With the options available to a first time eCommerce beginner only increasing, it can be confusing to pick what the best strategy is in 2020, as far as making your very first eCommerce sale is concerned.
Here below are three options of how you can sell online, as well as our advice regarding which option beginners should pick!
1. Sell through a marketplace
A marketplace is a site or app which hosts many sellers and provides all the customers. Examples of marketplaces include Amazon, Etsy, Facebook Marketplace and eBay.
This is a fast way of selling online, and there will be a large volume of potential buyers. The problem is, that there’s also a large number of sellers, who will be all competing with your products. This means that your success with common or generic products will come down to how well optimized your listings are, and how cheap your product is vs your competitors.
The other disadvantage is that marketplaces will take a hefty commission from your sales, sometimes as high as 30%. This is a major dent in your margin, but it will still mean higher sales.
2. Develop a totally custom eCommerce website
You can develop your own eCommerce site by coding it yourself and integrating services like payment gateways on your own. Or you can pay freelancers or a web development agency to do it for you. This is typically expensive, and will only recreate the experience you would get with an eCommerce platform for far less money and in no time at all.
We generally don’t recommend building your own store as 99% of eCommerce DNA is the same, and the amount of development needed to power the backend and administrative functions of your eCommerce system will be significant. There will be increased worry about maintaining those systems, what happens with hosting and servers (also ongoing costs), and what happens when things break or fall over. However, it can be resolve if you would look for websites or software that would help you analyze all areas of your business. You may seek help from TEC to know more about what is suitable for your business.
3. Build an online store via an eCommerce platform or website builder
Our advice would be to try out a simple eCommerce website builder or platform. All platforms have free trials, and they are a very quick way of testing out a site, listing your products and categories, and getting transactional as soon as possible.
It’s important to test out the themes, plugins, and features of your platform and get familiar with how they work. Once you’re ready to go, you pay a small monthly fee.
Of all the platforms, we’d recommend SimpleShop. SimpleShop has been voted the easiest eCommerce platform for beginners because it has an extremely clear interface, everything written in easy to understand, plain English, and it allows beginners to start selling in 15 minutes. Everything you need can be integrated at the touch of a button. There are no commissions on sales, no sales limits, no contracts, and they are often two to three times cheaper than other eCommerce platforms.
Once you’ve picked your means of selling online, you must optimize your categories, product listing pages, and reviews. Then you can go to the market! Pick one or two main marketing channels to focus on at first, rather than trying everything, common eCommerce marketing channels include:
- Google PPC
- SEO
- Social media
- Paid social media
- Email marketing
Master one or two and then move on. Once you’re generating good sales, then try to master another. Don’t forget to capture both the details of your historical customers, who you can then remarket offers and new products, but also visitors to your site who don’t purchase. Perhaps they’ve opted into a newsletter – if you convert them into first-time customers, they may yet provide longer-term revenue. Good luck!
