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Business > Entrepreneurialism > Greatrussiangifts.com Grows with Prostores!
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Article rating : 0.00, 0 votes. Author : David
Today, entering the online retail gifts market in the USA seems like an impossible task which is growing even more difficult day by day. However, if you are innovative, creative, have an entrepreneurial spirit and the drive to start your own business, you can achieve great success. This short article will highlight how one small company did the near impossible… achieved great success competing in this difficult global online marketplace. Greatrussiangifts.com faced extraordinary challenges from the onset of the business in 2002; today it is the number one ranked internet Russia gifts store.
Greatrussiangifts.com has always had a mission of providing authentic and unique Russian gifts to customers worldwide, while providing extraordinary customer service and a reliable and secure online shopping experience.Sound easy?Well think again.When David and Irina first created their first website www.GreatRussianGifts.com back in 2002, they had more questions than answers on everything. Probably the most important question they worked on was how to organize and setup a global supply chain that stretches from Central and Eastern Russia to the USA, and make this reliable enough to build a business around.Getting fragile, expensive, and one-of-a-kind Russian gift items safety to the USA in sufficient quantities on-time was a very difficult challenge, especially handmade gifts that can take months to make in Russia.
The Solution: A combination of risk taking, common sense, and a long-term focus led greatrussiangifts.com to correctly conclude that all of the Russian gift products would have to be pre-staged and inventoried in the USA in order to build the credibility and reputation of customer service the company would require to compete in the hyper-competitive online gift market. Sourcing suppliers in Russia was the best option due to the ability to obtain products at a substantial lower cost than from other middle men or importers. The company took nearly 6 – 9 months to find excellent and capable suppliers in Russia; at the same time, the company struggled to organize its online store.There were many challenges on all fronts, but the strategy proved itself and within the first 12 – 18 months, the company was able to achieve moderate success.
The company started obtaining expertise on directly importing Russian items to the USA by leveraging the expertise of large international freight forwarders.David and Irina ask lots of questions on everything, and eventually found logistics experts in Russia that could provide additional help in preparing shipments, creating necessary export and import documents, and shipping items directly from Russia.This local help greatly reduced the logistics cost of the company to sustainable levels.The lesson here: use experts when required, learn from those experts, then become an expert if the operation is critical to the success of your business.By leverage local help and expertise – for example, greatrussiangifts.com quickly learned from the Russian experts what items are taxable upon export from Russia and what is not, and also what can be imported duty free in the USA.
GreatRussiangifts.com continues to build on this success by also focusing
on providing excellent low cost service to each and every customer.Greatrussiangifts.com leverages the excellent services available in the USA (the U.S. Postal Service for example) to compete with even the largest gift companies and they continue to receive the highest customer service rankings of any Russian gift web site on the internet.
Superior service does not end with international logistics and local deliveries in the USA, greatrussiangifts.com also sourced superior web hosting and design solutions that allow the company to track inventory levels at the item level in real time.This is critical for a small store that stocks more than 1500 unique hand-made items.Stock outs and backorders were not options due to the unique nature of the Russian nesting dolls and other gifts, not to mention the fact that the supply chain was more than 9000 miles long and started in Russia. Prostores web technology was critical to the success of greatrussiangifts.com.
We always understood the importance of the worldwide online exposure and professional presence on the web that provides a great value to customers throughout the world. We also knew how difficult and uncomfortable it may be for the Russian dolls and lacquer box collectors to travel to Russia in order to find those exclusive and hard-to-findpieces for their preciouscollections.We turned this challenge into our online niche and our advantage.Today, we continue to build our store and our gift selections by continuously working to find new high quality suppliers.
Over the course of 6 years, www.GreatRussianGifts.com has grown tremendously and has surpassed our highest expectations. However, Irina and I could have not done it alone. Our customers along with our dedicated suppliers, talented Russian artists, professional business partners help us succeed.Today, www.GreatRussianGifts.com delivers nesting dolls, matryoshkas, Faberge jewelry and other Russian gifts to many happy customers in more than 20 countries worldwide. Over 1500 unique gifts are always in stock; and these gifts are sold with a 30-Day guarantee and a no questions asked return policy. We continue to build our brand and our service offering to our customers by offering same day shipping, free shipping on all US domestic orders over $50.00, 24/7/365 phone and email customer support. Those are just a few things that our customers really appreciate and precisely how we achieved a 5-star ranking on Shopping.com three years in a row. We also work continuously to expand our product line by handpicking only the most beautiful and highest quality items available in Russia.
Advice for others:Plan carefully; leverage the experts and the free help that are around you, have fun, choose excellent technology and keep your focus on your customers!
"Poka poka" (goodbye) and best of luck to you.
David and Irina own Greatrussiangifts.com and build this company over the course of 6 years. David and Irina combined their unqiue language skills, business expertise, logistics knowledge and entrepreneurial spirit to start the company from scratch. David and Irina reside in Phoenix Arizona.
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