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.