Expanding to £4m a year via international marketplaces with Trevor Ginn from Hello Baby Direct
By: Chloe Thomas
Tags: Baby, Magento, Baby Products, Ecommerce, Amazon

Expanding to £4m a year via international marketplaces with Trevor Ginn from Hello Baby Direct Chloe Thomas Jun 14·4 min read

Trevor Ginn is the founder of Hello Baby Direct. Founded in 2011 they sell via over 20 channels globally and achieve over £4m a year in sales.

About Trevor

Trevor started in eCommerce about 12 years ago when he was still working for Auctioning4u, the UK’s largest eBay trading assistant that was working for the likes of Dixons to sell their excess inventory on eBay. He was helping retailers sell their products online and eventually decided that he could do a better job at selling.

Since the company he was working for was going bust and he just had a kid, he felt that eCommerce was a reasonable market to get into. He went for selling kids’ stuff as his niche and this was how he became a retailer.

For Trevor, getting into eCommerce has its advantages which include the ease with which you can start selling and being able to start on a small scale.

One downside he mentions is the huge competition, but also acknowledges that everything else is competitive as well.

About the Business

Based in Saint Albans which is north of London

With worldwide customers

Sells other people’s products but will start making its own products at some point

Magento platform

Also uses online marketplaces to sell such as Amazon UK, EU, France, Spain, Japan, USA, Canada, Australia; Fruugo and eBay

General advice on selling through Marketplaces

It’s a good idea to use marketplaces because it’s where a lot of the customers are.

Marketplaces charge about 15% to be on their platform which can sound a lot but Trevor says you could also be spending the same amount or more doing marketing strategies and running your own website.

They are also particularly good for international trade. As an example, Trevor mentions being able to sell a few thousand pounds on Amazon Japan which would have been otherwise difficult to do and reach those customers. Amazon is also a catalogue site and this means that the items you sell in one country could easily be made available in another.

From this point of view, selling on marketplaces also makes sense because the speed to market is much faster.

Managing multiple platforms

While Trevor has been mostly doing everything himself, he’s recently hired people to help out.

Although he’s been in the business for more than 10 years, he still feels he’s just starting because there are things he could be doing better at. Being on various marketplaces needs dedicated attention, and hiring the right people has given Hello Baby the chance to improve in certain areas and taken a lot of pressure off him.

Staying on track

Growing to £4 million annually across multiple channels — balancing his own website and the marketplaces — is difficult to do. Here are the key ways he has kept himself on track:

Persistence

Certain love of eCommerce

To get to the next level, Trevor knew he had to get people on board. Doing it alone doesn’t get you a second perspective on things so you might still have unsolved problems even after being at it for so long. He has recognized that he needs to hand off tasks he’s not good at to people who are better than him in order to improve the business.

Software systems

Trevor uses Linnworks which is an eCommerce sales platform.

For him, platforms such as this provide amazing value because of the amount of time it saves you. If you plan to be a substantial business, you need something like this to help you manage everything you have to do and run it properly.

What’s coming up next for Hello Baby Direct

Some of the things Trevor is working on at the moment:

Get better with repeat customer base

Better level of customer service by providing more information about the products being sold by Hello Baby

Doing better on social media

Selling new verticals

Without the sponsors the podcast wouldn’t be possible — please do check them out:

Klaviyo is the world’s leading owned marketing platform known for accelerating revenue for online businesses using the channels they own like email, web and mobile. Enabling companies to leverage these owned marketing channels, Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications. And unlike other marketing platforms, Klaviyo doesn’t force companies to compromise between advanced functionality or ease of use — so companies of all sizes are able to maximize their sales quickly. That’s 38,000+ innovative companies across the world sell more with Klaviyo.

The Wix eCommerce platform powers more than 700,000 online stores worldwide. In 2020, Wix users surpassed $5.4 billion in online transactions, with 140% YoY growth in sales transactions and 114% YoY growth in overall sales revenue. Our priority is to deliver a robust, secure and scalable platform that empowers our sellers to stay on the cutting edge of eCommerce.

Wix eCommerce is the complete solution for entrepreneurs, omni-channel retailers, and brands selling millions of dollars online. Go to Wix.com/eCommerce today and join over 700,000 active stores selling worldwide with Wix eCommerce

Like to be a guest? Apply Here