Step Five the Competitors of your online hair store
Today we are going to shop, not to buy a lot of hair extensions, but to investigate how other web shops, beauty salon and boutiques operate. You already started to get an idea of how the other hair stores operate in the previous step, but now you take a deep dive. Learn from the best and the worst hair stores online!
For this purpose, you can prepare a list with issues you would like to understand, organized again around the four P´s and enrich your questions with the issues and possible solutions you came up with when you did step four. Today you are going to understand why other shops sometimes fail to make their clients happy and how you can benefit from this.
Do not limit your research to online hair stores
Although it is possible you only want to start a hair web shop, it is better not to focus only on similar types of outlets. Sometimes it can be rather inspiring to understand how another type of outlet operates and to adapt their method of operating or commercialization in your outlet. This so-called thinking out-of-the-box allows you to come with original ideas that has not yet been used in a specific type of business.
Create online test checklist
The easiest and quickest way is to start behind your desk and to visit online hair stores and Facebook business pages. Check out:
- how they organized their online hair store
- the type and variation of products they sell
- do they use social share buttons
- how is the onsite search feature working
- do they offer payment options like sizzle or affirm so clients can buy on credit?
- do they show client reviews or testimonials, to gain trust in their hair products
- the price and payment methods and
- do not forget their return policy.
Make a list with your findings and check at least 10 or more websites or pages. Pay attention on the issues raised by your target group and if you have the budget (or if the return policy allows you to return the hair extensions) place an order to purchase some hair.
Try to understand the differences in price, products, distribution method and promotion and if possible, try to call the owner to have a chat. Why are they using specific solutions, what is their motivation for not having a of a return policy, the reason they do not sell specific hair types etc. But beware the shop owner might have reasons to color his answers, so you always need to cross check the answers yourself.
Try to rank the shops in best, medium and not good and compare their performance on the four P´s. This again will help you to select the items you can improve to have a better performance than the existing shops.
Visit some salons to get ideas
A similar method you can use if you do some field research by visiting some hairdresser’s or salons that sell hair extensions. Investigate the way they operate, how the hair is shown and how they interact with their clients. Check their promotion material, do they use flyers, brochures, calendars etc. and how do they connect with their customers?
It´s not enough to know your client, you should also know your competitors as they will be a main source of new clients if you do better than them and you succeed to communicate this to your potential customers. You will only get clients when your Unique Selling Point (UPS) outperforms your competitors. As now you have enough knowledge about your market, we will define your USP in the next chapter.
Tip It is all about the experience. It is important to \keep in mind, your clients do not need strands of hair. They want to look and feel good and part of that feeling you should give them with the perfect shopping experience. Do not make the survey and spying on your competitors as a technical exercise, learn how and where you can improve the shopping experience.
Step Six Define your Unique Selling Point (USP)
As the word Unique implies, your Unique Selling Point stands for anything in your product offering that is unique and helps customers to save time when they want to buy hair extensions, because they already know where to go to (in your online hair store!).
Simply because if you succeed to make clear your hair extensions and wigs are different, better, or cheaper than the rest, you will stand out from the competition and the client will be yours! Make sure your USP can be quickly picked up by your potential customers. For example, by putting your USP in one clear sentence and use it in all your communications with your client.
For example:
¨Give women the ability to maintain a healthy financial life without sacrificing their beauty and personal style¨ or ¨We strive to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations¨.
But how do you identify your Unique Selling Point?
The good thing is, as a start-up hair business, you can choose from the wish list of your target group you prepared on step Four. Start with the hair pieces with the greatest potential, because most people from your target group referred to this type of hair.
The wish list will give you a great overview of all the benefits your clients are looking for when buying hair. Some benefits are more important than the others, for example if your customers prefer a low price but also a broad offering of colors you should be able to rank one benefit as more important than the other. Using the feedback of the interview will help you to prioritize this.
After this you will have a wide-ranging list of benefits your potential clients are looking for and the priorities they consider when they must choose between these benefits. With the lessons learned from your visits to the various online hair shops and hair salons you will be able to consider if these benefits are offered by the competition and at what kind of level of quality or price. This overview will show you which benefits, your target group is looking for or is not serviced or provided by the competitors or provided at an unsatisfactory level.
The last thing to do with this list is to highlight the weak spots of the competitors.
Your challenge and your gain of clients will depend on the fact if you can beat the competitors by offering the benefits they do not offer or at a level below your client’s expectations.
For this you should see if you can beat them on price by buying cheaper from your hair vendor or to work at lower expenses. For example, to work from home.
To have a USP is not enough, the people interested to buy your products need to know your USP also. Make sure you communicate your USP very clear in every interaction with your target clients. A good idea could be to think of a slogan for your hair and beauty company, a one liner that you print on your business card, website, Facebook business page and in the conversations with your clients.
Step seven The Hair! Your Products
If you want to start an online hair store, you are already very much aware of all the aspects and fashion trends of hair extensions and wigs. This step will not be about hair extensions in all the various textures, production, or bonding methods. This will be about how you market your hair extensions as the need of your clients they want to satisfy.
Know your product
We would like to advise you to make sure you know the hair you are going to sell. Fix it, wear it, wash it, lose the weaves, and see how it responds over time. Only then you will be able to advice your clients about the hair. When your client has some complaints, you will be able to analyze more better what might have happened and what might have caused it and the most important lesson, how to solve it!
The products that you are selling, the hair extensions, wigs, and closures, are in fact the need or desire of your client to look good, to look different than on another occasion. If your client is happy with the hair extensions, it is because she feels good! She is less interested in the way the hair is manufactured or shipped from Brazil or India to your shop. So instead of a product you should see the hair extensions as a need-satisfying offer to your client.
As hair extensions are a beauty product, you are not only selling the weft, but also the service of giving advice and sometimes fixing the hair. But you might also deliver supporting material like conditioner or specific soap to maintain the hair. Your clients will ask for it.
Although hair extensions are becoming more and more a convenience product, your clients like to take the time to compare, feel and try the looks. Most people will not buy the hair in an impulse, but only after they are sure the extensions will make them look good. For this it is key to know your client will, before the purchase of the hair, spent a lot of time to compare the offer from other shops, especially if they are buying for the first time. This can be up to seven times! To avoid your clients are only comparing on price, you need to emphasize on your Unique Selling Point.
If you are not selling on price only, it is good to offer something extra, as your client will expect this. More information about the maintenance or the possible hair styles, a 100% money back guarantee or free shipping. The hair extensions can be used in different ways, some people might buy wefts to sew them direct in their hair, others use wefts to cut them in pieces and to attach clip-ins.
So, when thinking of the product your interview with your clients will become of use again. You need to know where your clients want to use the extensions for, are they using them to make clip ins, are they going to dye the hair? It could also help you to suggest some new features they did not know about before, but that could help satisfying their needs in a better manner.
Another important issue is if you sell real human hair, the origin of this hair is a natural donor and therefor it is impossible to reach 100% perfect reproduction of the desired hair. The natural hair extensions may vary in color, length, wave, and availability from a previous shipment.
The price of the product, and availability are issues to consider when selling this in your online hair store. It is very unpleasant if you finally got a customer for some nice real human hair and your supplier just ran out of stock. This risk will not occur in case of synthetic hair, as these are manufactured.
Packaging
The way you present the hair in your online store is also very important, not only to protect the hair extensions when presented to the clients and later when shipped to the final purchaser.
To add some extra value, to communicate to the client your Unique Selling Point. Do not underestimate the importance of the bag you want to put the hair extensions in. That bag is your business card and tells the friend of your client directly where to go to if they want to look as great as their friend with her newly purchased curly extensions. You can also use the packaging to inform your clients this product is new, a new line of hair extensions and be honest who does not like to buy a product that just recently was introduced to the market.
Brand name for your online hair store
If you create a brand name, you help your clients to discover you easier between all these suppliers of hair extensions. And make sure your brand is linked with your Unique Selling Point. If your clients bought your brand before and your product satisfied their needs, they will, without the urge to compare again, buy your brand again. Using a brand name will encourage clients to repeated buying and it will lower your costs as you need to invest less time and money in selling the product to your clients.
How to find a catchy hair brand name
Tip Of course you need to earn that your clients prefer your brand over the others, just to select a name to your products will not be enough. So, invest in, again, your Unique Selling Point.
Step eight Location, location, location, also online
Even if you have the best product, in quality and in price, but when nobody knows about it, not one person will buy.
Although in the age of Internet and courier services the location seems to be less of importance, it remains an essential factor. Not in the least as the clients should be able to meet you and find your shop on the internet.
Find a hair store thanks to referrals
People use more and more different strategies to find the hair and beauty products they need. Google, nut more and more YouTube, the yellow pages, visiting a shopping mall etc. To find a shop selling hair extensions near you is not that difficult. When you use Google, you will find thousands of online hair stores in a matter of less than a second. But people want to be sure the shop is trustworthy, so the most important source for people remains referrals. If you are in need for good quality hair you talk about it, and this can be in real life or through social media. And then your friends or contacts will suggest you, based upon their experience a place to buy the products.
Your clients will tell others about your hair brand
You should put a lot of effort to have your shop been found by potential clients. And even then, just to be seen on the internet is not enough, people should also have a good feeling. So, more important than a good location, is a good relationship with every visitor that succeeded to enter your shop. Regardless of if this visitor will purchase hair extensions, they have your shop, your brand and your USP in the back of their mind when they leave your shop. They are your ambassadors, so even if they do not buy anything today, respect them and remember good chance they might come back!
How to be found online
When you design your online hair store, you need to think of how your ideal client will find you online. This means,
- write appealing product descriptions, use the right keywords your Ideal clients use when searching for the hair
- create a menu structure to allow the search engines and your clients to find what they are looking for in the most efficient way
- think of technical SEO, this is the right structure of the text you use, alt text for the images, using filenames that explain the content of the image
- use your social media to promote your web store
- share your expertise in a blog post, use enough words and images to tell the story
- design a website that loads fast, so users on mobile will enjoy landing and visiting your web store.
- visit your web store regularly to see for broken links, the call to actions you placed and the message your visitors will see the first time they land on a page.
Online hair store but also offline
If you sell hair online, you have the choice to offer your clients a pickup service or to ship the hair extensions. Take your time to select and compare the various post and courier services. It is not only the price of the shipment that matters, but also the information they provide to track your shipment and the reliability of the communicated time of arrival of your parcels. If the mail has a delay, big chance the client will blame you for that, although this is of course completely out of your control. An appreciated service is to share the tracking information with your client, this will reassure them the shipment they paid for is on its way.
Now you know
- what your clients want
- what you are going to do better than the competition,
- how you will promote the product
- how you will wrap it and
- how people will find your online hair store
Everything in line with your Unique Selling Point . But before you can open your shop or salon you need to sit behind your desk again. It is time for some mysterious work, you are going to predict the future!
Step nine – Time to predict the future
Do not forget the bookkeeping
First, you should do what you are good at and that is selling hair extensions. But you are also responsible for your bookkeeping and tax return, so you need to invest some time to study about these topics. You can, if the money allows it, hire a bookkeeper for the operational side of accounting and the tax return, but you should be able to understand at last the basic rules. You should know your figures to avoid surprises. These rules differ per country, so check with your local chamber of commerce.
Think one step ahead selling hair
Next to this, you should be able to start developing something that predicts the future. If you foresee an increase in potential clients soon, or even better if you know the hair products potential buyers are interested in you can anticipate. You will be able to influence this potential buyer by special actions, coupons or anything that might influence their purchasing behavior.
And you can adapt your plans to buy certain type of hair and avoid too much stock of hair extensions that perhaps will not be bought for a long time.
Use your Store Data
How to make this work? As mentioned before, in general, people review a product or visit a store seven times before they buy something. So, the client that bought the ¨Natural Color Hand weft hair extensions¨ today, has been checking them seven time before, perhaps not only in your shop, but there is a good chance she has been reviewing you and your shop before.
Thanks to the internet, thanks to tools like Google Analytics and the analytical page of Facebook you will be able to learn what kind of products, items published on your website and postings on Facebook attract people and the ones that does not. With Google analytics for example you will be able to see what parts of your website or web shop attracts the attention of most visitors, you will also be able to see, over time, the cities your visitors come from, what webpage is interesting for them and what makes them leave your site right away (bouncing). You are even in the position to see exactly which specific products is the most favorite even if it is not bought.
Analytics will also allow you to see how many new and returning visitors are visiting your online hair store. If people do not return, your product offering needs some rethinking. If you have a high percentage of returning visitors but low level of sales, you should check the price level from the competition. Your hair is attractive, and people like to review your products, but your conditions (price, shipping, payment) might be a hurdle to buy.
If you regularly take note of this kind of information, next to your sales figures, you are building up a great knowledge of the behavior of your clients. And with this knowledge you will be able to predict their behavior if you promote a certain article, or if another event occurs. You will be able to predict the future!
This kind of predictions only work if you have a longer time of observations and significant number of visitors. So be careful in interpreting this data if you just started with your web shop. You need some time to get reliable and sufficient information you can work with.
And now you are ready, time for the last step!
Step Ten – Open for business!
Finally, after all the preparation, it is time to tell the world you opened your online hair store. Make sure the world knows and organize a great event to celebrate the opening. People should speak about that new hair shop in town. And do not forget to let me know so I can help you to let the world know, through the website and social media platforms!
You know who your clients are, you know what you do better or cheaper than the competition and you can predict the future. This should be the key to success.
Yes, but… there are more steps to take to grow your online hair store.
As the market changes, as people change, the trends evolve over time you must repeat all these steps every now and then. You should, except for selling you hair extensions keep on listening to your clients. Especially with the client who had a complaint or that you have not seen for a long time. Keep an eye on the market and keep on inventing new Unique Selling Points.
I wish you good luck and I would love to hear from you how your online hair store is going on! I will support you! Check the products we offer to help you.