Daylight Cosmetics

[daylightcosmetics]

Hi, I'm not new just decided to re-open my Daylight Cosmetics store with some serious changes. A little about me and my business: I decided to brand my own cosmetics and skincare line because I love makeup and think everyone should have a good skin care regimen. I also believe in supporting America, so I chose a labratory in the United States to manufacture these products. All the products have been tested on several skin types but never on animals. What I hoped for my business was to offer women professional quality products at affordable prices. Similar products to what I sell are sold at double or even triple what I sell for and most that you buy here in the mall or specialty stores are made in REMOVED.

I am a mother of two and soon to be three and i had hoped to build my business enough to open a cosmetics store where people can get matched to the best skin care, foundation and color cosmetics. Unfortunatly this economy has really stalled all my goals as people are not buying, instead they want to buy the cheap products at Wal-Mart that frankly are not good for the skin in many cases. I hope that this next year I can see some improvement in sales.

Edited by moderator to remove objectionable content. Please read the rules to posting at the community page.

[jjseuts]

Hello



Welcome & Good Luck with the new re-opening. Your store looks nice.

Jay

[thelivesandlovesofmaggiethecat]

Welcome to ecrater.

Truthfully it will be a long time before I drop $100 to try non-returnable cosmetics. I understand that you can't resell returned items but I can buy personal care products from any company and return them for a full refund if they react negatively or I just don't like them.

If you really don't believe in your products enough to offer refunds, at least offer foil test packets for a $1 so people can try them first. You don't even say what's in the bottle. They could be olive oil, lard and rose water for all the buyer knows.

[lastade-designs]

You could put up more pictures, Perhaps closeups of the product. You can have up to 10 pictures.

[makusan]

Welcome to eCrater! ")

[daylightcosmetics]

I appreciate the advice about the product pics however, ecrater does not currently provide a way for a product to have more than one image. I am sorry that my post may have offended some people however in countries where low standards are present the cosmetics are quite dangerous and that is very important to this industry. The reason I do not offer refunds is because in the state of Iowa it is illegal for me to restock or resell cosmetics if they have been returned regardless of wether or not the customer has opened it. In this way I have to either take a loss for every unhappy customer who chooses the incorrect shade, or I have to break the law and resell the product, so I don't loss my entire business. I do have confidence in the products but people them selves are hard to please, because selling on the internet can be difficult because they may make bad choices on shades, which isn't totally their fault. But until the law in my state changes I can't accept returns on products which are not damaged or incorrect. Again there is no good answer for me in this regard. The products really aren't expensive, people spend about 80 to 100 on makeup and skin care from Walmart and target for low quality products, but sometimes it seems more expensive because many don't buy all at once, only getting what they need this week and don't realize how much they are spending. All my customers here love the products but i need a lot more customers which is why I gave this site a try.

[lastade-designs]

[tarasouth]

Welcome and good luck with your store! I think if you had some testimonials it might help your sales.

[tchgiftsandthings]

Good luck with your re-opening...

TCH Gifts & Things

[daylightcosmetics]

Thankyou for the heads up on the pictures thing I guess i didn't realize i could add more images. I am also going to see if I can get a list of ingredients from the labratory. I tried doing ingredients once on a site it took over four hours to list the ingredients on only about 20 products currently I have well over 300, but i only sell packages because it's honestly way cheaper for the customers, than buying individually. I could probably get a couple of my customers to write some testimonals of their products. I wish I had more room here to write about the products but there is a pretty limited amount of space for that.

ALso I have a real problem with minimum orders, because I do not bring in continual revenue from sales I have no choice but to make each order at least $100, actually when I order form the labratory I have a minimum order of $150.00 per order. So if I don't package my products (except Knexyl or similar products which actually cost me quite a bit of money) I can't meet my minimum. It take one week to get my products then I label them by hand with special waterproof labels I had made locally here in my home town then I send them out to customers, so i actually pay shipping twice. What I charge 9 dollars for most compainies wouldn't sell for less than 18.00. I really do try to give people the best deal I can but I am trying to take care of three children and I can't sell for too low to make profit. I don't wnat to give up but I am not very encouraged right now.

[acread]

[daylightcosmetics]

Thanks for the copy feature suggestion it really does take a long time adding in hundreds of different shades of products. I have also decided to open a wholesale version of my site, where retailers and salons can purchase my brand for use and sale in their establishements, they may be a better target audience. I will still continue to offer packages for customers on the original site, but maybe if I can get some good sales going from the wholesale store I can start allowing customers to purchase much less, because I won't have to worry about coving the order minimum. I will also be trying to offer some samples when I can for people.

[GuadalupeForgeWroughtIron]

I think samples would be a great help! I think you are tackling a very challenging thing. I understand your comments about the downside of allowing small orders, and the reason for no returns, but those things work against you when you're trying to grow a customer base. Smaller orders and samples sound like a good idea, if you can offer them eventually.

Sellers offering items in competition with cheaper manufactured products have a special challenge. We've faced that too, selling handcrafted items that sometimes cost up to ten times the price offered by big box stores.

Over the years there are four main things we tried to focus on:
1) offering items that are not commonly available elsewhere (you're doing that)
2) presenting items professionally (you're doing that too, with your great packaging)
3) getting your products in front of the right group of people (you're working hard on that too)
4) doing a bang-up job of helping our customers understand WHY they should buy our more expensive items.

The last one is hard, especially over the internet, since folks can't see the quality of your products first hand. I think you have to turn to words, and possibly more photos. Not a listing of chemical ingredients from the lab, really, but lots of good explanations about each one of your products, and how it can make a difference in the lives of your customers. Will it make them healthier? Look better? Feel better about themselves? Feel good about supporting a company that chooses to manufacture in the US? How is it better than the $5 stuff they buy at Walmart? Samples would work towards this too, since they will allow your internet customers to truly understand how your products are different.

[daylightcosmetics]

Thank you your comments and suggestions are very good. I wish we had a way to have more pages for our site oyu know like where I could have a page dedicated to skin care suggestions, makeup tips etc. I will try to add much more to my site. As far as the samples i can do them I just have to charge because it costs alot of money to hand them out fre, especially if you're mailing them, some of the products come in a sample form directly from the manufactuere, but many do not, the issue there is that say I take one bottle of foundation and split it up into several small bottles for samples, well I have to buy those sample bottles in the hundreds, if not thousands, and those cost a lot too. So again I hope to become more sucessful and gain revenue to make the capitol available for these investments for the clients. So it's abit of a circle I suppose, need samples to get clients, need clients to afford sample programs.

[GuadalupeForgeWroughtIron]

Another way to have more space to write pages of copy is to set up another small simple website elsewhere (I set one up on Weebly.com, since it's free and you don't have to know HTML.) You can write all the articles you want, and then link that website to your eCrater store. Also, you can list the URL of this "info" website in your eCrater store (maybe on your About page?) You can't have a clickable link to it in eCrater, but you can still place the URL address in your copy, so folks could copy and paste it into their browser window to get to your other site. (Just another way to skin the cat!)

I sure do understand about the cost of samples. My husband and I made iron cabinet hardware for years. People would ask for free samples, but at $8 and up per handle, I couldn't do that. So, we'd ask folks to pay for the sample handle (and keep the shipping VERY low.) Then, if they ordered more, I subtracted the cost of their sample order. That seemed to make most folks happy. In our case, they were welcome to return the hardware samples, but of course I understand why you can't do that with cosmetic samples (hopefully folks would not expect to return those!)

What you're doing is a challenge, no question. I guess that's why some businesses with high start up costs have to find investors...it can be very hard to have enough profit in the early stages to set up the materials you need for success. I hope you can find a way to hang in there, and accomplish your goals, even if it takes longer than you'd hoped. I really wish you the best of luck!