Easy Ways to Start with Ecommerce
The ecommerce trend is far from dying, more people are finding success with ecommerce every week. How are these people finding success in ecommerce? They take action, plain and simple.
Marketers make a lot of money teaching other people how to sell products online. I know far too many people that were talking about ecommerce in 2015 and still don’t have a successful store in 2017. The trainings and webinars are great for a beginner but actually doing what was shown will advance you far more than the content of that $497 training course that is being promoted.
I’m a self taught man, youtube showed me how to do a lot of things online and helped me make a good income freelancing. I watched a webinar some self proclaimed expert was preaching about his rise to fame from nothing to something and then pitched an overpriced training for the remaining 2 hours. Man do I hate pitch fest webinars after listening to an hour of someone’s sad tale of growing up #internetmarketers.
I took the 5 minutes of actual screenshare that the expert showed on the webinar and did all the steps to get a site live with 3 products available. I was not a natural in any means, my first couple of ecommerce stores failed horribly. I learned a valuable lessons from failing, I became much faster at building websites and getting things set up so I could sell online. I spent thousands of dollars on Adwords before I took the plunge into Facebook ads.
To be honest I failed at facebook ads, multiple times. I learned a valuable lesson from that as well, I also learned about targeting and conversion elements. The important things came from failure, if I hadn't failed I would not of learnt to try other angles or to be resourceful.
Taking the plunge into ecommerce marketing helped me develop my skills faster than any other activity I was doing online. Editing product images, descriptions and changing buy now button placement could of taken weeks, but when you need it done you just have to take action and do it.
Enough reminiscing about my journey in online sales, I want to give you some shortcuts that will help get you selling online with ecommerce faster and without losing the shirt off your back.
Where to source products
There are millions and millions of products available to promote online. Popular places to find physical products to sell are
Platform | Cost | Products | Comments |
---|---|---|---|
Ali Express | Free | Millions+ | Vendor rating system, extensive product database with messaging capabilities. Easy to navigate. |
Mega Goods | $14.99 | 4,000+ | Specifically electronics products. Low monthly cost, fast shipping but clunky dashboard. |
Dropship Direct | $9.97 | 90,000 | Small directory, manual ordering using the PushLift data feed software. |
Worldwide Brands | $299 | Millions+ | Verified vendors, lifetime access $299 nice slick UI. Large product database. |
Doba | $29 | 2 Million+ | Starting at $29, nice UI and some alternative products. |
Global Sources | Free | 2.8 Million | Huge product directory. Verified vendors, clunky interface. |
Salewoo | $67 | 2.6 Million | Unlimited support, 8,000+ vendors. Smooth UI and easy to navigate dashboard. Trusted brands. |
There are many more marketplaces that provide physical products that can be on sold and repackaged as your own. If you can’t find a marketplace in the table above you need to refine your expectations of what you plan to do with ecommerce.
You need three things to sell products online
- A product
- A platform
- A customer
That’s it in a nutshell, there is more you can do to optimise the store, the products and frame your buyer but that’s the key ingredients to selling with ecommerce. I could hyper focus in on what makes a buyer click the buy button or crafting a high converting Facebook advertising campaign but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Drop shipping, Private label or affiliate sales
Before you commit to “just” selling online you should consider your path. Will you sell your own goods or leverage someone else’s hard work and put some cream on top.
Dropshipping - When you sell someone else’s product advertised as your own and markup the purchase price to cover buying it cheaper elsewhere.
Private Label - Creating a branded product. This may also be taking product A and adding features to it so that it is similar but unique with your private label brand.
Affiliate - Similar to drop shipping but you are selling someone else's product and getting a commission on that sale.
Each has its specific advantages, but each also comes with its disadvantages. To find the path that best suits you You can easily say affiliate because it sounds like the easiest road but if you don’t do the research it will be harder than you first thought.
Consider the following:
- Your financial situation
- Your marketing budget
- Your knowledge of website design
- How many hours in a day you have to commit to your choice
Dropshipping pros and cons
Most people open up a dropship online store with the understanding that they will be receiving the same bottom dollar pricing as everyone else selling the exact same products. What really happens is that dropship distributors add a surcharge or extra fee and allocate these fees onto the quoted wholesale price.
Thinking smart as the distributor it makes sense to sell in bulk, instead of in drips and drabs. The lower cost for doing more work sending individual packages is counter productive.
Having to package and ship a lot of single items is more work than bundling bulk products together in one shipment. Your costs for shipping will need to be considered along with manual hours you spend boxing and sending everything, time is money.
Often times, you will require the use of several dropship distributors to fully flesh out the product selection for your store. Using 2 or more different dropshippers means that 2 or more companies will be making separate shipments to your customers, which means that 2 or more companies will be charging you their own separate shipping costs.
Another downside is that you have are the person on the end of the phone answering any enquiries about delivery or damaged items. You will repeat yourself over and over again and could easily be apologising for someone else’s mistakes.
Dropshipping also comes with the confusion of multiple vendors supplying a multitude of products. One customer might buy 5 items at your store but the products come from 5 separate vendors, this makes it a logistical nightmare for organising the order. Your customer just wants to see that the 5 pairs of Air Jordan’s are the correct size, colour and the price was as stipulated. They care not for how many vendors you had to organise their shoes from would it be awkward to say “Just Do IT!”.
Ecommerce platforms to sell your sh%t on
Everyone has heard of Amazon and in parts of the world where Amazon has not yet penetrated the marketplace there is eBay. I like eBay for quick transactions and fast turnaround times. Buyers don't hassle you if you make them aware of estimated shipping times (I add 2 days to the average shipping time).
Amazon is massive and only going to get bigger. The commissions for selling on amazon as an associate were cut back for some categories in March 2017, and the entry percentage is quite low. If you know how to sell online then you could negotiate some more selling commish if you move goods.
Shopify is a massive player in the ecommerce game. The platform looks slick on the backend and has increased functionality. A gripe with shopify or more so the developers is getting someone that can edit Shopify code is expensive and involves them being legit on point when it comes to code.
Facebook marketplace is the newest player to the ecommerce game and it makes complete sense following the move to compete directly with Youtube by having Facebook TV for videos and now making waves as a marketplace. Sellers can upload direct from their mobile phone and interact with geo filters.
My Fav:
I’m a WordPress fan, but more recently I’ve been enjoying Magento for larger ecom stores.
Ecom with a low budget
Many people reading this will be in this position, the marketing budget to set up and get the store operating is $1000 or less. I’ve knocked around on enough forums to know anyone still talking about setting up an ecom store is in this category, because if they weren't in this category they would already have a system and understand what it costs to get a store operating
Key points:
- Do everything yourself, get fast and produce more
- Use free softwares and tools where possible
- Push organic posts as often as you can
- Use what ever budget you have spare for Facebook ads
- Find converting products and push them
Ecom with a budget
You have a budget and can invest some money into setting up an ecommerce store and get some advertising for products.
Ecom with a fat stack.
Firstly let me say if you have a fat stack of cash to invest in ecommerce and you are new to ecom, I suggest hiring professionals to build your website, set up the products and basically create a done for you online store.
Honestly I lost days doing it all myself. Now I go to Fiverr and order a store build off a trusted provider with a turn around time of 48 hours. Once I have the store I can get products up on the website myself or use another trusted source on Fiverr to fill my store with products that I have pre selected from AliExpress or other marketplaces.
This allows me to be handed a store that’s ready to go, all I need to do is optimise pages and products and I can start sending traffic.
Ecommerce Platforms & SEO
This has become more and more aligned with the importance that SEO plays in a stores online success. Things that you should consider when committing to a platform to sell your products are:
- Domain mapping your own domain
- Do you have the ability to blog
- How flexible are the product description fields
- Can you get reviews listed on the product pages
- Will your store be mobile friendly
You want to have your products appearing on the front page of Google and you want them to be able to be reviewed when people find them useful.
Selecting a compatible platform when you make the move will play a vital role in your search result rankings and you should consider SEO a viable stream of lead generation for your ecommerce store.
Tools and Software
Marketers do love their tools and softwares. The basics of it are going to be listed below and I would imagine others may have their own box of tricks for such an occasion as helping others find their way.
This is my list of versatile tools to get a store setup and operating sooner than later.
Tool/Software | Function | Monthly Cost |
---|---|---|
Google Keyword Planner | Keyword research | Active Adwords Account |
SEMRush | Competitor analysis | $99+ |
Buzzsumo | Social Signals, Content marketing | Pro $79 |
Referral Candy | Social trust, Referrals | $49 |
Email Autoresponder | Email marketing | $9+ |
Canva | Design eye catching images | Free |
This is a basic list for down and dirty to get the job done. Yes there are some hefty paid tools mentioned but with some resourceful thinking I’m sure you will figure out how to reduce these costs and even use some of them for FREE!
Try not to lose yourself in the toolset and focus more on getting products up on your store and in the eyes of who is looking to buy those products. The rest takes care of itself with the only real work in adjusting some conversion elements.
Finding software that integrates into the platforms can be a massive time saver. The ecommerce game is so robust and deep that to be managing everything yourself will kill your business. Plug n play type API integrations can speed up productivity and overall management of your growing ecommerce empire.
Key elements that you want to integrate for seamless reporting, tracking and management are:
- Stock Inventory management
- Orders, refunds and customer support
- Email marketing automation is a must have
- Accounting integration. Profit, revenue and sales figures at a glance
A rule I live by is to review the plugins, software and tools I use every couple of months to see if there is something better. Optimising your tool warchest can reap benefits by lowering cost and improving your time spent manually doing things
Security for your Empire
The Google HTTPS and SSL push for secure online browsing is looming on the horizon, and ecommerce stores have a massive advantage by getting onboard. To briefly sum this up, Google wants all websites especially those collecting personal data and exchanging payments to have a secure socket layer or SSL installed to protect sensitive customer data.
Selecting a marketing platform that is PCI payment card industry compliant is what sets you apart from the competition for now anyhow. Think about your customers not wanting to spend their money with your store because it lacks basic security functions, that is an easy fix and one you can get a web developer to assist with.
Improve your ecom store’s reputation by displaying trusted secure logo’s in the footer, increase social trust and maintain sales by providing signals that you are a secure checkout. This is a no brainer for store owners to get onboard.
Ecommerce made easy
All you need to do is take action.
Many people struggle to take action and one of the biggest stumbling blocks is picking a niche. Once you spend 5 minutes browsing the product marketplaces you see the diversity of what can be sold online. This sheer volume of choice provokes hesitation for the new ecom store owner.
Let me give you some ideas:
- Beauty products
- Books
- Clothing
- Computer accessories
- Sporting goods
- Toys
That’s a very good list of niches and covers a very broad amount of products right? Correct and I would say maybe to broad. Making money in ecommerce involves niching it down.
Instead of beauty products zero in on a specific product range within the beauty niche.
Beauty products > Lips gloss and lip primers
Using a targeted product base allows for more engagement with your target market. The audience may be smaller but they are much more interested and will convert a lot higher than someone coming to large site.
Time to Scale
You get into ecom to sell products and grow from 3 products to a fully stocked warehouse of products with your own label on them. Most people starting with ecommerce have this type of vision, but few accomplish it due to inability to scale.
When it is time to scale your business can your marketing platform handle your growth? Very important question and the answer could stall your money making opportunities to a halt.
Shopify offers a very simple scalability plan as you grow so will your platform. A system that restricts growth was never built to grow, and you should have store growth in the back of your mind from the time you register that domain name.
Customer Service
I know it sounds like hard work already and it can be a nightmare. Taking care of your customers will reward you with positive referrals and in turn generate more revenue and sales.
You can take four routes for success with customer service.
- Outsource the process
- Hire a team of microworkers
- Handle it yourself
- Set up a well organised chat bot
Outsource the process start to finish to a professional service and remove any headache involved with servicing customer problems. If you are making money from your store than go the road and pay someone to get it done, you can implement changes and have them actioned instantly. This is not for the baller on a budget startup store owners.
Hiring your own team of microworkers to manage your customer service will be a positive move and reduce most of the stress involved with customer service enquiries. This will still require some involvement, you can get this in place relatively cheap by looking at places like Upwork, People per hour or advertising locally.
Handling the customer service process yourself is how you maintain gold standard service levels. This will suck the soul out of most people, you will lose hours and repeat yourself a hundreds times in a day. Satisfaction that the job is being done right is way many people handle their own support lines. This is how many small online stores grow into larger stores by providing solid customer service.
Chatbots are all the craze, and I like where that road is leading ecommerce businesses. Automated, but personalised and helpful messaging between buyer and chat bot.
Conclusion
Getting into ecommerce is not that hard when you look at what’s been presented above. Starting from low budget or knowledge, to advanced with a fat bankroll you can get started in ecom. I’ve found great success with ecommerce and have now transitioned to ecommerce marketing as I enjoy helping store owners reach success.
Anyone can be successful at selling products online, it takes a slight learning curve and for you to take action. Once you sell one product before you know it you have sold 20 then 50 and it snowballs.
My advice, go out and build a niche focused store and start selling.