1. Your own online store: It is near impossible to beat the big online stores, the Amazons of your country, unless you offer
- Something unique (e.g. pants for fat people),
- Something in a unique style /brand (e.g. Bonobos colorful pants), and
- Can beat the big ones on price or variety (E.g. Zappos, before it was bought by Amazon).
You can open a store on Shopify platform, or build your own using Wordpress (and free WooCommerce plugin), Squarespace (wordpress like, but paid site builder), or Magento (free and very popular eCommerce site builder).
The big issues with selling stuff through your own online store are many:
- Sourcing the products at a great price (e.g. phone cases wholesale from China)
- Partnering with a logistics/fulfillment partner
- Dealing with returns
- But, the most tricky part is advertising to get customers, which makes bad business sense if the margins on your products are not that high enough.
Try this alternate method: First know and get in touch with customers who might be interested in your product/s
- e.g Run a Google Adwords campaign or a Facebook ad campaign, bringing in users to a landing web page, getting their email ids/or, to pre-order beforehand.
Or, you can start small, with a small first batch of stock, seeing customer response before you invest in bigger stock lots.
Another alternate method: Look at products with higher margins. And, if you find some, think how come no one else is looking at this lucrative market.
eCommerce is a 24*7 sales job.
35. Selling arts and stuff on Etsy: Since Etsy is a place for selling arts and crafts, there is no fixed price for any kind of stuff. People will pay what like. And this is the best part about selling on Etsy.
This also gets people to overpay for stuff. Smart sellers will also back their prices with some reviews from buyers.
Rule of success on Etsy is simple: Sell cute and different.
Thank you for reading.
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