Image via CrunchBase

If you read our recent article titled, “Social Shopping Websites,” then you are aware of the benefits of social shopping.  Imagine you are a shopper looking for the perfect pair of diamond jewelry earrings to add to your fine jewelry collection.  You could drop the key phrase: “diamond jewelry earrings” into Google and start sifting through the thousands of sites that pop up in their search results, spend hours on random websites researching and comparing quality, pricing, and customer service reputation, or you could head to a social shopping site like Kaboodle and save a lot of time by reading the reviews from your fellow social shoppers.  Social shopping is a new way for consumers to gather information and rate products that they want to purchase, or have purchased.  It takes the guesswork out of Internet shopping, and because it is easier that using search engines and can provide more accurate results, it is no doubt the future of e-commerce.  Today we will explain ways that you can harness social shopping sites to help promote your jewelry website.

Jewelry websites have an advantage over other products in terms of marketing through social shopping sites; these sites are generally related to the fashion industry.  The most popular social shopping sites which focus on the fashion industry include: Polyvore, Kaboodle, and ThisNext.  There are two major benefits for you as a jewelry storeowner to utilize these three sites and others like them.  First, you can gain insight into the wants and desires of your potential clients, and second you can market your products to those most likely to buy them.

First, create your own social shopping profiles to research your clients. On these sites, users create personal profiles that afford various ways to engage in social shopping with their friends.  They can create wish lists which itemize all the clothing and accessories they long to have; they can create style profiles which detail some of their favorite items and how to coordinate them; they can highlight specific products or trends that they find interesting and want to share. By examining the choices users make with these various social shopping site features, you can get a good read on the types of jewelry your clients want.

Second, create your own profiles so you can showcase your work to a targeted group of people.  Through your various social shopping profiles you can market your own jewelry website.  The friends that you gather will have access to the items you add to your wish lists, style profiles, and product alerts.  For example, you could create an entire look complete with jewelry from your own website.  This shows your potential clients ways they can coordinate your jewelry with various outfits.  Those who want the new Juicy Couture jump suit can see how great it looks paired with your gold hoop earrings.  You can also create pairings of your products and show potential clients which earrings match which bracelets, and so forth.  Be creative with your combinations and show the social shoppers out there all the benefits of owning your jewelry.

Encourage your friends and clients to showcase your products in their profiles.  This is another great way that the people close to you can help your jewelry website succeed.  You do not have to be the only social shopper promoting your jewelry; your friends can do it too.  Encourage them to use your products when possible in the various wish lists, style profiles, and product promotions that they create.  The more buzz about your jewelry, the better!  Need more tips on marketing your site?  Contact Websites for Jewelers today!

Related articles

• 7 Social Shopping Sites that worth your time (seoservicesgroup.com)
• Why Facebook Could Dominate the Next Generation of Ecommerce (jagdidit.com)
• Nordstrom Buys Social Shopping Site HauteLook (webguild.org)
• Kaboodle’s Chief Marketing Officer Talks Social Shopping [Interview] (socialtimes.com)

Nicole Barr is the brand name for a company that manufacturers gold and silver enamel jewelry. When they contacted Websites for Jewelers towards the end of last year, they were considering a redesign of their website.

Their old website was designed more like a catalog site than a site that could be actively used by their retail customers to browse and order their jewelry online. Even though they did have pages that showed all of their jewelry, the experience was like flipping through a catalog with many small images of jewelry and some basic text about each item. There was no ability to see larger versions of each image, the text details for each item was limited, and you could not point, click and order like you could in most well designed shopping-cart e-commerce enabled site.

The new website uses a streamlined navigation set to allow both consumers and B2B customers to easily navigate through Nicole Barr’s products. The navigation was developed to allow visitors to get to specific types of products much faster than before and to focus specifically on what they were looking for.

For the B2B customer, once they have found the types of items that they are looking for, they can click any item and see a large and very detailed version of the jewelry accompanied by more text details than had appeared in the previous site.

One of the most important improvements over the old site is the ability for B2B customers to order Nicole Barr jewelry using our shopping-cart order system. All items can now be ordered with a simple point and click.

The new nicolebarr.com website not only represents a tremendous improvement over their old site, it represents an opportunity for retailers to purchase and resell a type of jewelry that is rarely seen these days. If you’re a retailer and looking for something completely unique to offer your customers, make sure to visit nicolebarr.com and register to browse and shop for Nicole Barr jewelry.

Sure, brick and mortar jewelry stores will certainly be around for years to come, but studies show that more and more shoppers are browsing not among your glass cases, but on the World Wide Web instead.

According to a study released by Spending Pulse, a report from MasterCard, this past holiday season saw online shopping increase by a whopping fifteen percent!  This was in fact, the busiest online shopping season EVER, seeing shoppers spend roughly $36 billion between October 31^st and December 24^th.

Let’s face it, electronic commerce has EXPLODED!  And why not?  What is better than shopping from the comfort of your own home?

Even those who are not interested in selling jewelry online and prefer the face-to-face interaction with their clients must take advantage of electronic commerce as a marketing tool.  Many high-end jewelers are using the web to showcase their product and increase awareness of their brand.

Take for example, the websites of luxury jewelers JB Star and William Goldberg.  While you cannot purchase their pieces directly online, they are reaching more potential clients by placing stunning images of their jewelry on their websites for the world to view.  These images, along with their blogging practices and SEO techniques, have drastically increased the awareness of their brand.

Luxury jewelry retailer Bulgari has also seen the advantages of increasing their web presence.  They have recently teamed up with software developers to create 3D interactive applications for Apple products iPhone and iPad, which allows their customers to fully explore how it would be to own and wear one of their Magsonic watches, through high resolution images and consumer interaction.

Today’s consumers are tech savvy and they will even check out a jeweler’s website BEFORE stopping by to browse in person.  It is most likely that those of you with the most online visitors will also see the most in person visitors as well.

If you want to catch the fast speeding train of ecommerce and are considering increasing your web presence or selling jewelry online, here are some of the benefits you can expect:

-       Your Store is Always Open:

This past Christmas Eve, after all the stores closed, retailers saw an incredible increase of 42% of online shoppers.  When you have an online store, or even market your products online, your clients can shop all hours of the day, every day of the year.  While you are vacationing with your family or snoozing away, thousands can be browsing your products.

-       Extremely Low Overhead

If you decide to try exclusively selling jewelry online, you won’t have the need for a store, or many employees.  Unlike a web business, in order to run a brick and mortar jewelry store you must pay sales people, maintenance people, and high rental fees.  Neither of these is necessary when your jewelry case becomes a computer monitor, and you can save loads of money.

-       Less Hassle

Brick and mortar stores don’t just cost more money than an online store, but they take more looking after as well.  Landlords, property taxes, leaky roofs, and interior design issues all disappear with an online store.

-       Freedom

When selling jewelry online, you can check in on your store from anywhere you find WiFi, and you never have to worry about who will open and close the doors each night.

-       Inexpensive Marketing

A television commercial, magazine ad, or mailer can never give you the broad reach of the internet, and at a much lower cost!  A website afford you all the ad space you need to truly market your products.

Related articles

• Samuels Jewelers Launches All New E-Commerce Website (prweb.com)
• Rogers Jewelers Launches All New E-Commerce Portal to Enhance Customer Satisfaction (prweb.com)