On Launching An Australian-Based Online Science Gift Shop
Hey, My name is Peter, and I’m one of the founders of More 2 Science. M2S is an Australian-based pure play online retail science gift shop. Our purpose is to make science gifting fun, bring extraordinary service to the science gift niche, and help people sneakily give awesome gifts that encourage the gift recipient in their learning, creativity, and imagination.
Our team is on fire about sharing the idea that when you give a gift of knowledge it can last a lifetime, even long after the initial physical gift is forgotten the knowledge gained by the gift remains.
Some of our flagship science gifts in Australia at the moment are the brilliant range of science exploration products from UK brand Thames & Kosmos who design and make some of the world's most interesting chemistry, robotics, engineering, and general science kits. We also have a full range of the Australian brand Discover Science. As well as the most popular STEM kits from Wonders of Learning.
Although the More 2 Science business only started in 2021 our local team has been helping people find awesome gifts online for over 20+ years through the multiple other businesses we manage. Since starting M2S we’ve experienced growth through word of mouth, organic & PPC traffic.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I’ve personally always had a deep interest in learning how things work, growing up in an Australian bush setting, I was the kid who was most often pulling things apart and (sometimes) putting them back together.
My life journey saw me move straight from high school to a big worldwide manufacturing company, then to small IT consulting, then to freelance IT contracting, then to writing & building eCommerce software that I used to launch our first eCommerce business.
I remember the day when someone purchased something off my first website, I think my thoughts were something like “Wow, someone has actually trusted me enough to charge their credit card and send them goods across the country.” What a feeling that was.
That first site was a simple javascript based shopping cart script that emailed me the order details when an order was submitted - I don’t think it was even a secure site. I’ve certainly learned a lot since then.
More 2 Science is a new joint venture between myself, my wife, and two Australian scientists. We also have an additional four awesome people on our team that also help run our two other online retail businesses, Tasnique & CoolThings Australia.
How do we do it all? Well, for one thing, my wife is processed crazy, always looking for better and faster ways to pick, pack & dispatch, and run the businesses.
Our guiding principle with all our businesses is to always give people who shop with us an extraordinary experience. It's more than transactional with us, we are not and will never be the size of Amazon, we love to create space to reach out to people, help them over the phone and be curious when we are chatting to them about who they are gifting for.
When my wife and I were initially thinking about the idea of a new business to add to our group it made sense to team up with our two long-term scientist friends to launch a dedicated science gifting store. We have known them for over 20 years and so we thought now was the right time to disrupt the science gifting space.
We launched our business into the science gifting space for multiple reasons, the first being that we know inside and out the gifting space from experience with our other business, and the second because our idea of “gifting knowledge that lasts” really connected with the test group of people that we shared this concept with.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and building your website
When building the More 2 Science website, we absolutely knew we wanted a clean, uncluttered, easy-to-use design/layout and, most importantly, a great customer experience.
I’d really love to say that we hired a stellar 5-star design company and went through multiple iterations of Figma and Adobe XD layouts with a total investment of 100k but the real truth is that we simply went on the hunt for really great functional eCommerce example sites then started with a base template and got to work implementing our version of those designs one idea at a time.
Here’s what we started with:
And here’s what we launched with:
Never let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of launching something.
Our eCommerce design process wasn’t super sophisticated, it mainly consisted of a bunch of internal emails sent back and forth identifying features and ideas that our team found helpful.
We also took screenshots of sites we liked and made comments on the functionality that we found helpful and guided the sale in the right direction.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Launching More 2 Science before Christmas was important because it's the biggest gifting event for all of our businesses.
We didn’t have a super big budget so our launch consisted of a special email to the people who had purchased from our existing businesses in the past. This gave us a great boost in sales during our launch at a low cost. I guess you could say we “bootstrapped” our launch too.
We invested heavily in getting our product data feed connected to the Google Shopping network, which also impacted our launch sales.
This:
Turns into this:
We designed the theme for our website internally using a base template and developed all the custom theme code ourselves.
More 2 Science is a truly bootstrapped business, all start-up costs were financed directly by the four founders with no outside assistance from investors or banking institutions.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
The biggest piece of advice I give to aspiring e-commerce store founders is to never let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of launching your business.
Our shop theme wasn’t even finished when we launched, it was good but not certainly completed. We didn’t even have a proper category menu (see image below) in place.
Most of the things we were missing at launch have been completed now, but an online store is never finished, we are always working on making it better for the people we serve.
The steps we have worked on to increase traffic and sales have mostly been centered around working with the people we already know.
We’ve reached out to companies and organizations that we’ve worked with over the last 20+ years to let them know about our new business and because they know & trust us we’ve been able to work jointly on promotions and giveaways to increase sales and traffic to More 2 Science.
At the moment, we are focused on SEO for growing traffic to our site, and improving our reach in organic search results by targeting eCommerce category-based search queries that match our range of products.
I was an early participant in Pat Walls Lean SEO course, the part I found most helpful was the idea of creating MVCs - we use that methodology to test out potential eCommerce category pages.
What I find super fun is using SEO to work on growing traffic to individual category pages, especially when you start seeing impressions growing up and to the right. Whoooo Hooooooo!
We research ideas by looking at existing science eCommerce stores and use tools like ahrefs to identify possible categories to create pages. This research also assists us with our PPC efforts because we know what category terms to use within our Google Shopping product descriptions to improve the visibility of our visual shopping ads.
Always take conversion optimization recommendations as just that, as recommendations. You’ll never know what will help your customers make a buying decision unless you test.
We purchased the excellent conversion checklist by Jaka Smid, which helped us a lot to prioritize conversion improvements to our shop theme.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
More 2 Science is still quite a new business, most of our work during the first half of the year didn’t really show great signs of bringing results. However now (July) we are starting to see the fruit of all the groundwork we’ve been doing. Hint: SEO is a long game.
We are not profitable yet, but our plan is to be profitable by the end of the year. We are currently converting 2.65% of visitors to customers sitewide across all our traffic channels which we are pleased about but we are always looking to improve this.
Our distribution model is pretty simple, we have a warehouse located in Tasmania, Australia, and stock everything we list on our site locally. We have not set ourselves up to dropship direct from suppliers to our customers, as this would mean we no longer have control over making sure that orders are shipped quickly and have been well packed.
Amazon isn’t a channel we would ever use here in Australia. I cannot go into more detail about my thoughts on Amazon in case I start ranting…
Long term our goal is for More 2 Science to become the go-to place for science and knowledge-based gifting in Australia, this means constant innovation and never-ending improvement.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Probably the number one poor decision I’ve made and learned from over the last 6 months is having a lack of attention on the business.
I know I am sometimes afflicted with shiny object syndrome. I love to be involved in start-up but know I need a good team around me to keep the momentum going and things moving forward.
I’ve learned that hiring a good EA (Executive Assistant) is critical for someone like me so in February I finally hired one.
Can’t believe I hadn’t done this sooner!!
One piece of advice I would give to startup founders is to get yourself an awesome Executive Assistant. You might be able to hire one offshore but I love that my EA is in the same office as me. I’m instantly able to flick items across and they are able to overhear what's going on in my world and help me with the tasks I know I shouldn’t be doing.
If you haven’t got an EA, stop reading and go and make the moves you need to make to hire one now!
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Our eCommerce platform of choice for all our businesses is Maropost Commerce Cloud. We use Zapier to automate a lot of our business, from posting to social media to automating our email systems with data from our eCommerce platform.
We also use Google Sheets a lot, and when I say “a lot” I mean a lot. Google Sheets makes collaborating within our team when working with large product datasets super easy.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Right at the moment, I’m listening to an Audio book called Product-Led SEO.
by Eli Schwartz which is more about the philosophy of SEO than specific SEO tactics. It speaks about turning your SEO efforts into products that connect with your core offering. Real interesting stuff!
I try to make listening to books a priority when going for a walk or when I know I have a long drive ahead of me. If you struggle to sit down with a book then I’d encourage you to give listening to books a go. I use an app called Scribd.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Here are some of my top tips for people just starting out:
- Planning is good, just don’t get stuck in the planning phase and never launch.
- Your first business logo design will not be your last so don’t spend too much time agonizing over it. Yes, make it great - simple is best - if people have a hard time reading it then it's not a good logo.
- Your website will never be finished, especially if you are in the eCommerce space so it's best to get it done so it's good enough and then keep on making it better.
- Always take conversion optimization recommendations as just that, as recommendations. You’ll never know what will help your customers make a buying decision unless you test. Doing an A/B split test is easier than ever using free tools like Google Optimize.
- Never let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of launching something.
- If you are a founder then hire an Executive assistant to help you do all the stuff you shouldn’t be doing (Business Administration, filing, phone calls, emails, categorizing products, etc) - you will gain space to focus on what you as the founder should be focussing on.
Where can we go to learn more?
For more information about More 2 Science please visit our website.
More 2 Science on Social Media:
To reach out to me personally feel welcome to connect over on my LinkedIn profile.
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