Tidy Toys

Online Toy Shop selling Keel, Steiff, Ty, Russ Berrie, Wild Republic, Nici and Dowman soft toys. And Non-soft Toys. We mail within the UK and outside the UK and accept several currencies.

Susan Ling

I started my business over a year ago after being made redundant. My stock is funded from the redundancy payment I received. Running a business has been a very steep learning curve and certainly not what I expected when starting out. Choosing the right stock is something I dont think you can ever get 100% of the time, however, there are a lot of generalisations that I can now make so at least I can now avoid obvious bad buys. I thought that by running an internet business Id be able to keep a certain distance from the selling side. Whereas that is true to a certain extent, an internet shop is a 24 hour business and I do need to be available 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Especially as I can take credit card payments over the phone. I have a lot of stock available on the website and every item is photographed and weighed for calculation of postal charges. Every item has a write up and usually the toy is measured and described. I also need to be mailing at least once a day, sometimes twice as I offer Royal Mails next day delivery service. I also have an Ebay shop in order to supplement the website sales and find that different items will sell on Ebay as opposed to the website. Another pull on my time is trying to get my website up the rankings for certain keywords in Google. I never thought running a business would be so time consuming, but you are so much in charge of your own destiny, whether you succeed or fail.