Many people feel interested in online business. But many of their understandings are one-sided or even wrong. This is because they haven’t done one before.
Whether you got interested in online business or just starting in eCommerce, I believe this article can help you save a lot of money, time, and effort.
Build your website store with Shopify
Ten years ago, you needed a professional technical team to build a website and start an online business. Now, you can directly build your store with website builders, which are cheaper and more efficient.
There are many tools for building websites. There are a few of the more influential ones: WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix, Shopify, and so on.
For newcomers, we suggest not getting hung up on which site builder is better. We recommended using Shopify to build your website. It is easy to get started, and the fees are relatively reasonable and flexible. When you get familiar with Shopify, then try other tools.
Having different product categories in your shop
You must have heard people talking about building a vertical website shop by now. That is, sell a certain niche category of products.
For example, a phone case online shop sells all just phone cases, just different designs. Or building a boutique shop, selling all products for hundreds of dollars.
A vertical website shop is more suitable for sellers with some experience than for newcomers. For many newcomers, building such a shop will waste a lot of your time and effort.
You spend a lot of time and effort building a good website, and then run ads to test the product, only to find that the data is not good, or difficult to convert. Then the time and energy spent on building the shop are wasted.
In that case, your shop will have to be rebuilt, from the domain name to the logo, from the products to the images, everything will have to be redesigned.
Why is Having different product categories in your shop recommended?
Having different categories allows you to test different products and different product verticals, making it easier to succeed.
If one product doesn’t perform well, try another, saving time and effort. With a wide range of products to test, you will be more likely to get orders, and the positive incentive that comes from frequent orders will keep you going. As your online shop gets better and better, you can consider doing a vertical or boutique shop again.
The online shop can be built to be as simple and consistent as possible. Be sure to use high-resolution images, high-resolution GIFs, and detailed and attractive product descriptions.
Product Selection
Product selection is always one of the core tasks for an online shop. Online shoppers must look for products that have something special to offer. Either products that solve consumer pain points or products that consumers feel they need, not just products that look fun.
Many newbies only want to sell products that they think are cool and interesting and they don’t think in terms of the consumer. This is wrong. To you, the product is cool, but it doesn’t offer value to the consumer. Naturally, users won’t place orders.
Product selection is very important and it determines the success or failure of your online shop. We have talked about the principles and methods of product selection in our previous article and video, check them.
How to find the perfect dropshipping products?
How to Find Your Niche Products for Online Shop in 2022?
A certain amount of capital investment
Many newcomers will be curious: how much capital investment is needed to build an online business?
Building your online shop is a real business, and needs a certain amount of capital investment. It is not a 0-cost business. If someone tells you 0 cost to do this business, then they are 100% lying to you.
To build an online business and online shop, the cost is mainly spent on building tools, plug-ins, advertising costs, procurement and delivery, and business qualifications.
Dropshipping
Always remember, newbie sellers should not start out stocking up. Because the newbie seller cannot ensure that the hoarded products are all sold out.
If the stockpiled products do not sell, then the money for renting a warehouse or stockpiling will all be wasted.
The inventory value of unsold products is 0. So, how do new sellers solve the problem of sourcing and shipping?
Here is the answer. At first, new sellers can select products on AliExpress or platforms like eComhub.net. Once you got orders, you can do dropshipping.
When you have more and more orders, the more confident you are, then you can find a professional dropshipping agency to deal with the sourcing and shipping problems.
When it comes to dropshipping from AliExpress, it is necessary to mention its shipping time problem. It is all known that the logistics time of AliExpress is very long. For example, it is estimated 20-30 days for a parcel from China to the United States. But if you haven’t found your winning product yet, I’d recommend AliExpress. Always remember to give feedback to your customer on the logistics node of the parcel promptly, to reassure the customer.
When you find your winning products, you can find a local dropshipping company to ship your products. As a professional dropshipping agent, we have our global shipping line and can guarantee the best time efficiency in logistics.
Traffic Generation
Why do you need to drive traffic?
There are now hundreds of millions of websites around the world and new ones are coming online every day. Your website is just 1 of those new sites. Amongst this huge number of websites, people don’t even know that your website exists, so naturally, they won’t visit it. So, if you don’t get traffic to your website, you won’t get orders.
Since there is no traffic, we have to attract traffic. We online sellers have to actively promote our website and attract users to visit our website. The more people visit, the more orders are possible.
Free Traffic Generation
Email marketing, SEO, social media marketing (including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.), as well as YouTube traffic generation, community site traffic generation, etc.
Paid Traffic Generation
Social media advertising, e.g., Facebook and Instagram ads. Search engine advertising, such as Google Ads, and BING Ads. Collaboration with Instagrammers and TikTok celebrities and affiliate marketing.
Increase the customer lifetime value
This point is more commonly known as making more money from each customer.
Once you have a group of customers in your online shop, there are means by which you can keep your regular customers spending money in your shop. That is, increase the lifetime value of each customer. In other words: be in the business of repeat customers.
Anyone who has ever been in business understands that it is always easier to sell to a regular customer than to a new one.
When an old customer is familiar with you and has bought your products, he has more trust in you and is naturally more likely to buy your products again. And trust is a very luxurious thing. Every old customer deserves to be treated seriously. If you want to make money from your regular customers, you need to make sure your products are of high quality.
There are 2 effective ways to get repeat orders from repeat customers.
The first is that after the customer has received the product, we go to them for product reviews. It can be used to attract customers to place another order.
The second one is email marketing. Remember to choose a simple and easy-use Email marketing tool.
A determination to succeed
This last point may sound like the right kind of nonsense. But too many people have trouble building their online business and give up.
To succeed, you must be determined.