I’ve spent a lot of time lately talking about SEO and bloggy type stuff, so I thought it was about time I re-visited actual e-commerce; not least because I genuinely think that selling stuff online is perhaps the best possible way to make a decent living online.
Sooo… Where to start? Well, I’ve already talked about actually getting your business started. There are two options to consider; You can start off by building an e-commerce website or you can start small, with an eBay business and work up to a website from there.
But once you’ve figured out what to sell, and you have your e-commerce website up and running, you will need to actually make some sales, and you will want to grow your sales and grow your business…
Email marketing
This is not a new idea by any stretch – but I simply can’t stress enough how important it is to build a mailing list. Here’s an example though:
Say your new business makes 5 sales a day; after 6 months you will have acquired 900 customers! If you can convince just 10% of your customers to return to you, and each of those customers makes a purchase once every 3 months, you can make an extra 30 sales every month. That means that by using email, you could increase your sales by 66% right away!
The critical things to do are:
Make sure you add every new customer to your mailing list. Keep all the information you can, so that you know what each customer has bought, how much they have spent etc. Make sure you follow any anti spam laws in your country of course.
Make it easy for yourself to email your customers. Look around for a simple email solution and make it routine for yourself. For this blog I have written myself a plugin which allows me to write a quick email right from my admin panel. The easier it is to email your customers, the more you will do it.
eBay
If you are selling stuff exclusively via your website, why not try eBay? To get started, just pick one or two products that you can purchase pretty cheaply. To sell them on eBay you may need to offer these products at less than you usually would, possibly even at cost; That’s fine though.
Unless you are buying very cheap, you will probably never make a massive profit on eBay, but if you take a long term view, eBay is a great way to find new customers. Every sale you make on eBay is an extra person on your mailing list and you might find you can quickly grow your customer base this way.
SEO
In my experience SEO is unbelievably effective for e-commerce businesses. I tend to focus on optimizing my category pages, because the traffic you can get is often very well targeted.
The downside to SEO is that it takes time to build links and get rankings, but if you can afford the investment it is well worth considering taking on an SEO company. Paying for SEO almost invariably produces a better ROI compared to paid advertising such as PPC.
If you want to do your own SEO though, have a look around the rest of this site, there are plenty more SEO type posts to trawl though! The best place to start is with your title tags…
Coupons
Offering a voucher code is a really great way to draw in repeat customers. If you are sending out email marketing regularly, why not offer special discounts to your loyal customers. Your cost of sale will be lower to these customers, so you can offer discounts and still make a good profit.
Affiliate program
If you sell a popular type of product and can afford to offer a discount, working with an affiliate network can be very effective. Affiliate networks have a database of affiliates who have large mailing lists and can provide a lot of traffic to your site. You will then have to pay a commission on every sale made by these affiliates.
To make these programs work you will often have to provide a discount code, so that the affiliates can entice their readers to click on their link to your site.
By the time you have paid your affiliate commission and given a discount on your products, you may find it hard to make a profit, but again you need to take a long term view. A good affiliate campaign can bring you a lot of customers, and if you can break even on those sales, you can build your customer list quickly – and any repeat sales will bring in some nice profits.
Up Sell & Cross Sell!
Whilst it is brilliant finding ways to make more sales, it really does make a lot of sense to try to sell more in each and every sale you make.
Start by gradually increasing the number of complimentary products you have, so that you can sell related items. You know how every time you view a product on Amazon you see “what other people bought”? Well you want to be able to do that, so have a think about what other products you can sell.
Next, look at your website and think about how you can make it better at cross selling. When a customer adds a product to their cart, get it to suggest other products. You could even consider offering product bundles at a discount. Offering free postage on multiple items is also a great way to get people to buy more.
Summary
When you are selling stuff online, the biggest part of your job is marketing. It is really important that you try to put systems in place so that your basic logistics process is as simple as possible – try to get your business working smoothly so that you can free up your time for all of these little bits that make the biggest difference.
Hi,
This is really very good and informative article. This is very helpful for the neophytes in blogging. Well thanks for the information.
I’ll have to say that consistency is one of the most important factors in building up an e-commerce site. I tried my hand at just mass uploading of products and thought that the sales would just role on, only to realise that I would need to go back, SEO the products and create an attraction on the site to drive people to it as opposed to just waiting for sales to come in.
Another great post about e commerce from. Keep them coming. Sara x.
I have had the chance to experience the work of SEO companies lately, all are expensive and uneffective – in my experience. One I have met used black-hat SEO techniques and very low quality websites for link building, almost resulting in a Google ban, the other didn’t even do the things they have promised and do not want to give the money back.
Fortunately these were not first hand experiences, but those of my friends, but it’s enough for me not to trust these companies but rather sit down and learn a bit of SEO myself.
Thanks for the tips, you convinced me to start a mailing list and get more sales from former costumers. SEO takes a long time to see good results and I’m getting a little discouraged with it but I’m not giving up, as steve is saying consistency is most important and hopefully it will pay off.