Magdalene started Carousell for personal use in 2017, selling her pre-loved goods. She had just sold her spacious landed property home to move into a smaller HDB flat, which meant she didn’t have enough space for everything to move along with her. This prompted her to start a Carousell account to sell her items. Her profile started to gain traction as she sold them at an extremely affordable price, with many buyers realising her items were of good taste and quality.

Magdalene’s online business now specialises in home decor and her best selling products are wall art, carpets, watchboxes and porcelain stools, all of which are unique and less commonplace at commercial retailers. Her unique items give her a competitive advantage as consumers are less price sensitive to rare collections. 

She chose Carousell as her e-commerce platform as users love to chat directly with her. As her products are niche, customers tend to make multiple queries, which makes the direct messaging feature more favourable for her business. “Carousell buyers are different from other platforms, they already know what they want to buy, not like general shoppers.”

Bump and Spotlight are her main advertising tools. She also uses CarouBiz to manage her online store, and utilises as combination of Bump and Spotlight to drive traffic to her listings.

On her experience with Carousell so far, she said she was “happy with the progress of Carousell, always trying to improve their products but keeping the fundamentals at the same time.”

Her tips for other merchants are to always have stocks ready as she reckons more than 70% of her clients make their purchase on impulse. Having a wide range of products also gives consumers more variety to choose from, “One thing leads to another. People go to your page intending to buy one product, but can end up buying more than one when presented with more variety.” Promptness in servicing is her number one tip – Magdalene makes it a point to reply enquiries within 5 mins. That is, within her working hours of course! 

She also encouraged budding entrepreneurs to not be afraid of competition. “Keeping up with the competition may not be easy, but if you’re able to do so, it means you’ve succeeded.”