Even though my own online store ended up closing, I wanted to share what I learned with other entrepreneurs heading into ecommerce. I recently posted on my blog 5 rules to successfully sell online, and thought it would be very informative and helpful for any YE'ers who are planning, or in the process of starting an online store. The full article is
here , but below is some of it.
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5 Rules to Successfully Sell Online
by Ryan Glasgow
Based on my experience and experimentation through my tenure as President and founder of PureFiveAudio, I have learned what it takes to sell products successfully over the internet and how another could do so as well. It takes discovering your passion, specifying a niche within that passion, and choosing a limited amount of products to sell, choosing a USP, and forming a complete marketing plan before you begin building your business. To be successful as a merchant, you have to defeat the odds of other competitors and find a way pull yourself to the top.
The first rule in successfully selling online is discovering your passion(s). If you sell something you don’t like, or don’t know anything about, you won’t do well. I could have sold picnic baskets instead of iPod accessories. The problem is, I don’t own any picnic baskets. How can I devote hundreds of hours to of my time to selling picnic baskets? We are all different as individuals, but I would personally not do so. Also, if you don’t know your customer, you won’t be successful. If I had sold picnic baskets, I wouldn’t know the target customers needs, desires, and how to market to them. It’s important that you are, or were, your own target customer. There are exceptions to this rule, and you must decide for yourself if this rule applies to your own situation. Knowing your customers is very important and cannot be emphasized enough. Assuming you don’t want to indulge yourself in developing a new expertise, it is best to look at your own interests and passions and see what is sellable so that you start out as an expert on that topic.
The second rule is developing a niche (Definition: A special area of demand for a product or service) within a passion or interest. I initially chose to sell audio products for my online store. My initial product line consisted of MP3 players, cassette players, speakers, iPod accessories, MD players, walkmans, and headphones. I tried this product line for two months before realizing it would never work. A merchant cannot compete against the larger online stores that already offer such product lines and have been established for years and are flowering. To plant your seed in the ecommerce world, you need to begin with a specific product line. Headsets.com is a perfect example. They are offering a specific category, headsets, and are using that as their advantage. If someone is looking for a headset, they could go to buy.com and purchase a headset. Or they could go to Headsets.com, the headsets specialist, browse their extensive catalog of headsets, view their buyers guides on headsets, and make a purchase. The whole store is devoted to headsets ensuring you are buying from the specialist. The other advantage of a niche is marketing. Again referring to the beginning months of my own store Pure Five Audio, I had such a large product line I couldn’t market all of my products. To market such a broad range of products takes a lot of money most of us couldn’t afford. On the contrary, selling just iPod accessories allowed me to concentrate my efforts, spending, and entire store to a specific group of products ensuring better success as a whole. Smaller merchants must discover a niche, use it to their advantage, and expand their business once they are established and successful within that specific product group.
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When hackers are trying over 20 different card numbers a day at your online store, you can't continue. It came to the point where I didn't know what was fraud and what was a legit customer.
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