since this is an aspirational category. However, for new brands, discounts are a great way to mitigate the perceived risk consumers have of trying something new. Your online store must hence support product-level, price-based, time-specific, device-based, and even location-based discounts.

For consumer-facing brands, it is also common to have abandoned carts. Your customers like a product, add it to their cart, and then never buy it – for whatever reason. Your online store should be configured to handle this using a historical record of abandoned carts. It should also automate a conversion process with the help of reminder emails and notifications.  

This might sound counterintuitive, but it is more cost-effective and profitable to retain a customer than acquire a new one. Hence, make sure your online store can easily accommodate multi-currency and multi-language support even in your mobile app. If you can provide real-time support with chat functionality, you will further enhance the consumer experience.

2. Blur the Lines Between Online and Offline.

While this might not be the perfect time to open an offline location, not long ago, it was normal for consumer-facing brands to run an omnichannel operation. Experience in-store and buy online, buy online and pick up in-store, and several other models have dominated the space. 

The thing is – jewellery as a category has historically necessitated a touch & feel aspect in the purchase journey. It might not be profitable to run a physical store these days, but you can still provide an offline plus online experience. 

For instance – you can make your print ads more immersive by adding QR Codes to the ad. Your online store should inherently support such integrations and allow customers to scan & sign up for the store. On an additional note – if you have a local store, your mobile app should make it easy for your customers to locate you.  

Must Read: Why to Choose an Omnichannel eCommerce Platform to Sell Jewelry Online

3. Visually Engaging and Dynamic Shopping Experience.

Most jewellery business owners and operators already understand the significance of having an engaging web experience for converting maximum traffic and providing a lasting memory of online purchases. However, it is also critically important to update, change, and personalize this online experience. Starting

Redesigning the entire store can often affect the entire quarterly bottom line. Hiring and retaining an agency, buying themes, running iterations, and updating the marketing collateral to reflect the changes – this can be a very tedious process. 

If you want to update the store design in a way that is both cost-effective for your business and engaging for your customers, make sure your online store already comes with responsive themes with drag & drop functionalities. You shouldn’t have to hire a programmer to redesign the backend if you change the front-end. In essence, your online store must have a considerable library of theme options and should also provide access to on-demand custom development capabilities. 

Recommended Read: How to Start a Silver, Artificial, and Imitation Jewelry Online Store in India?

4. Safe Payments.

Getting an HTTPS is just the beginning of providing a safe checkout option. Your online jewellery store must support a diversified set of payment options like debit or credit cards, COD, wallets, etc. Moreover, it must be seamlessly integrated with leading payment gateways like PayPal, Razorpay, Amazon Payments, Paytm, CC Avenue, and so on. 

A common functionality often found missing in sub-optimal online platforms is the capability of supporting zone-based taxes. If you have to custom-develop this feature, it can add high costs to your online store’s development and maintenance overheads. 

5. Intelligent Product & Order Management Functionalities.

Lastly, as your store scales, you will find an increasingly pressing need to update product catalogues and manage orders. The ideal platform should have features as wide & necessary as grid & list views, sorting, wish lists, quick add-to-cart, advanced product filters, dynamic product tags, hidden prices with a nudge to call, product videos, related items, and so on. 

In terms of product management, you should be able to easily list products, manage inventories, configure products, offer custom pricing, import/export data in bulk, and manage multi-level categories of products. 

For order management, the best stores often have features like reordering & cancelling, easy returns management, express checkout, tracking, fulfillment & approval flow, and order-level discounts already built into the online platform powering the online store. 

In Conclusion

It is not easy to build an online jewellery business. However, the right platform that provides the right functionalities, launching, growing, and scaling a business in the precious metal or artificial jewellery segments can be quite manageable. If you compare platforms, use this list as your benchmark to find the most suitable platform with the highest probabilities of generating value – it should offer features that help in customer acquisition, retention, offline-online integration, store management, payment processing, and product & order management.

Quick eSelling was designed based on these very needs of the modern-day online jewellery business. It is embedded with every feature you can find enlisted here.