E-commerce has steadily been overtaking traditional retail for several years and increasingly more and more of the public are trying their hand at online business by buying and selling items online. Increase in the size of major retailers such as amazon and eBay is part of the reason why this trend has continued.
Choosing Your Products
One of the most important steps that you can take when starting out in E-commerce is choosing the product that sells well and that you can make a profit from. One of the main ways in which many online retailers just starting out choose to do this is to import products from china.
Importing products from china is significantly cheaper than purchasing them from most other companies and depending on the product they can be sold for a decent profit margin.
A good way in which to identify which product you may want to sell is by monitoring amazon and eBay for niche products and checking if there is a gap in the market for your product or alternatively just overall high demand for it.
Organising Delivery/Supply
A Key part of the online selling process is organising delivery of your product. One key issue that many online sellers may run into when selling online is often the lead time from China for an item to be delivered can be up to 28 days if it is being sent via boat. This is normally the cheapest delivery option. Air mail can also be organised but this normally costs significantly more .
In terms of supplying he product some retailers store their stock in a spare room or sometimes in a storage unit if the are running a slightly larger operation. A relatively new and very popular technique of supply which is being used by a lot of smaller retailers is known as drop shipping.
Drop shipping is when items are ordered from a seller and then when the supplier delivers them they are held in a warehouse or storage facility and then directed to the customer who has ordered the item rather than being delivered in bulk to the seller overall.
One of the major advantages of this is that the supplier does not need to use excess storage in order to store their overall stock.
How Can You Improve Sales And performance Overall?
There are a variety of different ways in which you can improve sales performance as well as marketing. One of the ways in which this can be done is by implementing different pricing strategies. Using different pricing strategies means that you are more likely to see results.
Furthermore encourage anyone who purchases your product to write a review so that your online selling profile has better trust levels and approval ratings overall.
A third way through which you can improve your overall selling listing is improving its overall SEO. Items on online retail sights need some form of SEO in order to be authentic. One easy way in which you can improve you listings overall s by adding tags to your listing.
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Devora Pieciak is an expert in service leadership and innovation. She writes about emerging trends in service-dominant logic, leadership strategies in service-based industries, and the impact of technology on customer engagement.
