How To Take Your Stationery Shop Online -A Step By Step Guide

When it comes to taking a new step to grow your business, you may find limits to your offline shop. You may have successfully grown your stationery business in your area but discover obstacles in branching out. This is where you may want to consider selling stationery online. Let us look at the basic steps for setting up an online stationery shop. 

Before you get started on how to build your online business, it can help to know what exactly goes into selling stationery items online. You may want to sell general office items or student requirements such as different kinds of paper, pens, pencils, inks, paperclips, notebooks, geometry boxes etc. 

Taking your stationery shop online allows customers to browse and order products from their homes or offices and enjoy doorstep delivery.

Before you go online, you need to create a business plan to sell stationery online. Here are some tips:

1. Get bargain wholesale stationery items in bulk: It can be a good idea to keep up with the latest trends in school supplies, office stationery, pencils, pens, erasers, notepads, stickers etc. Purchasing these items in bulk from a wholesale distributor or directly from the manufacturers makes business sense.

You may also want to consider personalising giveaway items that you can use to distribute to build branding. 

2. Ensure you stock up on inventory: Partnering with big stationery distributors can help you get access to imported or domestically sourced stationery products. Ensure that you receive the best quality, price and selection to save on bulk purchases.

3. Open business accounts: Create a business bank account and set up an accounting system to follow through with expenses. You will also need to register your online business for taxes and permits.

4. Know the kind of stationery website you need to build: When building a website, look into your customer profile to understand what will work. Are you looking to sell directly to the public or to businesses? If you are a B2B stationery shop, your target would be administrative managers.

Reaching out to them may require a completely different approach to targeting ordinary customers. Use relevant strategies to reach out to your customer base as every category must be approached differently.

5. Tie up with delivery partners to ship stationery orders: Hire delivery boys or tie up with delivery partners for doorstep delivery services in your area. Train your delivery boys to carry the goods safely and behave well with your customers. 

6. Offer a wide range of payment options: Offering online payment option helps in improving shopping experience and enables you to get more customers to your website.

If you’re looking to improve customer experience and reduce manual effort in purchasing stationery products on your website, it is important to tie up with a wide range of online payment service providers to ease the purchasing process for your customers.

7. Use digital marketing: Despite the shift to computers, stationery items including pens, paper and writing instruments continue to enjoy popularity. To add colour to your stationery store online, how about branding your website in your business colours?

You can also use tools like SEO, SMM etc. to reach out to customers online. Use trending hashtags for your Instagram images to attract customer attention.

The main expenses in setting up a stationery business online are web development and inventory. How much your website will cost will depend on its size and complexity. 

A typical website may cost anything between Rs 500 and Rs 10,000 using online website builder services. The cost of a custom-made website is comparatively higher and may range between Rs 1,000 and Rs 50,000 depending on various factors.

Inventory costs depend on whether you already have an offline shop or plan to establish a new business from scratch.

Any new venture requires a good amount of planning. Having a well-thought-out business plan is essential when it comes to entering the online stationery business. 

Today, new options use mobile technology to smoothen out your operations without involving extra cost. When you choose software, you do so to make your business operations smoother and more efficient. 

Having an all-in-one shop management app like Zadinga can help you to manage your business better wherever you go. All you need is your smartphone to keep track of your business. A single app that manages your shop will help you look into e-commerce, stock management, billing, business reporting etc. Here are some more benefits:

• Getting notifications on new orders, tracking your inventory, customer communication
• Managing sales and purchases
• Collecting transaction data
• Tracking customers and suppliers
• Tracking multiple warehouse stores
• Tracking daily sales either by items or customers 
• Setting a minimum stock level
• Organising items into groups or folders
• Adding pictures to every item
• Easy data input
• Scan incoming and outgoing products
• View and analyse profits or losses

Having a user-friendly shop management app can be a massive benefit for your online business. More than that, it will be an essential tool to run your online store. And since you may not be conducting business from a single location, the app could be an excellent way of managing your online store from any location.

When it comes to handling your online stationery business, you need to look for simplicity and clarity. Zadinga’s specialised one-stop shop app offers you full-feature functionality at a single glance.

It serves numerous purposes allowing you to save costs and explore new opportunities to grow your business.