Spotlight on Local Business...

Online shopping is more popular than ever. And for mums balancing work and family, the internet has opened up the opportunity to present a professional shop front without the expense or time commitment of a high street store.

Sisters Joanna and Elizabeth from Kings Hill set up an online baby shop Prepmybaby in autumn 2011. They sell fun, innovative, organic and award-winning products for babies and mums, carefully selected by mums.

We spoke to them to find out more about their business and to gain their tips and advice for other would-be internet entrepreneurs.

Tell us how the business idea for Prepmybaby came about?
As sisters we had often discussed the idea of starting a business together, but up until now the right time had not presented itself. It was only when we found ourselves pregnant with due dates a few days apart that we began to seriously consider pooling our skills! Our boys were born just 2 days apart and after doing lots of baby shopping together we both struggled to find things we really liked, or that were just that bit different from what we saw on most high streets.

How do you decide what products to stock?

We settled upon the notion of ‘organic if possible’, simply because this is best for new baby skin and the environment. Lots of time was spent scouring the internet and making contact with suppliers. We also visited some of the London Trade Shows to further research what might be best for prepmybaby. We also talked to mums about their favourite must haves for their children and what they think is missing from the market. For most it was easy as we just fell in love with so much of what we saw and managed to road test a few items on unsuspecting new mums!

What is a typical day for you at Prepmybaby?
We keep up with the conversations on Twitter and Facebook as we have found these are invaluable for knowledge sharing and increasing traffic to our site. There are some great support networks out there for mum’s in business and small businesses in general and its great to see what everyone else is doing. We regularly tweet and update our followers each day on what we are doing, if we have any new products or are promoting anything like sales etc. We keep on top of the website by updating our blog and are always scanning the internet for new product ideas to add to our site. Then there are the general day to day admin duties of processing orders and paying the bills! All this of course whilst feeding and changing the kids!!

As your business is 100% internet based, how important is it to consider search engine optimisation?
This is very important to us as our website is our shop window. We have set up lots of google analytics tools to help us collect data on how our site is functioning and are continuously updating key words and adding links to improve our site performance. We check the analytics daily and do all we can to increase traffic to our site as hits mean sales. The challenge has been getting google to recognise our site and for us to stay up there in the listings. Its an ever changing world and you have to keep on top of it by making sure your site is optimised to its absolute full potential so it is ranked among the best….hopefully ours will be there one day!