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|  Make sure it's viable, don't waste your time, your effort, your moneyHi everyone, Rob from Parade Antiques shares his incredible journey on SellingOnlineToday! Some thoughts from the interview "The online sales started about 5 years ago when we went into a family run antique shop and started selling online for them. Parade Antiques has been a shop in Plymouth since '97 so it has been going for a little while but they didn't have an online presence so we saw a need to be filled." "It was myself and the oldest son of the family, we have known each other since we were 4 years old. It was around the time of both of us coming out of university and not wanting to move further up country in order to use what we had been learning. To stay local, we thought we would try helping out the family selling the bits online and it worked. Very quickly it was apparent it was a model that was going to work." "Both of us were in Science." "So long as you've got the right attitude towards the work I suppose it doesn't matter what it's doing." "The shop has been full of one off unique items and that is not really the easiest thing to retail online." "To a certain extent the photography is the most important thing of all because the way that we work we now have 3 or 4 different shops or art galleries and we sell them through commission basis. So we demand a product description and a price but it is the photography itself that really sells the item. The person isn't in the shop with the item is his hand so you have to picture every angle, every dent, every chip, every aspect of the piece to make sure that they can see from the other side of the world as best as possible." "So long as you can get up nice and square so you are not taking a weird wiggly angle picture. The art itself is meant to be viewed so they come across well in the pictures it's the details that are the issue." "We decided that with Amazon, because we are one off items, the nature of Amazon is selling multiples rather than just selling a one off thing. The amount of time and effort it takes to get on to Amazon and list just one item to be sold just once." "We list to eBay.co.uk but we have so many products online now it is worth being a becoming a featured shop which gives you cheaper international site visibility so we do sell over the world through eBay." "You have to have a 14-day return period but we offer a 30-day so they can take their time, pour over it, show it to experts if they want to be sure." "We have a large amount of packaging going out on a weekly basis and all of it goes fully insured and fully tracked." "We have a small office where we have everything we need to picture, list and post and item so there really is no extra work required from the dealer other than this is an item I would like to sell, this is what it is, and this is how much I want for it." "I would like to spend more time on social media to be honest but seeing there isn't that many of us here, I think social media could be a full time job for a person just running it for one business but that is not always viable. The approach that we've taken is that you have to be a bit quirky, you have to be a bit cool." "Pinterest is very useable, Instagram not so much." "We have tried Google Plus, we tried Stumble Upon, we tried many over the years to make sure we don't miss out on anything." "Twitter we use slightly differently to Facebook. I think Facebook is a bit longer lasting you get to follow it whereas Twitter we use it as a product feed." "We have a YouTube channel but we have used it more for gimmickier videos rather than product introductions. It was something we thought long and hard about and we haven't written it off yet." Best Advice: "Don't waste your time, your effort, your money unless you can see it paying off in the end because you can throw years of your life into something and that doesn't necessarily mean it will work. If the idea is no good, then you are not going to come out the end." What do they offer? Parade Antiques offer a wide range of stock including artwork, china, glass and ceramics, antique furniture, silver and jewellery, coins and medals, toys, advertising, railway and motoring, maritime, ethnic items, entertainment memorabilia, science fiction and much more. Listen online: http://www.sellingonlinetoday.com/ Listen on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ End
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