Process of Selling Products through Online Store
Online Store> If you are planning not just a one-time sale, but a real business, then of course, you need to sell products on demand. The best way to trade on the internet is to launch a sales site. It does not require a lot of money to create and promote it. It is quite important to properly organize & think through everything. An online store can work according to the following process:
Standard Sales. A typical story for an online store. The website has a catalog of products with prices. As soon as a customer places an order, you ship it to the specified address. This way, the transaction is done directly between you and your buyer.
Dropshipping. This business model is often used by sellers who do not have their own warehouse. Here’s how it happens: Your site has information about the product, its features, and cost, but you don’t actually have the product. And, as the user places an order, you place an order with the product supplier, acting as an intermediary.
Entrepreneur and blogger Yevgeny Kushkov tells how to sell a product without keeping it in stock (without buying it). You can sell through the Internet retail and wholesale products. Again, not everyone can afford to keep stock for bulk sales. In the second case, accounting will be more difficult. Therefore, this is the better for beginners in the field of e-commerce to start with retail okay. Opening an online store that only sells in a specific region will cost you less. It is much more convenient to deliver only within your area. This is the most acceptable option in the beginning, but then you can cover a wider coverage area.
How to start selling through an online store
Step number 1. Choosing a niche
When choosing a niche, you must calculate your chances in advance. Are you able to compete with other suppliers of the products you are going to sell on the Internet? Is the selected type of sale able to bring you profit, or is it only associated with losses? The choice of product, the sales you will engage in directly depends on your finances. The starting capital sets certain limits. If you don’t have a lot of money, you’re less likely to sell jewelry or high-end electronics.
First, you should do a marketing analysis. This can be done independently or with the involvement of experts. Of course, you will make the final choice based on your personal feelings & preferences Also. Whatever stirs up emotions in you, consumers will probably like it too. But, nevertheless, push personal feelings and preferences into the final plan, when the main directions have already been selected on the basis of serious analysis. For example, you have decided that your niche is to sell clothes. But now you have to decide whether to start selling ties or gloves? Trust your intuition.
What should guide your choice? The product sold must be:
- demand;
- Competitive (preferably not too competitive);
- Untimely.
When starting a business, these criteria are very important. Knowing how to sell online is not enough. You must decide what will be sold.
Step number 2. Search for suppliers
Information about some product suppliers is now apparently invisible. And finding it is no problem. We list several ways to find suppliers:
- There are many directories on the Internet that have information on companies that offer a wide variety of products. Study information on forums, thematic sites that have unbiased reviews about suppliers by their customers and partners. Use this information to create a list of your suppliers, including contact details and business reputation.
- Printed publications. Many benefits can be gained by studying specialized magazines, newspapers, brochures.
- Exhibitions. Events where manufacturers showcase their products are perfect places to build bridges and learn from a specific market sector. Here you can see the products with your own eyes, communicate with the company’s employees. The only negative is that usually companies participating in such exhibitions and conferences are aimed at wholesale sales.
- Market. In a small town, this option can be quite acceptable. In the market, you can see the products and even touch them, collect the suppliers’ business cards and agree on favorable terms of the transaction.
Competitors. If you ask the seller for product certification, you can see information about his supplier. But to get the same favorable conditions for working with suppliers as with competitors, you have to work hard, since not everyone is given to make profitable contracts.
Stage No. 3. Business Registration
When you acquire partners, build a business base, you need to think about how this business is best organized. There are two forms for an online store:
- Limited Liability Company (LLC);
- Individual entrepreneur (IP).
Registration as an individual entrepreneur is a simple low-cost procedure. But LLCs have wider potential. True, registration costs you in terms of time and money. For example, the minimum authorized capital for an LLC is 10 thousand rubles. In addition, you must pay:
- State registration fee;
- A fee for notary services to certify copies of documents and signatures of the applicant;
- Fees for providing a power of attorney, if required;
- other expenses;
- Fees for opening a current account.
The minimum amount to create a legal entity is 50 thousand rubles. Additionally, it is important to have your legal address, so you need to think about the premises. Calculate whether all these costs justify the planned profit? If you still open as an individual entrepreneur, you will have to pay only one state tax in the amount of 800 rubles. An individual entrepreneur may not have a seal or current account. However, for more convenient cooperation, it is still better to start them. Even if you entrust all the necessary documents to a third party, your expenses will not exceed 4,000 rubles.
Step No. 4. Finding an office and a warehouse (can be skipped)
What your office will look like and whether you can maintain a warehouse depends on how much money you have to begin with. It is difficult to make the right decision without calculating the expected profit. If the income is expected to be low and it takes a long time to wait, it may be better to do without a warehouse and an office first.
If you absolutely need an office and a warehouse, do a study on the cost of renting the respective premises. Pay attention to access roads, regional location of structures, as well as their technical condition. Renting an office is often associated with hiring one or more employees. And all this requires additional costs. Therefore, decide whether you will spend the initial capital to rent this premises.
Stage number 5. Create an online store
How to sell online if you don’t have an online store? Theoretically, this can be done, but it is inconvenient. So, to create an online store you need a logo and corporate identity. Hope that the image will be your face for many years, think carefully about this moment of organizing your business.
Almost all online store owners hire freelancers to create their logos and landing pages. Numerous remote service sites will allow you to find an expert who will create a high-quality and conceptual logo for you. It will cost about 5-10 thousand rubles & the design of the web resource itself will cost 10-20 or 30 thousand rubles.
It doesn’t matter what you sell on the Internet, in any case, you can use gifts with corporate identity as an incentive for customers. Try to be creative in designing it. Be guided not only by your own taste, but also by the opinion of an expert, as well as by the compliance of the chosen style with the general direction of the store. For your site, through which you will sell your products on the Internet, you must have three things:
- Hosting;
- Domain;
- Engine
Hosting – A remote server to store all store content. The domain is the address of the store on the Internet. Often, both hosting and a domain are provided under the same contract, their maintenance usually starts from 600 rubles per year. Engine is a site content management system. The free engine has a minimal set of features. If you want to create a more advanced and user-friendly website, you should look for a more expensive option.
Stage number 6. Filling the online store with content
For an online store website, you need to create high-quality content. And it is advisable to think about every little thing. Start with a catchy greeting and company story, continue with product details (photos, price, features) and end with ease of navigation and a conversion button that stimulates purchase. All this is very important and affects profit.
Outsource text drafting to freelancers or run the event yourself. The cost of finished text is measured in rubles per thousand characters without spaces. The minimum price is 20-30 rubles. If you just copy other people’s texts, search engines will block you and then you can forget about promoting an online store and selling online for a long time.
It is best to hire a professional photographer to take product photos. His services are not cheap pleasure: for each picture you will have to pay 150-200 rubles. In some cases, this the amount in list approaches the actual cost of the product. If it is expensive for you, then at worst, a photo can be taken from the supplier’s catalog.
Stage number 7. Launch of an advertising campaign
To sell goods or services on the Internet, it is important not only to create a website, but also to promote it, otherwise no one will even know about its existence. Promotion is done by specialized agencies that have considerable experience in this matter.
Freelancers can also do SEO. They will prepare text for your site that includes keywords. It is for them that the search engines will offer your site in the search results when the relevant request is received. You have to wait to see results, but it works in the long run. Advertisements attract viewers very quickly. You will get a return almost immediately after payment, but it is short-lived. It is better to combine all the above methods to promote a product.
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