I was sitting at work banging on to colleagues about how my car key fob battery had failed and was gutted by the fact that I had to buy two from Dixons at a price well over £6! A colleague of mine happened to hear me and said that his parents ran a jewellery business and they “pick those watch batteries up at trade fairs for pence”. That got me thinking as I could find no website in the UK at the
time selling them. So I did a bit of digging and found a wholesaler in Bradford and made some enquiries about purchasing some batteries. They confirmed that the markup by retailers in the High Street was considerable. The wholesaler, A.G.Thomas said they would even send me single batteries, no bulk buy required. So, I created a free website on freeserve and starting advertising watch batteries for sale. Potential customers would purchase by printing off an order form and posting their order with a cheque. But since no other site on the internet was selling watch batteries at the time, orders started to trickle in. It was then that I registered the domain name WatchBattery.co.uk. The site developed, a basic shopping cart was built by myself and then I took the plunge to get a merchant account with WorldPay. I remember thinking at the time that I was taking a bit of a gamble shelling out the princely sum of £300 to get the merchant account set up, but once we started taking credit card payments, sales began to take off. Also, the site became known to Google and our ranking was always on the first page of Google for Watch Batteries and we were number one on Google for 14 years. More recently, the likes of Ebay and Amazon knock us off the number one position, but we are always on the first page. Now we sell a variety of other batteries and watch straps and are now the biggest seller of Casio and Timex watch straps outside the manufacturers themselves. We rank well for those watch strap searches on Google. So, we have to thank A.G. Thomas for their support in the early years. Without their support I don’t think we would be here today. We still buy an awfu lot of our stock from them, so we both have benefited. We get continued support from Casio and Timex too but just wish the likes of Swatch and ICE would see the quality of service we offer to our customers and allow us to sell their products via the internet without having the need for a shop front. Come on guys, this is the 21st century.
