eCommerce Simplified
eCommerce Simplified
Introduction
With platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, which make it easier to start up an online store without much programming experience or significant funds, plus the proliferation of inexpensive drop shipping stores, e-commerce is thriving like never before.
E-commerce is one of the few methods of generating money online that are long-lasting and sustainable. As a result, it may continue to provide income for many years in a profitable niche.
There are, in reality, ordinary folks with no business experience, no sophisticated education, and no enormous beginning bank balances which make millions selling standard products.
If you’re interested in launching your own internet store, I suggest reading this entire tutorial. I will teach you the fundamentals; the rest is up to you.
So let’s get started.
Chapter 1: Selecting a Profitable Market Niche
Suppose you don’t pick a successful niche. In that case, you can construct the most incredible, best-looking, most engaging internet store ever made and fail horribly. Niche selection is so crucial that it may practically determine your success or failure.
A good niche should: Have a moderate-to-large audience; low-to-moderate rivalry; Have enthusiastic customers about the place; Have items priced at a level that generates sufficient profit.
You want to ensure that there are enough individuals interested in the niche to sustain a healthy amount of sales. Still, you don’t want the niche to be so saturated that it’s impossible to generate a profit.
You desire a market in which purchasers are passionate about the product or genuinely need it. Unless you have a highly unique selling feature, such as a much cheaper pricing or some value-added selling point, it will be tough to make a lot of money selling ordinary things. Instead, you want to sell something that consumers are eager to purchase and will return to repeatedly.
You must ensure that you have digital items that can be priced sufficiently high without pricing you out of the market. Of course, you won’t be able to establish a large enough market quickly enough to earn any money selling things priced under a dollar. Still, a product priced at ten dollars or more would likely be enough to warrant starting a store.
Indeed, some people have earned a fortune selling inexpensive things, but the volume required is beyond the capacity of a novice.
Make a list of your hobbies, interests, areas of expertise, and demands as a solid beginning point for specialized research. When you create a business, the more you know about a specific subject, the easier it will be to source things people want to buy and locate the appropriate marketing methods to reach your core audience.
Once you have a list of at least 10 to 20 subjects, you may conduct thorough research. But, first, you need to determine how many individuals may be interested in each conceivable niche, how many available things you may offer, and what kind of achievable profit margin.
There are several approaches to doing this, but one of the most effective is checking Amazon. Begin by searching for individual things you may purchase in a specific niche. If you wish to investigate the golf specialty, search for golf clubs and golf balls and determine the bestselling rank for each item. This will give you a broad picture of each product’s sales performance.
You should be able to locate at least a few goods that sell well enough to be in the top 10,000 in their primary category, with the top 1,000 being optimal.
Here is an example of a current Amazon listing for a specific brand of gold balls:
This product is now ranked #857 in its primary category (Sports & Outdoors), indicating robust demand for golf balls, particularly compared to other items in the Golf Balls area. This category’s best product ranks #125 in Sports & Outdoors.
You should know that tremendous demand within a primary category may not necessarily result in huge sales. Obviously, specific types will have fewer sales than others. However, this will offer you a broad notion of whether or not the niche has a market.
It is not sufficient to pick a profitable niche. Instead, suppose you select a specialty you aren’t enthusiastic about or detest. In that case, your business will likely become a chore very fast. In fact, one of the primary reasons individuals start businesses is to escape employment they dislike. Your ultimate desire is to discover yourself in the same situation you were in before you quit your job: dissatisfied and desiring something new.
Therefore, when searching for suitable niches, you should choose something you are interested in and passionate about. This will facilitate your ability to source things, advertise those products, and devote the necessary effort to the development of your shop.
You may have no lucrative interests, although this is quite improbable. However, even if you are interested in very esoteric topics, you may expect to find many others who share your passion.
Chapter Three: Inside Information
Once you’ve identified a niche that you feel has great potential for profit and enthusiasm, you should aim to refine it further to create the most specific niche possible.
Suppose, for instance, that you’ve decided to focus on the outdoor hobby sector. Such activities may include camping, trekking, hiking, hunting, and fishing. However, thousands of prominent businesses specialize in this field, so competing would be highly challenging.
To establish a comprehensive store in such a vast market, you need to source thousands of goods and ensure that the pricing remains current. It would be an enormous undertaking for a single individual or even a small team.
Instead, it is preferable to concentrate on one topic. It might be the field you are most interested in, or the one you feel will be the most lucrative (as long as you are still interested). However, it is crucial to narrow your specialty as much as possible without making it impossible to locate an audience or source items.
For instance, instead of “outdoor activities,” you may specify fishing.
This may still be too general; thus, you may narrow your focus to fly fishing. This is fantastic, but you might take it further by specializing in a specific type of fly or offering fly tying tools to those who wish to make their own fishing flies.
Continue digging until you can no longer locate sufficient items to source or interest in the niche. Your potential will astound you. Go to several sectors! As an illustration, blacksocks.com specializes in black socks. They have grown into other items, like colored socks and undergarments. Still, they began by selling black stockings and have been tremendously popular!
How to Source Products is the subject of the fourth chapter.
There are three primary techniques to get merchandise for an online store:
You can employ a drop shipper
You can purchase from a wholesaler or manufacturer.
You may develop your own goods
Every tactic has advantages and disadvantages. That is available. There is no single best strategy for every store; thus, let’s discuss these elements so that you may choose the ideal way to source items for your store.
4.1 Drop Shipping
If you’re unfamiliar with drop shipping, it works as follows: you accept orders on your store, and after someone places an order and pays you, you order the product from the drop shipper’s website. The drop shipper sends the merchandise straight to the customer, and you retain the difference as profit.
Suppose you are selling a world globe for ten dollars. This world globe costs $5 from the drop shipper. Therefore, your buyer pays $10 in addition to any shipping costs you charge. Then, you purchase the item from the drop shipper for $5 and retain the profit of $5.
Other systems automate the ordering process for you, such as plugins for WooCommerce and Shopify, two of the most popular e-commerce platforms.
This strategy’s primary advantage is that you don’t have to pay for items up front. You can start your business for free, excluding the cost of a domain name, hosting, etc. Additionally, you should not worry about having warehouse space to keep the goods or packing and shipping.
However, you lose much control, which might occasionally cause problems.
For instance, you won’t be able to assure that your buyer receives the proper goods, nor will you be able to regulate the shipment pace.
4.2 Buying Wholesale
Buying wholesale from the manufacturer or a wholesaler who works as a middleman is the most typical method for online and offline retailers to obtain their merchandise.
Because most drop shippers are middlemen who must mark up wholesale costs to generate a profit, you will typically receive cheaper pricing when purchasing from a wholesaler. This is one of the significant advantages of this kind of sourcing.
You’ll also have greater control since you’ll be able to ensure the consumer receives the correct goods and determine how it is packaged and dispatched. This leads to diminishing returns.
However, you will need warehouse space to keep the items, an inventory management system, and sufficient time to package and transport the products to your customers.
Additionally, many individuals cannot afford the considerable monetary expenditure required to purchase merchandise. This is one of the primary reasons why many internet companies begin with drop shipping.
4.3 Developing Your Own Goods
The ultimate method of acquiring items is to produce them oneself. You can make your own items if you have a favorite pastime, such as creating jewelry or painting.
You may also build a product prototype and look for firms to produce the product on your behalf. This might be excessively pricey for many individuals, but it’s a terrific way to obtain a unique product.
This offers various advantages, including having a product that no one else has, which can enhance sales. However, there are a few disadvantages.
Making your own items, for instance, might be rather expensive. Even if they are made by hand, supplies must be purchased. If you hire a business to manufacture the goods, you will incur enormous beginning expenses.
Original items are nearly always the best option if you can afford them. Still, you can always establish your brand on drop shipping or wholesale products and later transition into your own products.
Chapter 5: Retail Store Marketing
“If you construct it, they will come.”
Surely you’ve heard this quotation before, right? It originated in the 1989 film Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner.
Many individuals live by this maxim with books, blogs, websites, YouTube channels, and online businesses, in addition to anything else you can imagine business sector.
But unless you are really fortunate, customers will not miraculously discover your business and begin purchasing from you. Instead, you must actively seek out and attract visitors.
Let’s discuss a few creative ways a novice might advertise their shop.
5.1 Possess A USP
Your store must have a USP, often known as a Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point. This distinguishes your store from all or most of your competitors and provides customers a cause to purchase with you rather than someone else.
If you sell an incredibly unique product, it is your USP. However, if you’re offering a widely available product, you need something to distinguish you from the competition.
Here are some recommendations:
Free shipping – This may or may not be viable, dependent on your profit margins, or you may have to provide free delivery only with a purchase above a particular price number, but this is a terrific method to persuade customers to shop from you as opposed to your competitors.
Specialize – We’ve discussed how important it is to go as far as possible into a specialty, as it may truly set you apart from competitors. It’s a fantastic USP.
Include incentives – People enjoy receiving free items. Including incentives with purchases, even little prizes, may be an excellent strategy to increase customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and attract new customers. Fingerhut and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds are well-known retailers in this category.
Develop packages – Bundles are an excellent approach to differentiate oneself from the competition. Suppose, for instance, you run a company that offers model car-building kits.
A beginner’s model construction kit might include everything a person would need to get started with the pastime, such as a primary paint set, brushes, craft knives, etc. You may then market this package to attract customers to your store, where they will likely purchase different things.
Diversify your business model — Many individuals switch from an essential shopping cart website to a subscription model, a bundle model, or another form. Ensure that the model you choose is suitable for YOUR market before investing a great deal of time and money in it.
Do not develop a USP for the sake of possessing one. Instead, ensure that it is appropriate for your market and delivers genuine value to the customer’s experience.
5.2 Social Media
You undoubtedly already know how beneficial social media can be for marketing. Still, you may not know which sites are the most effective or how to use each site to generate the most and highest-quality visitors. Therefore, let’s discuss several significant networks and how you may leverage them to create traffic AND purchases.
Facebook is one of the world’s most popular social networking platforms.
Statista reports that Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users. Not only 2 billion accounts, but 2 billion active users! In addition, they have one of the most diversified audiences, with a more significant proportion of older users than younger ones.
Facebook marketing may occur in three key ways:
Facebook pages
Facebook Communities
Facebook adverts
It is prudent to build a Facebook page. It is prudent to make a Facebook page. For your business to establish your brand’s presence on the platform. Still, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the page unless you’re using it for paid promotion. This is because Facebook altered how page postings display in users’ newsfeeds, resulting in fewer views.
Instead, concentrate the majority of your efforts on creating a Facebook GROUP. Group postings are far more visible than page ones, and groups generate more engagement than pages.
You may host member-only contests, freebies, and more within your club.
This will encourage more individuals to join and participate in your group.
You still need a page for advertising, as Facebook advertisements demand this.
And you may still routinely update the page. However, you should focus more on establishing your group to benefit from the free traffic they may generate.
Facebook is likely the finest social media site overall for marketers since the group function is so practical when utilized correctly and because they have the most diversified audience in terms of gender parity and coverage of the majority of age groups and other demographics.
Instagram’s user base primarily comprises individuals under 35, although they also have many users in other age groups. This makes them an additional, relatively diversified platform, although primarily geared toward a younger demographic.
Instagram has recently been gaining a reputation as an additional excellent marketing platform since its format has been modified to make it far more effective for marketers without alienating its primary user base.
Promoting things by displaying photographs and videos that appeal to your target audience is simple, and you can even illustrate how the product is used.
Instagram users are 58 times more likely to share a post than Facebook users and 120 times more likely to do so than Twitter users. This is one of the reasons why Instagram is so strong.
Instagram has also implemented a paid advertising system that has received many good reactions. However, due to the lack of clickable connections, direct selling is not as successful on this platform.
Many individuals do not truly perceive Pinterest to be a social network. It is social because you share things viewed and shared by others and because you may like and comment on them. However, it is not as socially resilient as other networks. However, we will include it because it functions similarly to social networks.
Pinterest is among the most productive sites for generating traffic and revenue. According to analytics, Pinterest is far more effective than most other sites for marketing items.
Many companies have found Pinterest’s paid advertising strategy incredibly effective at driving sales. Targeting is comprehensive, and you may reach the specific people you wish to contact with the exact things they seek.
Additional Social Networks
Other networks may or may not work for you, depending on your target demographic and how you utilize them. Twitter, for instance, works very well for specific users but not so well for others. Snapchat may do very well for younger, more tech-savvy audiences but not as well for other markets.
It is prudent to have a presence.on various networks, but you shouldn’t devote too much time to them unless you feel they have promise for YOUR market.
For instance, LinkedIn advertising is highly effective, but only for B2B audiences or when selling products related to school or job searching.
Check out Ecom Smart Start for additional in-depth information on promoting your e-commerce shop. In addition, you will discover many more techniques for marketing your shop to get the most customers possible.
