Finding OpenCart Helped Mist E Liquid Unlock Their True E-Commerce Growth Potential

OpenCart is an E-Commerce platform that has proven to be a significant driver for success numerous times. It’s free and the open-source architecture makes it without a doubt the perfect choice for digital businesses of all size.

The success story of Misteliquid is one of those stories showing that your determination for knowledge and helping people can lead to great things. The founder of Misteliquid will tell you about how he found his passion for their product and how OpenCart has helped the growth of their E-Commerce substantially.

Let’s dive right into it...

A Bit About MIST

I’m Fred Cassman, founder of www.misteliquid.co.uk. After discovering electronic cigarettes in early 2008, I quickly became obsessed with all things “vape.” After successfully switching full time to “vapour” and armed with 2 years industry knowledge, I figured I’d try my hand in seeing if I could help spread the word about these revolutionary products and start selling online.

MIST officially started trading in 2011 with one primary aim: to help as many people as possible make the switch from smoke to vapour!

With a plethora of products available and huge differences in quality, MIST has been on a mission to select only the easiest to use, enjoyable, and safest products on the market. To date, we have helped tens of thousands of people make the switch from smoke to vapour!

About Our Website and the Tools We Use

After trying eBay, a custom CMS and CubeCart to host our products, we finally found OpenCart. OpenCart offers some great features out of the box, but in order to get the most out of it, we have had to install and custom code tons of extensions/modules! The great thing about OpenCart is that it’s open-source, so it allows us to get pretty much anything we can think of made up allowing us to finely craft it to our specific needs.

One of our most important modules is a “stock inventory forecast” which allows us to manage our 1000+ SKUs. If you have lots of products, this is essential in knowing how much you are selling, and knowing how much stock you are going to need in the future.

Another favourite module of mine is “post order review emails” which automatically sends out an email asking a customer to leave a review after a certain period of time. We have had great response with this, and it has helped us build 1000’s of quality reviews for our product. Plus, we didn’t have to do much to get them – it’s automated!

About Our Growth

It has been a rollercoaster at MIST over the past few years. We experienced rapid growth in 2013/15, doubling turnover year on year. Due to the competitive nature of our industry now, this has slowed down, but we still think there is a lot of room for growth! We are now embarking on an SEO campaign, something we have not focussed on to date.

How We Promote

Marketing e-cigarettes is HARD. This is down to the fact we are not allowed to use PPC, Facebook Ads, or pretty much any form of paid advertising. We use social media, forums, newsletters, and video to attract new organic traffic to our site.

We have found word of mouth, and forums and newsletters to be particularly effective. Like I said before, we are now embarking on an SEO adventure to try and get even more organic traffic to the site.

Advice for New Entrepreneurs and Store Owners

My advice for any budding entrepreneur is to become an expert in what you are doing. In order to compete against larger companies with unlimited marketing budgets, you have to have something you can do better than them. That for me was becoming an expert.

Start reviewing products in your industry, get yourself on forums and get a feel for what people are talking about. You would be surprised about how helpful your customers are too! Get a dialogue going and ask people what THEY want and how they want it.

Conclusion

So, what did we learn from the Misteliquid story? They bet on a tailored website experience, a lot of social media outreach, word of mouth and heavy investing in an SEO campaign to help increase their reach even more. All of those are undeniable growth tactics that will always work if you put enough effort into them. Take notes and get your OpenCart store in shape!

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