If you are looking for ways to sell products online then consider the following 2 options. We have listed the pros and cons to help you make up your mind.
Sell via an Online Marketplace
Most of us are well aware of names like Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart. These are online market places where people put their products for sale and people buy them online. The website charges a fee 10% to 15% of the product sale price. In last few years these companies have spent a fortune on marketing their brands and getting a steady stream of traffic, which you can use for your benefit also. Join them as a vendor and put across your products at a competitive price and good business terms to get sales online. This is just like having a shop in a real market, only this is on the internet.
The advantage is that you just need to join and add products. Its simple. You can do it yourself, its easy. You pay a small fee on your sales to the company ( Amazon/Flipkart/Snapdeal) as a vendor fee.
The disadvantage is that you are just a vendor. It is not your website. You are competing with others on price and terms to reach customers. You have to agree to the marketplace terms to conduct business – there is no option.
Sell via Your Own Online Store
A better option is to have your own business website where you list your products, define them, add prices and sell them on your own terms and conditions. If you are the manufacturer you can get direct orders from your distributors, and if you are a vendor, you can get retail customers via your website.
Advantages: With your own webstore you can do the following things:
- It is your business website. You own it.
- You can promote your own brand and products exclusively.
- Define products, prices and terms to suit your business.
- Create unique offers to improve sales and add more customers.
- Make online sales, get payments straight into your bank account.
- Get data on website traffic, visitor movement and patterns to improve your website further.
Disadvantages: Much more is possible, but building a brand takes time, money and patience. You will need a professional to build your online webstore, list all products, list prices, update terms and conditions and finally market your webstore to reach good search ranks for various product categories. This is an ongoing process which will take a year or more depending on the competition.
Now, you can decide what you want to do.
The Best Way
The best way it seems, is to sell on established market places while working on your own online store simultaneously. This way to can keep selling from the very start and once your own online store is on top search ranks, you can do double the business.
If you are tech savy and would love to do it by yourself, read on..
Do it Yourself Online Store
To start you will need to buy a Domain and Hosting.
The biggest question then is which platform to use? It has to be convenient for you as well as customers, not to mention, search friendly and complete in every possible way. Given below is a a list of 6 commonly used softwares for building a web store:
In our experience WordPress + Woocommerce is the best means to create an online store, because of the following reasons:
- WordPress is FREE, easy to install, use and manage. It is a tme tested software with no possibility of errors.
- Woocommerce is the most commonly used online store plugin which works great everytime.
- With woocommerce create as many product categories as you want and post as many products as you like. There are no limits.
- Thousands of worpress plugin options allow you to customize your store just the way you want.
- Hundreds of tools available on wordpress help you streamline your store’s SEO and marketing ability.
- Link it up with Google Analytics to see real time traffic and visitor data for constant Improvement.
- Get online Payments made by customers into your account, new order alerts, automatic invoice generation, etc.
If you don’t wish to do it all yourself, we can do it for you. To get a professionally designed online store you can contact us.
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