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<< Back to Interviews Homepage Download MP3 version of podcast Gareth: What's you opinion on products online when people are picking a new business - do you feel that it makes more sense to be a niche business or to offer a wide range of products? John: My opinion on that is that I like to be good at what I do. I'm very specialist in printers supplies essentially, ink cartridges, toner cartridges, etcetera etcetera... and the more you squeeze the people the less the knowledge becomes, so all you say we're in a niche market, it's a huge niche market, but to have a business that's gonna grow - I mean, I want to be £5-£10 million pounds business in 5 years time and to have opportunity the opportunity of achieving that you need a niche that's big to support that, which certainly printer consumables is.
John: Can you ask me that in 5 years time! I honestly believe that I can achieve that online. I do not want to go into bricks and mortar shops - I've looked at this to some length - because you get to certain stage and you start thinking "How do we kick ourselves forward?" We are good at what we do on the Internet. The internet makes it very efficient in terms of processing orders, cheaping orders, etc and then you start looking at do you go into a bricks and mortar situation - I do not think that I need to, I honestly believe that I can generate a level of sales over the internet and maintain a small business, a small ethos, small business management, mentality, which is customers focused, and you know, customer driven.
John: It's absolutely critical. Again, we put a lot of effort into reassuring customers that we are a real business - we are ab ISO 900 acreditted business and we have various things on the website to reassure customers that we do what we say and service them.
John: I think for high ticket items, pay per click it's a good route to market. You have to say Google in the first quarter of this year (20007) nearly matched ITV advertising revenue and in the last quarter of last year (2006) they exceeded Channel 4's advertising revenue. Now, they haven't taken traditional TV advertising off these guys, they've generated a whole new stream of advertising revenue. But the bottom line is I don't think people understand the benefits of it. With traditional offline advertising, like newspapers, radios,
TV, it's difficult to major a response. But with online advertising
like Pay Per Click you have a very accurate response. So if your
running a campaign you must, you must, run the ROI
calculator. You must understand what it's costing you and what
the returns are and no other advertising medium gives you that power
- pay per click does so use it!
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