Are you thinking about getting into eCommerce? Does the idea of working in your jammies and fuzzy slippers really appeal to you? It may be just the thing for you, but there’s one dirty little secret that you just need to know, and it can make all the difference.
If you want to sell products, you already know that you have to:
- sell something that people want to buy online
- and sell it at a price they are willing to pay
But the dirty little secret of selling successfully on the web is to sell things they can’t easily get other places online.
Beware of the “Get Rich Online” Offers
There are hundreds, possibly thousands of websites out there that say that you, too, “can be rich working 2 hours a day from home . . . ” and some of them are telling the truth, but most of them are selling you into a bigger package, or better yet, into selling their “wholesale” products online, and they’ll even provide a website for you. STOP RIGHT THERE.
Maybe 10 years ago this was a better plan, and an easy way for folks to get started, but now, in my experienced eCommerce opinion, it’s the wrong path.
I don’t want to single out any particular company, because that wouldn’t be fair, but I will show you an example of a product that they say would be easy to sell. For home parties, or retail stores, this may be a great supplier. But one the web, not so much.
Take this Pizza Stone above , the site says if you sell it at retail you can make $15 for a sales. And though I didn’t dig deeper on this site, I bet they offer to “dropship” it too, for a small fee.
A little image researching on Google and I found out this product is called a:
Good Cook 4301 14.75 Inch Pizza Stone with Rack.
A few quick clicks into Google, and this exact item is listed on Amazon and 192,000 other websites for as low as $9.46. So how do you compete and make a profit like that? The answer is, “you don’t.”
Can you really make money online?
The answer is “you can,” and all you have to do is think differently. A lot differently. Instead of looking for the easy button, invest your time in and focus on how to build a real, sustainable business.
Look for products that are wanted, but perhaps not readily available. Avoid being the “only one” selling this “contraption” because if no one else is selling anything like it, there may not be a market for it. Own the manufacturing channel if you can, and if you can’t, get creative. One way we did this was in the waterproof headphones niche was by custom branding an existing product.
In early 2003, as iPods and mp3 players were becoming more popular, swimmers wanted to take them in the pool, and while we had waterproof cases that could do just that, there were simply no broadly marketed waterproof headphones.
As a small company we didn’t have the money for research and development, but we did have the credit to take a risk. We approached one of our manufacturers and had them brand their headphones with our logo and in the newly famous “arctic white” color, at first 1,000 pairs, and when they sold out, 5,000 more. We weren’t first to market with a waterproof headphones, and there were better brands on the market, we were just one of the first to couple affordable waterproof headphones with an ‘ipod waterproof case’ to make a swimming solution.
By “owning” the space, customers were not able to buy this solution from anywhere else, because it was the only brand on the market like it.
It’s worth noting that once they were popularized, other manufacturers started making higher end products that were competitively priced and they were spending hundreds of thousands on marketing, research, and development, so we exited the manufacturing position and moved on to something else.
It’s almost like investing in the stock market, getting in when the timing is right, and getting out with the most cash possible.
Think about the product or niche that you want to sell into, how can you own it as your own? And if you can’t, how might you position yourself as the market leader? If you can solve that you can make an ecommerce business work.
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