| |
| |
|
Ecommerce Information |
|
|
|
How To Sell Your Products Online?
E-commerce is gaining pace! Research firm eMarketer predicts that 2003 will see online sales reaching US $58.2 billion excluding travel. According to Forrester Research, another reputable research company, business to consumer e-commerce will hit US $230 billion by the year 2008. While offline retail sales are staggering and will continue to do so in near term, online retail sales will show a hefty 19 percent consecutive year over year growth! And by the same year, two third of all US households will buy some kind of products and services online. In 2003 alone 97 million consumers will make some kind of purchases through the Internet. If you are selling products and services offline, you should seriously consider hopping on to the e-commerce bandwagon, or risk loosing significant portion of your business to your more proactive competitors! Is it difficult to start selling products or services online? May be, in the beginning of Internet era, this was a daunting task, but today, with proper planning it is fairly easy. - Choose the products or services that are viable to sell over the Internet - Build an online presence - Create an online product catalog - Choose payment methods - Promote Select products or services to sell Although, some products are easier to sell online, contrary to popular believe, most of the products and services are, actually, marketable on the Internet. At present, books, electronics, information and travel related products are selling better online. But, that does not mean that there is no room for other products or services. As a matter of fact, you can sell just about anything over the Internet! It depends more on the market segment you choose, and how good you are in marketing. As you know, traditional items that you can get in nearest grocery store were not doing very well on the Internet. However, that is going to change very soon! According to Forrester Research many of today's slow categories are poised to significant growth as oppose to early online sales leaders like travel and electronics, which will experience market maturity and slower growth. Prediction is: Food and beverage category will grow at a rate of 49 percent, reaching $18.2 billion by 2007. The home products category will grow by 42 percent over five years, from $7.3 billion in 2002 to $42.0 billion in 2007. Flowers, cards, and gifts will grow by 41 percent, from $951 million in 2002 to $5.3 billion in 2007. That's not all! By the year 2008, today's best selling product: books will have a mere 3 percent share of total business to consumer online sales. So, if your products and services can generate offline sales there should not be any problem in selling these items online. Build online presence You can choose to build an e-commerce website either yourself by hiring required experts, i.e. web programmers or by appointing a website developing company to do the job for you. In both of the cases, you have to be prepared to spend a significant amount of money. E-commerce site is a very broad terminology! Depending on you demand, it can cost you from a modest US $800 to any where over a million US dollar! That's not all! You have to be prepared to spare considerable time on it, as well. Writing the technical scope, choosing the appropriate design for your site and creating proper content for your site will take a lot of your time. And there is no guarantee that you will do everything right! That's why, if you are new to e-commerce and do not want to spend a fortune in your first endeavor, you should think about making your online presence by choosing one of the available, on the Internet, Web Store services. There are enormous advantages of using these services: - You can build one for a fraction of the cost, needed to create an e-commerce website. - You can choose the design of your web store from numerous available templates. - Simple editor allows you creating your web store all by yourself. - You can be up and running within days. - You can choose a merchant account from the one offered by the service provider. There are many Web Store service providers on the Internet like Yahoo! Store, Bigstep, Rusbiz, etc. Compare and choose the one, which best suits your requirement. As an added advantage, some of the Web Store service providers will integrate your store with a shopping mall or e-marketplace free of charge. This will instantly expose your web store to a large targeted prospective customer audience. Create an online catalog If you sell only one or couple of products and do not add products or services often, you don't require an online catalog. However, if you have a product line of over 10 products and you constantly add or change products, you should consider a web store with the facility of an online product catalog. This feature of a web store service allows rapid developing and maintaining of you electronic catalog without spending large sums on creating one by yourself. Look for a web store service provider who offers wizard or form base product adding method to the electronic catalog and use some kind of standard product classification codes. At later stage, if you choose to sell products through e-marketplaces, this will allow you to integrate your products to e-marketplaces and make sales offers with ease. Choose a payment method If you are planning to sell ebooks, reports, whitepapers etc. I would suggest you to consider using clickbank's marketplace. That way, you don't have to worry about getting a credit card merchant account. Around 90 percent of all sales transaction occur online are by credit card payments. To accept credit card payment over the Internet, you must first have a merchant account. A merchant account allows a vendor to process credit card transactions. If you built a web store online with one of the web store service providers, you will see that they offer gateways to one or several merchant account providers and have partnership with them. In general, you get a better deal with them. However, as charges vary significantly from one merchant account provider to another, make sure you shop around before committing yourself to one. Promote you site To sell your products through your site, you must draw traffic. There are number of ways of promoting your site on the Internet. This includes: - Search engine submissions - Adding your site to different online directories - Opt-in email campaign - Link exchange - Banner and link ads In you effort to promote your site, you should combine as many offline and online promotional methods you can come up with. The more traffic you can generate the better chance you have of selling more products from your Web Store. Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com, http://www.rusbiz.com
MORE RESOURCES:
ecommerce - Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Electronic Commerce Tax Jurisdiction and Principles of Permanent Establishment The principle of "permanent establishment" is very important for avoidance the conflict of law of matter connected imposition of taxation. In the absence of a permanent establishment, a country where goods or services are sold has no jurisdiction to tax the resulting profits. How to Get Free Internet Merchant Accounts This article will show small businesses how to get free internet merchant accounts. If your business is to grow and succeed, it is essential to accept online credit cards. What is SSL (the little padlock)? SSL ("Secured Socket Layer") is a protocol used to encrypt the communication between the user's browser and the web server. When SSL is active, a "little padlock" appears on the user's browser, usually in the status line at the bottom (at the top for Mac/Safari users. Are You Making These E-Commerce Excuses? (part 1) A year ago, I had big plans to re-vamp my web site. I was going to publish my e-newsletter twice a month - every month, and I was going to upgrade my own e-commerce capabilities. Increasing E-commerce Website Sales With consumers purchasing billions of dollars of merchandise online each and every year, the Internet has become the key to financial security. The e-commerce business has consistently thrived well above all other online enterprises, and continues to flourish. Outsourcing Your Ecommerce Order Fulfillment When your eCommerce business grows to the point where you can no longer package and ship the orders yourself, it's time to begin outsourcing your order fulfillment. Although all order fulfillment centers offer the same basic services, their individual methods and costs will help you choose one over the other. Effective Management Of Your Customer Services With a third party merchant account you will have a dedicated 24/7 support team to handle your credit card payment on your behalf as part of your package. You will also need to provide your own support for issues relating directly to your product. How To Sell Your Products Online? E-commerce is gaining pace! Research firm eMarketer predicts that 2003 will see online sales reaching US $58.2 billion excluding travel. Internet Merchant Accounts For Innocents Abroad If you want to sell on the internet, your need to accept credit cards. To accept credit cards, you need a merchant account, or access to one. Is Your Business Afraid of the Internet? My Business is Afraid of the InternetBill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, once said that there would soon be two types of businesses, those online, and those out of business. Those words still ring true today, and many small businesses are missing a huge boat by not getting online. Google Catalogs - Old Gashioned Mail Order Meets High Tech Search In addition to Google's Froogle shopping service (still in beta), which features a searchable database of online merchants, Google is also beta-testing their Google Catalog service. Google Catalogs provides a searchable central repository of hundreds of mail-order catalogs. Ecommerce Solution for the Big and Small Business First off, you need to know what an ecommerce solution is. An ecommerce solution can be defined in many ways. Shopping Cart Usability Usable Shopping Carts Increase SalesE-commerce has been around since 1993 under many different names, but one thing remains constant; shoppers want usable web sites. Without a usable shopping cart the sites typically fail from poor performance. 12 Powerful Ways To Use Autoresponders That Will Take YOU To The Top If only I had known that autoresponders are a necessity to your online business when I first ventured online, I would have saved a lot of time and money. You have to automate in as many areas as possible and if used responsibly, autoresponders can be your best friend. How to Start a Business on the Internet So you want to start a business? Good for you. Really, I mean that sincerely. Selling From Your Website Greetings!Friends and relitives ask us all the time " How do sell from your website?" and no doubt you want to know as well. Over the next two issues we will be covering this very thing! We decided to divide it into two camps - tangibles and non-tangibles. Credit Card Processing - 7 Things You Need to Know Before Opening an Online Merchant Account When considering opening an online merchant account to accept credit card orders, there are a lot of things you need to keep in mind. The best thing to do is learn all about credit card processing before you open your online merchant account so you can handle everything from the beginning rather than having to go back and make many changes. Conducting Business through B2B E-marketplaces Businesses, which are still sitting on sidelines and not doing business on the Internet, should think seriously about their position! If you are one of them, chances are there, that you have to pay dearly for your indecision as you might lose significant market share to your more proactive competitors in a very short period of time.Apart from the fact that e-commerce is growing at the rate of more than 25 percent a year, the use of online features can bring efficiency to virtually every aspect of business process, be it supply chain management or customer support management. Writing Web Pages: Get To The Meat Faster Much of my consulting work comprises writing 'Outside Opinion' reports on the sites of large companies and organizations. Sometimes I review just a few pages, sometimes fifty or more. 10 Second Internet Person, sound familiar? Some people do not understand the Internet idea of online commerce, but then again some people do not understand themselves either. To fully understand Internet Commerce you really only need to monitor your "clicking habits" for a few days to see where you are going and what if anything you are buying.
|
| Article List | Index | Site Map |
|
All logos, trademarks and articles on this site are property and copyright of their respective owner(s).
The comments are property of their posters, all the rest is Copyright © 2006 CanadaSEEK.com - All Rights Reserved. |
