E-commerce is gaining pace! While offline retail sales are staggering and will continue to do so in near term, online retail sales will show a hefty 19 percent consecutive year over year growth! Next year two third of all North American households will buy some kind of products and services online.
If you are selling products and services offline, you should seriously consider hopping on to the e-commerce bandwagon, or risk losing significant portion of your business to your more proactive competitors!
Is it difficult to start selling products or services online?
Maybe, in the beginning of Internet era, this was a daunting task, but today, with proper planning it is fairly easy.
- Choose the products or services that are viable to sell over the Internet
- Build an online presence
- Create an online product catalog
- Choose payment and shipping methods
- Promote
Select products or services to sell. Although, some products are easier to sell online, contrary to popular believe, most of the products and services are, actually, marketable on the Internet. At present, books, electronics, information and travel related products are selling better online. But, that does not mean that there is no room for other products or services. As a matter of fact, you can sell just about anything over the Internet! A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is unless you’re a big national company with recognized brand or at least moderate marketing budgets (moderate means at least a hundred thousand per year), you’re only likely to make profit if you sell products that make you at least $150 in profit on every sale. It also depends more on the market segment you choose, and how good you are in marketing. As you know, traditional items that you can get in nearest grocery store were not doing very well on the Internet. However, that is going to change very soon! According to Forrester Research many of today’s slow categories are poised to significant growth as oppose to early online sales leaders like travel and electronics, which will experience market maturity and slower growth.
Build online presence. You can choose to build an e-commerce website either yourself or by hiring required experts (i.e. web programmers or by appointing a website developing company to do the job for you). In both of these cases, you have to be prepared to invest time and money. E-commerce site is a very broad terminology! Depending on your demand, it can cost you from a modest US $1000 to any where over a million US dollar! That’s not all! You have to be prepared to spare considerable time on it, as well. Writing the technical scope, choosing the appropriate design for your site and creating proper content for your site will take a lot of your time. And there is no guarantee that you will do everything right the first time – be prepared for some trial and error!
Choose payment methods. If you are planning to sell products online you need to get paid for them somehow. There are various ways of going about that. The simplest one is via PayPal (www.paypal.com). The setup cost is minimal, but some customers may consider it to be a hassle (although some prefer PayPal over other methods of payments) but cost per transaction is likely to be higher than if you were to accept credit card payments directly. Around 90 percent of all sales transaction occur online are by credit card payments. To accept credit card payment over the Internet, you must first have a merchant account. A merchant account allows you to process credit card transactions. You can open one either with one of your local banks (make sure they work for E-Commerce websites, because some are just for offline credit card payments) or with one of the internet merchant account companies like:
However, as charges and setup costs/times vary significantly from one merchant account provider to another, make sure you shop around before committing yourself to one.
Choose shipping methods. If you plan on selling physical products you need to think about how you are going to get these products to your customers and how you are going to quote shipping costs on your website. From the technical point of view the easiest way is to have a flat shipping rate on all your products. It’s not very accurate but if your shipping costs do not vary significantly from product to product and region to region (if you have multiple shipping locations worldwide or only serve North America for example) this is the best way to go. A slightly better way is to have a flat shipping rate that varies by country or region. For example charge $X for all shipments to North America, $Y for Europe, $Z Australia, etc. If you’re in a situation where you have a lot of different products that vary in size and weight and you ship worldwide then you need to have your site integrated with the shipping company of your choice to obtain quotes from them in real time. Most shipping companies provide this type of service including:
Promote you site. To sell your products through your site, you must draw traffic. There are number of ways of promoting your site on the Internet. This includes:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Adding your site to different online directories
- Opt-in email campaign
- Pay-Per-Click advertising
- Banner and link ads
In you effort to promote your site, you should combine as many offline and online promotional methods you can come up with. The more traffic you can generate the better chance you have of selling more products from your Web Store. The main idea you need to take away here is that no single promotion method is guaranteed to work and you need to try things (with caution of course), keep doing things that work and repeat. Working with an experienced company will help you reduce the amount of trial and error you’ll have to go through.
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