Online business is blooming

KAREN Bugelli isn’t shy about asking a random teenager for Instagram advice if she’s sitting on her phone in a local cafe.

Social media has become more important than ever to the florist, after she made the big decision to swap her bricks-and-mortar shop in the Launceston CBD for the 19th century horse stables in the back of her home.

It was a big change for Ms Bugelli, who had run her own stores for 25 years, and at one point juggled four Gold Coast outlets at once.

She decided against renewing her lease and instead took online courses and attended seminars put on by the State Government to take her business, Florage, entirely online.

After three months, she has been named a finalist in the Brides Choice Awards and was recently advised by ecommerce platform Shopify that her site was top of its category for sale numbers.

Ms Bugelli expects more retailers will choose to take the operations entirely online.

“It was a bit of a gamble, even though I would consider myself a businessperson with a business brain — it could have gone either way,” she said.

“My income is just about the same as what I had when I had my shop.”

Much of her business still comes from Launceston but she also has loyal customers from Western Australia and Melbourne.

She put her success down to a few key principles of doing business online, including knowing what works, having something to offer (in her case, free delivery) and using real photos of products.

“You can’t just have a website and hope you’ll get picked up,” she said. “I’m 55 but I know exactly how to do Instagram, and what works.

“You’ve got to ask people too. Everybody is quite new.”