Subivi review: How an eBay CRM changed the trajectory of my business!

Subivi review: How an eBay CRM changed the trajectory of my business!

I currently sell 750,000 items across 24 different eBay stores. Business is booming and both myself and my wife were able to quit our jobs, working together and travelling the world. This obviously is not a movie and I have had my own trials and tribulations along the way but the bottom line is that we are able to support ourselves and our beautiful children entirely from eCommerce.

 I think the key elements to my success have been:

  • My ability to focus on expanding my product offering.
  • knowing when to get rid of products which were bogging down my business by sitting in storage for too long and not selling. 
  • Having the time to open up new stores which focused on a specific niche. 
  • Having the necessary data and tools to optimize my business.
  • And the thing that ties all of the above together: a great CRM. 

Subivi eCommerce CRM

I personally hate cliches and I also hate reading about these super successful people who only managed to succeed thanks to a specific product. I am writing this review because I have been using Subivi for a few years now and it has truly been a catalyst for my business. I can’t say that Subivi did all the work for me or that without it I would be nothing but I can say that without the presence of Subivi in my business I would not have the time to spend with my wife on vacation in Europe or with my children on a daily basis. 

What did Subivi do for me ? 

  1. Time – The first and foremost thing which Subivi did for me was provide me with more time. Their system is built in such a way which helps increase efficiency. In my case, I only started out with a handful of stores yet handling  customer support was eating up 70% of my time. Subivi aggregates all the tickets, customer queries and returns from all your eBay stores into one inbox. That alone saved me the time and hassle of jumping between accounts using proxies and clouds. They also have automated messages,and smart tags which pull up and insert both customer and product information automatically as well as ready-made templates which you can send with the click of a button. When you clear away all the copying and pasting, looking for customer and product details as well as not having to deal with followup messages (‘product was shipped’, for example), you start to have a lot more time on your hands.
  2. Expansion – As Mentioned earlier, when you have more time on your hands and are not dealing with small, tedious yet necessary tasks, you are free to think expansively. Specifically, ‘how do I expand my business’. The answer I came with is open more stores and add more products. But the first question you ask yourself is ‘which products do I add ?’ and ‘which niches do I target?’. Subivi was instrumental with this in terms of their analytics which helped me focus on specific products and target markets and guide me in the right direction.

Once I knew where to invest my time and money, I went ahead opening more stores and adding more products to my ‘catalogue’ through dropshipping. The thing is that beyond time, I would not have had the wherewithal to handle the amount of returns, cases and customer inquiries if I didn’t have these automated using Subivi.  

  1. Profit – Subivi has two specific features which have personally helped me increase my revenue stream. The first one is product-specific feedback which allows you to request feedback based on an item’s SKU so that you can address specific problems and generate more positive feedback. The second feature which I was able to use to my advantage was the cross-selling feature which allowed me to set up pairs of items in an automated SKU-based message. Once an item was sold, the buyer would receive a special offer from me for a related product with some sort of incentive – combined free shipping or a discount (5%;10%;15%). I had to set this up just once and did this for tens of products. Once you get this out of the way, the whole cross-selling thing runs on ‘auto-pilot’. I personally experienced a dramatic increase in sales using this feature which is pretty simple yet effective. 

Bottom Line 

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Subivi in any way and do not have any monetary incentive to promote them as a company. 

Now that that’s out of the way, I would highly recommend using Subivi as a CRM for your eCommerce business, especially if you are looking to expand your business. Some people can handle running 24 stores and 750,000 products (albeit in ‘dropshipping facilities’ somewhere in China) on their own. I personally found this to be impossible and am thankful to Subivi for helping me achieve the business goals I set for myself. Whether or not you decide to give Subivi a try is entirely up to you. 

Best of luck to you on your selling journey! 

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