Selling a product online via an e-commerce website is the Internet equivalent to owning a high street shop. Much like a shop your customers browse through your products, selecting what they want before paying at the checkout. Your job is then to deliver their order to them in a timely fashion. The classic example of a successful ecommerce operation is of course Amazon.

The real power of the World Wide Web is that it allows you to reach millions of customers world wide meaning that various speciality products that can not be economically sold on the high street can now reach a big enough market to be viable, for example in my post you can sell anything online I gave an example of a business selling tumbleweed over the Web.

Getting starting with E-Commerce involves the following steps:

1. Choose a product to sell and negotiate a deal with a supplier.
2. Create an ecommerce website and populate with stock.
3. Integrate and online payment provider.
4. Develop your backend process (picking, packing and posting).
5. Market the site.

Choosing a product is possibly the hardest step, as you’ll need to find a product that has a big enough market, without being flooded with competition and which is ideally not price sensitive - or where it is difficult to compare prices. Then you’ll need to identify a supplier, unless you are going to manufacture the product yourself.

Creating the site while technically challenging should be one of the easiest steps - providing you find a good web developer to work with (read How to Choose a Web Developer for an Ecommerce Project) to find out how to select the right web developer for you.

Taking payment requires integration with a payment provider, you can use a merchant account through your normal bank or alternatively one of the specialist payment providers such as WorldPay or PayPal.

Developing your backend process is crucial - having won a customers order you need to ensure they are satisfied and likely to buy from you again and/or recommend you to their friends, family and colleagues. You will need to consider how you will manage stock, how you will pick and pack it and who you will use to deliver it.

Marketing your site is perhaps the hardest step; it’s also the step that most businesses don’t take - little wonder then that they make few if any sales. The secret to promoting your site is a balanced mixture of on and offline marketing including but not limited to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Email marketing, Direct Mail Marketing and Advertising.

If you lack the capital to develop and online ecommerce solution straight away, or you wish to test the market first before committing there are of course some cheaper alternatives that can allow you to bootstrap your operation, for example you can test your products and prices on Ebay and may even find that you can trade successfully using an Ebay shop - but that’s a topic for another post.

This post is part of my Internet business opportunities series.

Subscribe:
If you enjoyed this post and would like to be kept updated on future posts, then please Subscribe by Email or subscribe to my RSS Feed.