Tictail Store of the Week: Mistervain

Victor & Marcus, founders of Mistervain - a men’s accessories online store

Mistervain is run by Victor and Marcus - two Swedish guys who grew tired of the lack of choice from the large online menswear stores. They wanted tasteful, timeless accessories but literally couldn’t find anything of the quality they were looking for.

After some thought, they arrived at the conclusion - why not do it ourselves? And that’s how Mistervain.com was born.

Mistervain only carries stuff the two founders love, nothing more, nothing less. While offering unique products to their customers, they try to do this with a green conscience.

How? you might ask. It’s simple. For every 500 SEK you spend in their store, they buy a tree from Forestify who in turn plants a tree. In your name, of course! 

www.mistervain.com offers free shipping worldwide - what are you waiting for?!

Introducing Order Search

Christmas was an amazing time for us and all of our stores. Not only did we double the traffic every month since September, but the holiday sales went through the roof! During the last three weeks of Christmas, Tictail stores sold four times as much as during the same period the previous month. In fact, during those three weeks alone, Tictail stores sold more than the accumulated sales in Tictail’s history!! We anticipated that Christmas would be a great period for our stores, but we didn’t dare dream of these numbers. 

As a result of this high peak in sales, we’ve noticed that a lot of the store owners’ time has been spent on the orders pages recently, and in our mission to always simplify and improve Tictail, we found a great target in need of improvement; the order page itself!

Today we’d like to introduce you to the new brand new order search. Now, instead of browsing through all your orders to find that one customer, you can simply search for anything you remember about their order - such as their name, email, address, order ID, transaction ID. If that’s not enough, why not try searching for a quirky little message they added to the order! 

So, to recap, your search options are:

• Order ID
• Name
• Email
• Address
• Payment transaction ID (Paypal transaction ID, Klarna OCR)
• Customer Name, Address, City, Country
• Order message (note from customer)
• Payment alternative (Klarna, Paypal)

Enjoy!

Lots of love and Happy Valentine’s Day,

The Tictail Team

Tictail Store of the Week: Cling People

Tictailer Sofia El Arabi runs the Tictail store Cling People

Casablanca native Sofia El Arabi runs the fashion blog Fashion Bakchic as well as Dar and Beida, a blog about moroccan interior, and The Closeterie, which features Moroccan people’s closets. When working on these projects, Sofia had difficulties finding jewelry that suited her taste. After a trip to Poland, she discovered Mafia Jewellery, and decided to start selling jewellery on Tictail. We couldn’t be more proud to have her on board!

Cling People offers free shipping worldwide and right now she has a sale with 50% off everything going on! Our favourites are Crown of Thorne and Golden Wings.

Tips for improving your store #2: Product descriptions

Here are a few simple tips to help you start writing product descriptions or perhaps to use when revisiting your current ones. There are 2 main things to think about; clear information and making it easy for people to find your products. 

1. Who are you writing your product descriptions for and what will help them make their purchase decision? This is a key question to answer before you start thinking how to structure your product descriptions. Write for your audience and answer questions that you think they are looking for. For example:

“Great everyday bag, enough to fit a 13 inches laptop. ”

2. Be accurate: make sure the description is clear e.g. include materials, measurements, specific details. Also if it’s not completely clear how to use, clarify this and give a bit of inspiration for usage occasions. Example:

 ”Larger frame similar to our Keelback model. Tiger is a classic unisex frame with inspiration from pre- wayfarer models with a small keyhole nose bridge.”  

3. Tell a product story if there is one. Is there an interesting background, or usage story worth mentioning? (keep it short though!). You could even make it up:

“We imagine that this specific pair of boxing gloves won a championship sometime long ago. The last punch they ever struck was a knockout…” 

4. When picking product names use words that people could use to search (keywords), at the front of the name. For example: Paintings for living room vs. Living-room paintings. 

5. Don’t duplicate content, vary words for better search results. In other words use as many different words as possible to describe the same thing. People can use very different keywords to search for the same thing, eg. shoes, pumps, boots, footwear. You can have a look at words people use in searches here: http://bit.ly/FindKeyword

For more examples:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2689-10-Compelling-Product-Descriptions

Good luck!

Tips for improving your store #1: Product images

Product images are one of the main things your customers will base their purchase decisions on, so it can really make a difference to work hard on them to overcome limitations with online shopping. Here are some tips that can hopefully be helpful.

The product at it’s best 

Whatever it is make sure it’s clean, steamed, ironed etc. Also include different angles if possible to give shoppers a clear idea of the product from every side, and also an idea of the size and full shape.

Make features clear

Show any specific details on products clearly. You can always describe features in words, but it is a massive help if you show them as well. So if there is a specific seam, material or design, display it. Close up pictures are great for this.

Composition and framing

There are lots of ways to display products, on the floor, hanging, inside, outside, white or coloured background. Pick a way that communicates the feel of your brand, but that still keeps the product in focus. A consistent look and feel to all your product images creates a more premium feel. Also putting the product in context can help explain what it does, and also what the actual size is. 

Professional quality images

If you expect people to buy products from you, you need to meet their expectations of looking like a serious business. A big part of this is having good quality product imagery, this can be done through everything from focus, to lighting. With today’s digital cameras this is much easier, but you still have to be familiar with the basics!  Luckily there are lots of good tips online. Here are some we’ve found:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399400,00.asp  (for beginners)

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/cameras-and-camcorders/50-essential-photography-tips-50006080/  (more advanced)

Holiday season = More online sales!

Because we want to help you make the most of your Tictail store, especially in the run up to Christmas, we plan to give you a few simple tips in the upcoming weeks. The tips are easy ways to improve your store, and also a start to how you could increase traffic. So keep an eye out and make sure you make the most of the Christmas Sales!

Before we start sharing tips here’s a thought-starter: what defines your brand?

Because you’re competing against all the other noise happening online, make sure you think about your brand, and how to make it memorable. By having a clear idea of this in your mind all the tips we send through will be much more useful, as you’ll know what feels right for you store. Make sure people understand why they should love your store as much as you do!

A few examples we like, to help you on your way:

“About” shares the inspiration for the brand and it’s values, the product imagery builds on it.

Here the whole feel of the store is created through font and imagery.

The Tone of Voice is used in a very simple but effective way.

Or something as simple as this!

Dear storekeepers, Tictail customers, investors and team: I owe you my life

Six months ago I woke up on a mattress in the office. The time was 8am and three hours later I would be on stage revealing the first public version of Tictail at the Nordic E-commerce Summit. The team was still hacking away when I woke up: they had yet to get any sleep as they kept running throughout the whole night to ensure a smooth launch. I remember being overwhelmed by a feeling of gratefulness; to be given the privilege to represent such an amazing team of hard working & relentless entrepreneurs driven by the crazy notion that they will in fact change the world.

That same evening thousands of people would have had signed up for Tictail and a new stage of our company began.

Fast forward and it’s now 6 months since we launched Tictail and and although we’re still a small team of 9 people in our Stockholm office we’re now part of the giant global community that defines Tictail. Thousands of people in over a hundred (!) countries now use Tictail to conduct hundreds of transaction everyday.

Last week we did our next big launch. As one of the finalists in the Dublin Web Summit we released the all new Tictail feed to stores all over the world. As part of this we also announced our 1.2 million € investment lead by Balderton and Klaus Hommels, supported by our amazing advisory board. Their support and great understanding about our challenges as a young company have played a great deal of importance to us and the success of Tictail. I feel safe to say we got some of the brightest minds in the industry to support our vision and it have become clear to me that ultimately it’s not about investment but about engagement – something that’s much harder to measure but goes much further. Thank you Klaus, thank you Balderton. Thank you dear advisory board. 

We became one out of four finalists at the Dublin Web Summit Startup competition.  

Klaus Hommels during one of our board meetings.

It’s easy for me to say that these have been the most exciting months of my life, it’s also exciting to feel that the next six months will be when things become really interesting. 

Things are speeding up. Our community is growing, we are growing, we’re moving faster, building greater stores, conducting more transaction everyday! With the feed in place and some amazing new features in beta we’re truly creating a new generation of online stores. 

Dear store owners, dear Tictail customers. When I say we, I mean all of you. Because Tictail on it’s own is just an idea, a crazy thought - a vision if you will. The real value exists in each person crazy enough to share this vision with us. So with that said I’d like to finish by saying thank you. Thank you for believing in us, thank you for your feedback, thank you for your time, thank you for using Tictail. 

I’m looking much forward to spend my next six months in your company because after all -  we’re just getting started.

Carl- CEO & Co-founder

Read more about the announcement here»

- Wall street journal

- TechCrunch

- VentureBeat

-TheNextWeb

New free premium feature: Tictail Exclusive Access

We’re giving all Tictail users free access to one of our future premium features. We call it “Tictail Exclusive Access” -  a super simple way to password protect your Tictail, allowing you to restrict access to only e.g. fans or retailers! 

To launch it we created a Sneak Peek shop for global fashion brand Cheap Monday. Cheap Monday gave exclusive access to their Facebook fans, who could shop their SS-13 collection days before anyone else could even see it at their fashion show! This has created lots of buzz in the last few days, in fashion and tech magazines around the world which Cheap Monday and us are excited about.

“Our fans and customers all over the world are the fundament of Cheap Monday. We strive to find new ways to build our relationship with them and offer exciting products and services. We hope that making it possible to purchase our SS-13 Collection before everyone else through our partnership with Tictail is just as exciting for our customers as it is for us.” says Håkan Ström, COO at Cheap Monday

Why would you want to use Tictail Exclusive Access?

• You can open a B2B store, selling your items directly to your retailers at purchase price

• You can host a flash sale to all of your email subscribers to clear out inventory without damaging your brand

• You can combine a customer loyalty program with online sales

Let us know what you think about Tictail Exclusive Access!