FK Stores online retailer

Posted on 17/05/22 in blogs

**Standing outside my 500 sq ft** ***Industrial Unit***

This is an article from a few years ago and fk stores are no longer trading

FK Stores Ltd is a computer accessories and electronics online retailer who have now diversified into different markets such as telecoms, furniture, giftware, party favours, catering, storage, beauty and health. The UK based company established in 2006 by Managing Director Fraser King. Some of the products they sell are computer hardware, server accessories, cables, VOIP phones, Quad bikes, popcorn machines and jukeboxes. There’s been a couple name changes along the way, starting with FraserSales then FK Sales, FK Wholesale and now the current name FK Stores.

Fraser has had an interest in computers for nearly 40 years. He was introduced to computers when he was about 4 or 5 years old with playing the hand held version of Pac-Man and pong on the retro games console Atari 2600. He learned to program on the ZX Spectrum 48K when he was about 10 year old. He received his first PC as a 21st birthday present. Since then has programmed retro computer games and demos and designed the retro gaming site www.classic-games.co.uk.

Fraser begin programming the automated e-commerce website www.frasersales.com in 2006 and now he has a wide range of websites under the FK range such as FK Components, FK Telecoms and FK Power Sports. Currently there’s 10 websites though more will be created when sourcing other suppliers. They have around 11,000 products available to sell listed on their websites, Google and Amazon. They do not actually store the products themselves. The suppler dispatch the orders with a business model called dropshipping. There’s no rental charges, inventory control and little overheads so this keeps the costs down and increases the profit margin. However the responsibility lies with them if anything goes wrong with the order. The first 7 years of running the business, they did have an industrial unit and dispatched orders themselves.

From the start of 2017, the business has been expanding with increasing the dropship supplier portfolio. They distribute products for 9 suppliers but hope to increase this to 20 or 30 in the next couple years. With every new supplier who partners with them, a new duplicate website is created with all the supplier’s product titles, images, descriptions and slight variations on the website such as different logo, postage charges and shipping policy.

Fraser has been designing a bulk import system since 2012. A supplier who issues a CSV file with a list of say 4000 products with fields such as title, description, stock, price etc. and then after tweaking the computer system, the products are easily imported thus creating the new website. Then a script is run to create a CSV file with the products so they’re easily uploaded to Amazon and Google. If you had to manually create 4000 product pages, this could take weeks if not months!

The websites are hosted on Fraser’s own custom-built webserver which has been running 24hrs per day for the last few years. Throughout the day scripts are scheduled to automatically run to update the stock and price on the databases. Each supplier’s stock levels are updated 3 or 4 times per day. If you had to manually update the stock for 11,000 products each day, you would probably spend all day doing this task! Each website has it’s own control-panel to list new orders, view customers, create orders, edit order details, dispatch emails and sales volume reports. The websites accept payment by credit/debit card, PayPal, bank transfer and cheques as well as the ability to accept payments over the phone.

The expected turnover for 2017 should be about £50,000. After increasing the product portfolio and partnering with more suppliers, hopefully the turnover will double next year. FK Stores plan to expand into different markets, for example, supplements, toys, pet products, web hosting, personalised clothing, garden, books/DVDs/CDs, sports, embroidery, domestic appliances and sound/vision. As well as running the business, Fraser is trying to improve on his business acumen by studying for an A Level Business Studies and A Level English and then progressing onto higher education by studying for a Business Management degree with the Open University.