How to Sell Products Online

So you want to learn the highs and lows of online selling?

Well, that’s a pretty solid starting point. But to say the truth, the acute competition in the ecommerce industry is staggeringly endless and blustery. Learning how to sell online takes more than just being a little savvy about the current shopping trends to unravel the entire process.

You might even think of taking that online masterclass which appears so glossy on your email alerts. Not that I'm against this move anyway. But at times, you might end up with junk information that leads you nowhere.

 

If you’re about to find the winning products to sell online, you don’t want to start with zero sales in the first month. That might get a little dampening for the faint-hearted.

Just like brick and mortar store owners, you need a perfect blueprint to help you identify a unique product that makes your competitors want to venture elsewhere.

It doesn’t matter whether yours is a small business that’s facing a stiff neck from hefty and scaled-up counterparts. So long as you kick off on the right foot, selling products online shouldn’t be anything close to quantum physics.

Looking at the most recent stats, it’s unquestionably certain that ecommerce is becoming so lucrative like never before. In the US alone, for instance, the total e-retail sales for the first quarter of 2019 were estimated at $ 130 billion. Other reliable infographics detailedly explain that the revenue is expected to rise to $500 billion by the end of the year.

This tends to suggest that there’s a huge potential even for newbies looking to carve a niche in the ecommerce sector.

But the expedition doesn't need to be bumpy whatsoever. Well, this guide, which I took a couple of nights to draft, is compendious and bears all the rightful facts concisely.

Just to share a snippet of what it’s all about, here are some of the basics this article has in store:

• How to find your niche product
• Identifying your potential customers
• Selling via an online store or through mainstream marketplaces
• Marketing the products and turning mere visitors to real customers.
• Analysing the current market trends.

The checklist above might sound familiar to most readers. Alongside this, you ought to optimize every step to reach the maximum potential, by all means.

The Differences Between Hosted and Self-hosted Ecommerce Platforms

If you'd like to configure a full ecommerce store where customers can come to your store, place items in the shopping cart and pay you for the items, you'll have to select a hosted or self-hosted ecommerce platform. Both options require hosting, but they are different in the way you go about getting that hosting.

To start, a hosted platform already has the hosting included for you. For example, a favorite of ours is the Shopify ecommerce system. It's more of a consumer-oriented platform for people who might not know everything there is to know about ecommerce web development.

Although advanced users can find all they need with a hosted solution, the goal is to also make it easier for beginners. Therefore, you don't have to piece together that many services or tools when you're just starting to learn how to sell products online. This means a hosted platform has cloud hosting, holding all site files and handling security and speed. You can also generally find domain buying services with hosted ecommerce systems.

Overall, hosted solutions like Shopify, Volusion, BigCommerce and Squarespace are packaged products, with everything you need delivered for a monthly or yearly fee.

As for the self-hosted platforms like WooCommerce, Magento and Easy Digital Downloads, these are a little more complicated, but they often give you more control and flexibility in terms of design.

There's no telling if developers actually prefer self-hosted over cloud hosted, but most of the time you can assume that an experienced developer would rather have complete control with a self-hosted system.

For example, some of the largest ecommerce sites in the world use Magento or WooCommerce due to this control. The difference is that you must go out and find your own reliable hosting, manage the site files yourself and communicate with your host whenever something goes wrong.

It might sound complicated if it's your first time trying to figure out how to sell products online, but most hosts make WordPress and Magento installation simple nowadays. For example, hosts like SiteGround and Bluehost provide one-click installation buttons for WordPress and WooCommerce.

To sum it all up:

Hosted:

• This is kind of like renting space to sell your products (you pay a monthly fee).
• You don't have to think about hosting, since it's all given to you.
• In fact, all features and templates and tools are provided in the monthly cost.
• You might feel somewhat limited since you have to choose from the features given, along with the templates and designs.

Self-hosted:

• You own everything and have complete control.
• You have to find, manage and pay for your own site host and domain name.
• This route isn't always best for beginners.
• You can make your site look like anything, as long as you have access to the right templates, plugins and coding knowledge.

Keep in mind that both hosted and self-hosted options often come with app or plugin stores, making expansion possible for both routes.

To make zero mistakes while finding the most befitting product to sell online, you need to draft your ecommerce business plan by making a close reference to these easy-peasy steps.

Step 1: How to sell online: Identify a niche

Is this the first stepping stone? You might ask.

Heck yes!

After all, how else would you come up with a product that’s tremendously doing well in the market? Currently, there are millions of products to consider. That might make you a little bewildered at the first instance.

Not anymore if you’ve got the rightful pointers at hand. Assuming that you’re not looking to sell the obvious commodities in the market, consumables and the likes, identifying a niche product is more of a ritual before you spend a penny to start your ecommerce business.

That way you’ll be able to cut the losses.

How to sell online: Recognize a problem in the market

As you may pretty well understand, most niche products tend to resolve a problem that most potential customers are facing. With that at the forefront, you’ll be able to identify who the consumers are.

One justifiable way to do that is to read consumer feedback from social platforms. At the moment, it’s not easy to auto-generate a need via advertising. Your products will only fetch some hype from impulsive buyers, which is so short-term.

The real deal here is to retain a consistent customer base that’s very much alive to the value which your niche brings to the table.

That simple!

Surprisingly, there are up-skilled tools to help you spot a lucrative niche. They’re easy to use and help a potential online retailer make realistic projections.

So let’s get on with it.

How to sell online: Make the perfect use of Keyword tools

The search engine is way smarter than you think. It matches search queries by running an analysis using the key phrases used to the most appropriate results.

To be precise, Google Trends is quite a distinctive tool that shows the interest, a particular keyword fetches over a stipulated period. So how’s this compatible with finding a niche product?

Perfect question. You might coincide with me.

Well, to fight fiercely on the ecommerce battleground, you need to show an immense prowess by working with sharp and data-driven insights.

Google Trends, in this context, allows you to identify niche products that have less competition.

So what’s the result?

If you intend to run a big online store that gives you an edge over your competitors, you must make it quite visible. Your ecommerce site's product pages must score fairly good on your SEO rankings. Closely connected to that is the fact that you get to bank on an advanced customer engagement relationship.

By selling products that are hard to find, high chances are that you’ll have your usual customers’ list in your pockets way longer than you’d expect. Most importantly, identifying the most rewarding niche market on a tool such as Google Trends, allows you to cut down on marketing expenses.

The leads might be less since you’re dealing with a rare product, but rest assured that you’ll be sitting on pleasing and remarkable conversions.

That aside, Google Trends sorts the interest of particular keywords by region. Needless to say that this functionality is the most suitable option to help a potential ecommerce retailer identify their target market.

Also, it feeds you with all the related queries and topics that might be closely connected to your forthcoming niche.

Well, that’s one way to do it.

As an alternative, you can keep the task to identify a niche simple and elegant playing around with tools like SEMRush, Moz’s Keyword research tool, Ahrefs, Google Keyword planner, just to name a few that have a solid ascendancy in the market.

Step 2: Know Where to Source Your Products From

This is a dynamic step that varies from one online seller to another. If let’s say you’re looking to drop ship products globally, there are huge stores to source products from. As things stand, AliExpress seems to take all the rage.

So what’s the fuss about this China-based marketplace?

What tends to be peculiar about AliExpress is the fact that a drop shipper can source products from this end at exceedingly low prices. While you can also drop ship with the retail giant, Amazon, AliExpress lists most of its products at cheaper prices.

The products sold on AliExpress range from electronics, fashion, households, among others. Thankfully, you don’t need to source products from this marketplace manually. An app such as Oberlo automates everything for a drop shipper.