I am one of the joint owners of the business, founded in 2002 by myself and my brother. My specific day to day roles involve looking after the online side of the business. I am fully responsible for the development of the website including the usability, look and responsive design across multiple platforms.

The beauty of X-Cart I have found over the years is how well you can tune it to your own specific needs.

I oversee the product range of over 5000 products through 40 manufacturers and make sure the suppliers full and current ranges are displayed on the website.

I also control the daily/weekly/monthly online advertising budget – this includes maintaining several advertising streams including PPC, SEO, Affiliate marketing and product feeds.

The online store was a natural development from a traditional bricks and mortar store selling beds and mattresses. The original business has been trading on the high street since the 1960s. I have always had a keen interest in web development from an early age and built several online stores before bedstar.co.uk. My brother who worked in the family store approached me in early 2000 to build an online presence for the shop after a number of in-store inquiries.

When we launched in early 2000 we were one of only 3 UK bed stores trading on the internet.

My most favourite part of the store is the shopping cart area, the whole store is quite heavily customised but the cart area has the most customisation, this area provides multiple shipping options dependent on what type/size product(s) the customer has ordered and what postcode they want them delivered to. As most of our items are delivered direct from the suppliers this whole process has to be quite seamless and can get quite involved when a user has selected several items all from different suppliers and depending on size, then sent out with several different couriers. It’s taken a while to get right but we are quite happy with the system now.

Again the store is heavily customised and everything is geared towards expediting items to the customer as quickly as possible. Out of the 5000 products we retail on the website, over 80% is available for next day delivery, we even have a process where a number of products if ordered before midday can be manufactured and sent out same day. This along with the depth of the product range and the tuned usability of the website gives us the competitive edge.

I have been an early adopter of X-Cart going back to 1998 when I opened a consumer electronics eCommerce site. The beauty of X-Cart I have found over the years is how well you can tune it to your own specific needs, don’t get me wrong, X-Cart works well out of the box but it’s endless options for customisation and scalability that have allowed our business to grow at a faster rate than if we had used other out of the box carts.