How to sell products online? (E-commerce)

E-commerce , now everywhere

Competition has been endangering the businesses throughout the world. Brick-and-mortar has recently been replaced either by selling all the products online (e-commerce) or selling it through physical location as well as online (click-and-mortar). Selling products to either businesses or individual customers has been a challenge. You not only need to identify customers to sell your product or also need to figure out what to sell, how to market products and how to sell them online. All this goes beyond selling products in a different way than the ones done through traditional way of selling. A person as a business man needs to work as a seller. He needs to do rigorous research and figure out different aspects of selling discussed earlier.

Start a business at the beginning may seem invigorating. But once you get into it you might find alarm bells ringing. It’s when you need to find your prospective customers, where to find them, how to reach them and so on. As this world is now bounded by technology, people worry about how to sell their products online. Many customers are taken awtent/uploads/2017/02/E-commerce-681×454.jpg 681w, http://www.informationdiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/E-commerce-272×182.jpg 272w” alt=”E-commerce” width=”640″ height=”427″ />

Guidelines:

a)Start by finding the prospective customers:

Every business starts with identifying with target customers you are planning to target. It may be mass/broad market which is targeted by rest of the sellers or it may be niche which might be seen unprofitable by are profitable to your business at a particular period of time. You must go with your customer’s passion, needs of the customers that they are themselves unaware of or the problems facing the market or you can also go with finding opportunity gap in the marketplace.

b)Develop the positioning statement:

Building your brand is the second common steps in building any business. You must build your brand/positioning statement in such a way that it occupies unique position in the minds of your targeted customer. It must express your business’s unique position that identifies your business superior to that of your competitors business.

c)Where to sell your product online?

Customers to view on your products and only your products unlike eBay and Amazon, there are two options:

i) Hosted e-commerce: An e-commerce site is the site where you rent a space to sell your products. You don’t have choice to choose between how to organize your site.

Cons of Hosted e-commerce platform:

• Hosted e-commerce platforms generally cost more than their self-hosted platforms.
• Your monthly or annual fees will grow as your store attracts more traffic and requires more powerful features.
• Customization possibilities, while available, will be limited. You will only be able to use pre-approved themes and plugins. This protects you from a security standpoint but can be stifling in terms of creativity and limit the store features you can implement.
• Switching platforms is costly and time-consuming.

Examples of hosted e-commerce platform are: Shopify and BigCommerce

ii) Self-hosted e-commerce:

Here, you have the choice and benefit of choosing how you want your website to look like, and how quickly you want to extend or build on what you have.

Cons of self-hosted e-commerce platform:

• They are usually harder to set up than their hosted platform. At the very least, you will need to find a hosting provider, choose your e-commerce platform, and go through an installation and setup process.
• In most cases, there is no centralized support system you can contact if you need help or run into an error. So you will need to become adept at looking through the documentation and searching community resources to troubleshoot problems for yourself, or hire a qualified developer to help you.
• Depending on your hosting provider, costs can pile up once your store begins to grow.

Examples of self-hosted e-commerce platform are: Woocommerce, Meganto, PrestaShop, OpenCart

Choose the platforms based on how it suits your business, aim and goal.

iii) Selling through online marketplace:

If you choose not to create special position of your product in the minds of customer, this is the best option. You don’t have to sell build your brand, here your aim is only to sell your product. This is why online marketplace such as Amazon and eBay exists. They give you lots of benefits and opportunities which give you access to wide databases and customer flow, which results in returning you steady profit overtime.