Tuesday May 25th is Geek Pride Day, so we are going to focus the program on an online store specializing in collector’s items and gifts. We thoroughly analyze a medium-sized eCommerce, from the suburbs, specifically from Logroño.
Is named The frikilería and is led by Beatrice Alvarez. A business born from a small neighborhood store that became bigger and bigger in digital, supported by the power of the niche, in this case of geek and original gifts.
Interview with Beatriz Álvarez (La Frikilería)
4:34 What is La Frikilería?
It’s a gift shop for everything whatever has a fan phenomenon: movies, video games, Japanese animation, comics, superheroyes…. We were born in 2014, we were a small neighborhood store and now we are a “nice” online store.
We are in Logroño, at this time our physical store is still closed due to covid, and we have a warehouse where i am working at the moment and where we keep taking orders.
I opened a Facebook where I uploaded all the products that were arriving at the store, many people began to ask me to send them, With two or three people you could do it manually, but in the end there were so many people asking for shipments that I had to set up a very basic web page to be able to control it.
8:40 How was that first version of the web?
We start with something very simple: store logo, product photo and price, we actually used Wix. Whose system was manual, he had to be deleting the products when he sold them.
The following year we had to set up something more professional, at first it was very basic but as modules can be added we customized it. But we are running out of limits, for example manage the stock of online store and physical store separatelyIt gives us a lot of problems. In addition to getting a POS in a physical store that connects to PrestaShop and subtracts stock.
10:50 What is your current photo?
It changes a lot from season to season. Now we are 12 people, but we have become 18/20 during Christmas for example. We are in the warehouse, with people uploading products, customer service and preparing shipments. Logistics has grown very fast, we had to rent a warehouse to have more stock.
From a small online store where the stock was the shelf of my store that I covered to take a larger place with a back room, it was an odyssey to find the products, they were placed that way. And now look at us, with a warehouse.
We maintain the physical store and a warehouse where we prepare online orders, which is still manual. It has been difficult for us to have a warehouse organized by products and to know how to send them, because we have many categories and they are very different, from clothes to realistic swords or jewelry. We want to keep the neighborhood store.
15:58 How large is your billing? And web traffic?
Last year we made 3 millionwe are a distribution company without our own brand.
Traffic depends on the season, At Christmas we have about 500 thousand visitors, the rest of the year it is usually around 200 thousand.
The normal conversion rate is 1.7% and campaign 2.3%. This also caused us problems with the issue of hosting and the web, we had to do marketing to attract people but not too many, because our website did not support it.
18:30 In which markets do you work?
Mostly Spain, about 80%. We ship to the rest of Europe and America. Last year we shipped to 43 different countries. We have the website in English but we do not make great efforts to sell outside of Spain either. We do not have campaigns prepared to internationalize ourselves, It is something pending that when we see each other with desire we will do it.
We also sell on Amazon, so on our website you can see that you can pay with different currencies and currencies. Our internationalization largely comes from Amazon.
22:30 In the recruitment part, what do you work on in marketing?
We work a lot, it is brought to us by an external company that we have a lot of trust in and whenever a new product comes along, we look for and work on those keywords. We also work in and on RRSS with ads for people with a certain profile.
Social Ads have fared better for us than Google ads. Now we have a lot of competition, some of our products can be found in chains like El Corte Inglés, because of prices there are people who get products cheaper than me or who can spend a lot of money on
We are with an external company where we work different forms of affiliation: banners, coupon books, … At the same time, cAnyone who has a strong blog or profile can sign up and become affiliated with us, We pay better than Amazon.
28:10 How many followers do you have on social networks?
150 thousand followers on Instagram, It is the network that generates the most traffic.
In Twitter we are 73 thousand, We arrived here with a lot of patience, but it was hard for me to pick up the pace because you need another language and type of communication.
We live in the golden age of Facebook, with a lot of likes and visits to the web that we had back then, we never went back to that time. On FB we are now stagnant, we have 270 thousand followers but it is where we have the most purchases.
We opened last year and we are experimenting to see what content to create. For now we will learn how to use it.
We have a very personalized communication, explaining the products as if someone were present, maintaining our neighborhood store soul. Before showing the products that arrived at the store, at first it worked very well but it began to decline.
35:50 What is the average basket of the web?
It is around €30we are struggling to upload it but it is costing us. We work with affiliates who are dedicated to uploading the products in the carts. We have free shipping costs from €60, we have played with this too but never managed to do it without losing money. We have done many tests.
41:58 Do you work with more Marketplaces than Amazon?
We tried FNAC but it didn’t work very well. We are looking to hook up with some more Marketplace, with eBay it was impossible, we sell by license not by product. Many stores are copying our mistakes, we made the web like this and we throw away with it but they shouldn’t organize it like we do.
In Amazon we put all the products, but always more expensive than on the web. So when someone runs out of stock, there is us. At first we were tempted to lower the price to be in the first but we did the math by lowering the price, removing shipping costs and the percentage that Amazon takes, the conclusion we draw is that we were giving the product away to Amazon.
We highly note the use of Amazon for international orders, as a curiosity, when the pandemic started we had a boom in orders from Italy, they only ordered us there. When she started to get sick in, something similar happened.
53:29 What’s the weirdest thing you’ve sold?
weird things like Trump’s horse masks and hair. Other things we have that I never expected to sell were harry potter sprinkles that taste like earwax or vomit.
54:00 What are your challenges?
I want to survive. At the moment we are very well we have doubled traffic and billing, we are being profitable and we hope to continue like this.
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