Should you sell online?
E-commerce is the buzzword at the moment. Along with social networking it’s one of the main activities going on in cyberspace today. At elmnet we speak to lots of people every month who want to sell online and set up their own web store, and we always give the best advice we can based on their own circumstances.
It sounds too good to be true! Your own online presence where anyone in the world can view your products, order them and pay for them from the comfort of their own home. Everybody wins – the customer gets what they want delivered to their door with minimal effort, and the vendor makes an unattended sale. It’s almost perfect!
Almost. There are certainly a few things to consider before you dive in setting up your own online store. I remember when I set up my first e-commerce site selling photography online. My work was already in a few galleries, and I found that quite a few people were looking me up on my website after seeing what I was producing. My first ever sale came through around a week or two after setting it all up, and I was very excited. It was for a 40″ x 6″ panoramic print and it was to be sent to Perth.
When I realised that it was to go to Perth in Western Australia rather than Scotland the euphoria quickly died down. My postage and packaging rates never took into account sending items abroad, and the sheer logistics of packing up a panoramic print to go half way around the world via air mail quickly made the whole transaction fairly worthless. I stuck with e-commerce for a while after that, but it never really worked for what I was selling. Customers understandably much preferred to visit a gallery and see the work framed, behind glass and on the wall before parting with their cash. The lesson here is that some items simply don’t suit being sold online.
Promoting an online store is crucial. You need to be able to tell people about what you have for sale, or you won’t sell a single thing. The best way I can think of explaining this is to consider an artist painting the most incredible picture ever. It’s a masterpiece, and it’s worth a million! The artist puts the painting on the wall in their house and then adds a price tag to it, informing all who see it that it’s up for sale. The artist then get’s a cuppa, sits down and waits for it to sell. And of course it doesn’t, because no-one knows that it even exists.
Another thing to consider is the value of the product (or the margin made) and the time taken to package and ship. If after Royal Mail have collected your parcel you have made the princely sum of £1 then it’s time to ask yourself “is it really worth it?”. You may have spent half an hour packaging the item, and another ten minutes popping up to the post office and waiting in the queue.
Add into that the time it’s taken to add the items to the website and you may find that it’s actually costing you money. If you sell fifty each day then you can perhaps take advantage of economies of scale. If you sell five a week then it will quickly become an inconvenience.
The final thing to consider is do you have the time available to keep your online shop up to date and respond to your customers in a timely manner? An online shop with one hundred items will take more time than you think to set up. You’ll need to have a photograph of the item you are selling, and it will have to be a good one. You’ll need to add the item to the shop, and include a title, a short description, a long description, a price and full postage and packaging details. You’ll need to check your email constantly so you can act on any orders that come in. You’ll need to tell the system new stock levels as you sell products in your physical store (if you have one). You’ll need to keep the online shop up to date with special offers, and you should also take the time to market your store to potential customer via email newsletters. Obviously you’ll need to use Twitter and Facebook regularly to help things along, but you should be doing this anyway whether you are selling online or not.
Having said all this, e-commerce is undoubtedly a good thing. The opportunities are huge if you go about it in the right way. If you are a busy person then select a simple, profitable, easy to package range of products to start the ball rolling rather than attempt to put every item under the sun on your store. Get into a routine of checking emails, and set aside a time to bulk process orders as efficiently as possible. Consider selling gift vouchers for your physical store, this is a great way to easily sell online without the hassle.
If you want to take those first steps to becoming the next ‘Amazon’ then why not give us a call. There is a lot to think about, but we have been there any times before. We can certainly give you an overall e-commerce strategy rather than just provide you with the selling facility.
