Earlier in this blog series, we discussed Lata’s story of how she began selling online. See her story here.
You have decided that you want to sell online. The next query is – What should you sell?
Choosing the right item for sale can be a tough decision, but it necessarily doesn’t have to be! How can you make up your mind?
Here’s how Lata did it.
Lata has a business that sells women’s clothing. With each passing year, her business has grownup – and now it is a lucrative store.
Eventually, after a while, her sales stopped flourishing. She desired to grow her profits, hike up her business, and reach to more clients. She finally decided that the ideal option could be selling online.
When Lata made her decision to sell online, she had clearly in mind the products she wanted to sell. She made use of these factors to zero down on the correct product:
Cognize your target audience: As each and every seller worth his salt will be aware of, the first and foremost step for a prospering online business is to know your target audience.
Lata assessed the demographics, buying patrtern etc. of the individuals she wanted to target prior to selling to them. Lata’s Fashions was principally targeted towards upper-middle-class women, who longed-for buying contemporary, trendy clothes, which were affordable.
Assess the market for your product: Possibly you desire to sell handcrafted leather bags to Indian middle-class women. Or perhaps you want to sell pumps to B2B customers.
You need to know – Is there enough demand for your product? It is worthy of thinking about the target market for the products you want to sell. How will you stretch out to your customers? How will you create a market for your products and publicize?
The Global Retail E-commerce Index 2015 reveals the top selling products –
Determine your business strategy – What is your aim and do your products fit them? Either way, you sell niche products and bid higher gross profit but with a constricted audience or you sell mass-market products and bid lower gross profit, with a larger target segment.
Lata decided that the ideal strategy for her was to sell in vogue apparel to upper middle-class women with relatively lower margins, but a bigger customer base. She boosted her collection in various ways, ascertaining that she used her promotional material were her clients were most liable to see them.
If you make sale of mass-market products, you will discover high levels of competition online owing to the volumes of products on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay etc. Not just that, margins will nearly always be lower.
But then, making sale of niche products is a fair enough strategy if you can stand out from the bunch, which brings us to the next factor.
Brand yourself – To leap out from the muddle a customer meets online, you must brand your products – giving them the edge that makes them excel. For instance, brands like Happily Unmarried stand out, owing to their unparalleled products and kinky identity.
Pricing – Put a price tag on your products according to the comfort level of your customers. If you are thinking to sell high margin products, ascertain that your clients avail the pre-sale support they may require to make the purchase choice.
Shipping – Would you be shipping your products on your own? Or are you thinking of outsourcing your transportation to marketplaces or third-party logistics establishments? Shipping can get complex for start ups. The smaller the products you design to sell, the lower the shipping costs related with the products and the smaller the impact on your margins.
These are the elements you should think of when choosing the products for your store or marketplace. Like Lata you can make use of this list to narrow out the products you want to sell online.
Here’s some piece of advice from Industry person Hadi Curtay about how to choose products –
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Next in our series – How to make sale online on top marketplaces.
Any suggestions or comments for us? Let us know in the comments section below.
