How your gift business can compete with amazon

Selling gifts is a hard business. There’s plenty of competition offline and online. Big retailers are selling products for less than your buying price. Everything can be bought online and customers can compare prices instantly.

But there’s this one advantage, that most online sellers and the big ones don’t have – and probably never will: personal service. Online, things are fast, easy and anonymous.

But I don’t think that this is what the customers in our industry want!
Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that even online sellers can give a personal service, but it’s much harder.

Customers are looking for products with a personal touch. They want to feel the gifts in their hands and preferably want a nice story to evolve around it. That’s why the Rose of Jericho is mostly sold at markets and in small gift shops. People have the time to pass by, they’re in browsing AND shopping mode. And there are plenty of legends, prayers and symbolisms told about these remarkable plants!

Plenty of entrepreneurs are building their companies around automatic processes with the same service for everyone. Everything is the same, not one thing can be custom made.

But we – you and me – can. If one of my customers wants to get only small Rose of Jericho plants, I can do that! If they’d like to get my DELUXE plants, they can choose which stone they’d like to have inside – a product that can’t be bought somewhere else, especially not for this price (fun fact: if no one else sells your item, your price is always the best price 😉  If one of my customers wants to sell his own brand of Incense, I can do that – as my Incense is being packaged in my own facilities, which gives me a lot of freedom and the possibility to make a custom brand packaging!

You can do that too. amazon won’t. Your shop is unique – amazon isn’t.
You can build on this advantage.

But how can we support those advantages? By selling products that are unique – where each one of them looks a bit different. Products that are difficult to sell online and by the masses. Products that are local. And products that are made for you. Hand made and natural products. I have a new product and I’d love to customize it for you. Have a look:

Blue Cornflower flowers

Sunflower petals

Red Rose petals

Red Poppy flowers

These are dried flowers & petals. Blue Cornflower (blue), Sunflower (yellow), Red Rose (bright red) and Red Poppy (dark red).

All of these real and natural dried flowers and petals are sold in organza bags and each bag contains 50grs. They come attached with a small tag with only their names and the weight on them – handwritten. But these tags could also include your companies logo and address. They’re perfect as a table decoration and the Sunflower and Rose petals can also be marketed as natural and compostable wedding confetti.
I will also have some mixed packages – orange and red, blue and orange, … Which one is your favourite?

And how can we be unique? By combining two or several qualities that are normally separate. 
Have a look at the Café Snakes&Lattes in Canada. They’re running a coffee shop, but in the same place, they sell board games and you can play these games in the coffee shop. What’s your shop like, what makes you unique?

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