Introduction
People are sending gifts for any purpose. Gifting has become a new trend, even in corporate world, businesses are gifting their employees for many occasions. But sometimes finding the best gift become difficult. This has made gift basket an attractive option, gift baskets can be easily curated according to the occasion. Selling gift baskets is a highly rewarding and fun business. There is a respectable profit margin potential. As popular as the gift basket business is , it is still wide open and sales opportunities are limitless. It doesn’t require a huge capital investment. But it does require thoughtful planning and a wide marketing arena.
Steps to follow to start a gift basket business
1. Do your Market Research and Customer Profiling
The market research is an essential part of your business. This help you to know the need for the market. At this step you look at other similar business , what they provide and what will set apart your gift basket business. There is a huge competition in the gift basket business. What will set you aside from your other competitors is how well you understand the market. Here is where HBF Direct can help you, our market research services help struts business to identify growth opportunities and build a competitive strategy based on deep understanding of the overall market and target customers.
At HBF Direct , there are sector experts and consultants excel at analysing the underlying data and capturing the useful details out of it. HBF Direct provides customised research facilities as per your needs which will enable you to make a great customer base, which is most important for gift basket business.
2. Understand Investment required for gift basket business
This is one of the essential steps to start any kind of business. You have to prepare quite a budget and figure out how much you need. If you don’t have all the money you need to decide what you can do without. What you spend may vary as you already have some items such as a computer. You also need to add the cost of business license, utility deposits, insurance and any legal and accounting service. Prices for supplies and equipment will be largely for
- Speciality equipment: work tables, crafting tools
- Retail space: if you don’t operate from your home
- Materials: sourcing products for your gift basket
- Shipping and packing cost: there is a great deal in the gift basket business of selling your gift to a large base of customer that include selling online. This would incur a shipping cost.
3. Make the Best Gift Basket Combo
Making the best gift basket involves thinking about which type of baskets you want to offer your customers. You can offer one type of basket or combinations of the basket. This involves pre-made gift baskets, they help in creating a base for your business. By preparing these baskets you can present to your customers the type of gift baskets you prepare. Then you can also choose to prepare a customs gift basket for your customers, this will give them a large variety to choose from the list of items you have.
Make a combination of these two types of gift baskets gives an advantage to the business in capturing a large customer base.
4. Manage Supply Chain & Outsourcing Actvities
When starting a business you need to look at all the steps you have to perform before starting a successful business. Looking at all the steps you need to consider if you acquire the knowledge to running all crucial steps on your own or would you require outside help. That is you have to look at functions in your business that you would outsource. This functions mainly includes registration of the business, doing market research and doing marketing. Doing these functions on your own may require extra time and cost due to lack in knowledge.
You need to plan the channel of supply, many businesses these days are operating online. Commerce business operates at a lower cost as you can save a lot by not opening a retail store. But you can always operate in these two supply chains simultaneously. A lot of brands these days are doing business in these two chains simultaneously. This creates trust among customers and they get more options to explore.
5. Do Business Registration & Make a Website
Now the most important step involves business registration and taxation issues. This requires some bunch of paper works and may get hefty sometime. Here is when HBF Direct can help you to do your business registration process in a smooth way and in the least cost possible. HBF Direct possess the skills and team for doing this work at a fast pace.
You will need a website for your business. If you’re selling online, this is already taken care of. But, storefront businesses need to have a website, too.
The website should offer different features to customers, giving them the feature to explore a different type of gift baskets you offer, the about us section, the location and contact information of the business. The website should be available in top searches for the customer who is exploring the option of buying gift baskets. The website should be easy to use and should have some high-quality product photos. Using a low-cost web builder and hosting service is the easiest way to build a website for your business
HBF direct has some great plan and low-cost web builders, that can help you to achieve this at the lowest cost. HBF direct can help you create the business domain and host your website. Visit HBF direct limited website for more information.
6. Apply Latest Marketing Strategies for Sales
The next important step with a startup business is marketing. Once the website is set and you have done all steps above. You need to spread the word about your business to help customers to know about your existence. Marketing of product would require combining both online and offline modes of marketing. Online advertising requires the building of the website and digital advertising. Marketing as becomes and important aspect of businesses these days. With so many startups available in every field, creates a lot of competition among business and to stand out from all these competitions you require a good marketing aspect in your business.
There are many social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where you effectively advertise your products. Instagram can be a good choice looking at its visual aspect, you can easily advertise and Facebook also provides low-cost advertising, through which you can reach a large proportion of customers. Creating an account on Instagram is important and providing specific links to customers for buying products with ease. But these handlers need everyday engagement to attract a large number of customers and followers. This requires partnering with influencers. This may not be your specialisation area, but here also HBF Direct can come in handy and help you build a good customer base. They can help you increase your network.
Conclusion
The gift basket business has lots of scope of entering and earning high margins in profits. With a market like that of India which possess a large number and a variety of buyers can benefit you in a number of ways but you need to a write business plan for enabling you to achieve your dreams. Having the right tools and guidance can help you in a number of ways. Joining hand with HBF direct can help you grow and start your business in a better way.
Hello,
I’m Nitasha Gupta thinking to start my own gift basket business. Is there any help or suggestions that you can provide me on how to start with my own business idea?
Yes Nitasha ,
we can help you , lets contact on 9971337447 or [email protected]