With markets becoming fierce, and every second day a business going digital and making noise all around the social media, with people liking and sharing their media campaign, don’t you feel like turning your offline stores online, don’t you feel left behind?
or
Being a hobbyist who has an exceptional eye for handicraft or DIY items, don't you feel like making the world know how gifted you are, and why not get some big bucks in your kitty?
or
Being a visionary, don’t you feel the need to start something of your own? A business where you can sell products and earn lucrative profits at the tap of a finger!
Hello there, whoever you are but it’s time to make a mark and get some extra dollars by selling products online. To sell products online is a very easy task & an extremely profitable deal. Also when you sell any product or service online, and in some way make a difference to the users you stay in their minds forever!
So if you searched “how to sell products online” out of boredom or for some serious hustle, you have landed up on the right guide, as owning to the popularity of eCommerce business with a growth rate of 23% YoY, we are going to encircle you around:
So hop on and start unfolding answers to your query “how can I sell products online”...
Here are the ways how you can sell products online and earn some amazing revenue going down the line, without much technical know-how & outlay.
Selling strategy is not a made-up term but rather a blueprint or plan of action that will define the steps, purpose & your resources at hand. This strategy should enlist:
Let’s know next in detail, what products you can sell.
If so, that’s good. If not, you need to find out exactly what type, kind, or variety of products you will be targeting for selling your products online.
Generally, there are two types of products that you can explore:
As a rule of thumb, most ventures go for a combination of both to tap a vast audience and maximize profits.
“How to Know What Products I want to Bank my Money on?”
You know now what category to choose for selling products online, but it is still a task to decide certain products or combinations of products that your customers would adore & end up buying.
Don’t worry, here are the few ways you can identify what products you can target.
Here are the certain products, based on findings of Google Trends, that are low-cost to arrange, sell year-round & still make amazing margins out with consistent income.
Products |
Margins |
Upside |
|
1. Fashion Jewellery for Everyone |
$5-$35 |
Easy to sell & not much inventory space needed |
|
2. Beauty Products |
$3-$25 |
Lots of sub-niches to enter |
|
3. Timeless stuffed toys |
$10-$35 |
Endless market & can target audience other than children |
|
4. Unisex clothing boutique store |
$5-$30 |
Universally essential product |
|
5. Pet Care Supplies |
$5-$50 |
Recurring business opportunities, lots of upselling & sub-branches to head to |
|
6. Activewear |
$5-$15 |
High potential of profit of selling durable & comfortable ones |
|
7. Home decor & accessories |
20% - 45% |
Highly in demand, especially in these times of pandemic, could be handcrafted to attract more margins |
Check out this resource on how to use Amazon to find profitable business ideas or niches for your eCommerce store.
There are 4.1 million internet users, and almost half of them are the biggest online shoppers of 2021. Almost 2 million, Woah!
You mainly have three options to sell your products, either by setting up an online store or starting a dropshipping business or selling with established eCommerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, Etsy & more. We would suggest going for all three of them. Set up a personal store or dropshipping store and sell at eCommerce stores too. By doing so, you will have wide exposure to markets & at the same time, you can create a brand identity of yourself.
Fun fact - Do you know a good online retailer's profit margin is around 45%, in general, & for industries like retail and automotive, it hovers between 20% or 25%?
You can earn such a profitable margin too if you choose to sell popular products by having a systematic store & side by side volunteering for selling products on popular dropshipping stores like Amazon, eBay or so.
If you are looking for setting up an online store and sell products online we would suggest reading these resources:
You can select either of eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, OpenCart, BigCommerce, or Magento to build your online store with a professional eCommerce development company, in any custom budget you want. And with any overarching requirement or functionality.
By integrating the desired products over your online store with compelling stock photography & description, adding secure payment gateways, catalog & inventory management options, real-time shipping features, accounting & reporting tools, and building an intuitive checkout process, you can sell products online with ease.
Fun fact - On average “a new eCommerce business with a custom storefront & popular products can earn a revenue of $39,000 in 1st month and while going down the line in 3 years, can earn a revenue of $6.5 million.”Imagine how much your store would make you?
Why choose WooCommerce as a store builder?
It is used by 7.4% of all websites. Being a plugin of WordPress, this platform is completely easy to use and has thousands of themes & plugins to shine your store and help you sell products online. You can start any kind of eCommerce store, dropshipping business or so with it. You can easily create & manage a store at it and enjoy its exclusivity around secure payment options, inventory & tax management, shipping integration & more.
Why choose Magento as a Store Builder and how can I sell my product online?
Magento powers 1.2% of all sites on the internet. The platform is often admired because of its flexible shopping cart system, marketing support, catalog management tools, and overall ease to manage your products & content.
Why choose Shopify as a store builder and how can I sell my products online?
With the expansion in over 175 countries, the platform is used by 427,676 websites worldwide. The platform is admired because it offers flexibility in customizing the site, smooth inventory management, social media promotion, accounting support, and colossal business reporting.
Why choose BigCommerce as a store builder and how to sell my product online?
Around 38,573 websites in the United States alone are built over BigCommerce. This CMS lets you have complete control over managing your customers & orders. It segments your buyers into groups based on price, promotions & lets you prepare the personalized content according to different segments.
Why choose OpenCart as a store builder and how to sell products on your website?
Over 967,546 websites are built on OpenCart. This CMS is highly admired because its checkout process is simple, gives you complete control in managing your inventory & other actions. Its budgeted themes, modules, and features are perfect for any small business just stepping up.
Now, let’s talk about how you can earn with other eCommerce platforms, alongside your online store.
If you are running an online store of your own, and wondering how to sell products online, being on other popular platforms like Amazon, eBay, Etsy could be beneficial in expanding your products' outreach to a vast audience. With a vast audience, we mean 197 million people who are loyal to the Amazon platform.
Selling on Amazon is very simple and no-brainer. In fact, many brands, in spite of owning an online store, also consider selling products online with Amazon as well.
Step 1 - You need to choose a selling product online plan that talks about the commission you give to Amazon on each purchase. Their plan starts with as low as $0.99 per transaction. So choose the plan that fits your pocket.
Step 2 - Prepare a selling strategy - Decide whether you want to resell the goods of other brands or establish a unique one.
Step 3 - Sign up and create a business seller account on Amazon by furnishing basic corresponding & verification-related details to start selling products online.
Step 4 - Start adding the products to your profile under the proper category, but ensure the products you are planning to sell are clear from the Amazon FBA Product Restriction.
Step 5 - Enter clear product listing details as asked like - price, product descriptions, stock images, condition, shipping options, features to sell products online. You can make your listing stand out for others by adding bullet descriptions, keywords your users are searching you for, setting competitive prices, offering discounts, and coupons.
Step 6 - Advertise & Start Selling - Afterwards, you can advertise your listing, start selling, attract positive reviews & ratings to build credibility.
Step 7 - You can use the Amazon seller app to fulfill orders, inventory, keep track of customers, listings & everyday details with great mobility.
Fun fact - You can earn initially $1000 per month on starting. Nearly 44% of Amazon sellers earn between $1,000-$25,000/month based on the popularity & quality listing of their products.
Selling products online solely on Amazon could give you less dividend. So better sell your products on Amazon along with your custom eCommerce store, it will not just double your outreach but will also encash good profit margins.
If you are a business operating on a limited budget that doesn’t want to incur any running cost just like any wholesaler or retailer would, you can sell products with a low-risk dropshipping business model.
It is a profitable, low-cost business model, where you don’t have to maintain any stock or look into fulfilling any shipping by owning any warehouse. Basically, you create a platform, where different buyers list themselves, maintain their own stock, ensure its delivery, and in exchange give you some uber cool commission.
Your duty is just to maintain an eCommerce website like Amazon, update it, ensure the right synergy with customers & buyers, promote and advertise it.
So this is a very cost-effective way of selling your products online where the only cost is just associated with building an intuitive, stunning eCommerce store for dropshipping.
Fun tip - A dropshipper on average can earn between $50 – $5000 more on high ticket items. Which can boil down to $100,000 per year, if you get a stunning eCommerce website in place, have A-rated suppliers enlisted, and have amazing marketing gimmicks in place.
Almost 3.96 billion people are actively using social media, as per 2020 trends. Ever since 2015, there has been a 92.76% increase in social media users, who involve all kinds of generations (who could be your buyers).
Social media today is not just subjected to streaming content, sharing ideas, being vocal, creating a trend, it’s also a money bag for business. Businesses can actually start a store on these platforms and sell their products, without redirecting users to their eCommerce store.
Some Tips To Sell Products Online Using Social Commerce:
It’s good if you have an eCommerce store, but social commerce (the whole thing of setting up an online store on social media) is another thing you can do to expand your brand outreach and encash more selling opportunities.
Every social media you use today or think your users are active on, be it Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and even your WhatsApp, has amazing social commerce opportunities.
There are 2.80 billion monthly users on Facebook, imagine how many of your buyers must be out there. If you already have a Facebook business page (if you don't you can create one), there you will get an option of the “shop” tab on it. You will further have to:
Then you can start selling also on Facebook, along with your eCommerce website.
There are nearly 1 billion monthly active users on Instagram. It is the most hyped platform as social media and social commerce platform.
It’s very easy to make your Instagram shoppable. You just have to create a profile that is very catchy and attractive. Convert it into a business account. Add relevant business details, agree to merchant policies, set up a product catalog, connect your Instagram business page to that of Facebook, turn on the shopping features you need.
Once your account is reviewed, you can start tagging and selling products and even highlight them in your Instagram stories.
Instagram shops are very free and simple to create. You can run them alongside your eCommerce store to enjoy broader outreach.
Yes, Pinterest is yet another amazing social media cum marketplace that offers both a “mood board for quick inspo in any realm” as well as an online store to list & sell your items. With 459 million monthly active Pinterest users, can you forgo the chance of finding your buyers within them?
Believe it or not, but Pinterest users pay quite a lot per order as compared to other social media commerce platforms.
You can integrate your online store with your Pinterest business account, attract followers, and start to sell products online.
To get followers, you can use:
In its business account, you get an amazing feature, with which you can promote your products and create hype so that they get sold easily. Whenever users like your product, they won’t have to redirect to your website. They can easily click on “buy now” CTA over this social media & buy with its checkout page only.
Other Social Media Platforms You Can Sell Your Products With
Whatsapp is an amazing outlet with 1.6 billion active users in 180 countries. However, this is suitable only if you are targeting a particular region & not going global. This means it is best for local markets. You can set up a business account over Whatsapp and create a group or broadcast personalized messages.
Or you can download the Whatsapp business app separately and connect with your target busters more closely, highlight your products & services or offerings, and be on the toe with your users' queries. Here are some tips to sell products online on whatsapp:
This is a very great initiative for small or budding businesses, as this is low-cost, easy to start, and can get you amazing qualified lead inquiries within your local market.
No matter if you set up an online retail store, create a dropshipping website, or do both but if you don’t have a marketing strategy and initiatives in place, how can you expect your users to know about your brand?
In offline retailing, it’s easy, you just have to keep the customers informed about your items, either through print materials like pamphlets or just giving excellent customer service to promote amazing word of mouth.
But in an online context, you have to please both search engines & netizens. So better have a marketing strategy & practices to gain traction online, and sell products online.
Start by creating a marketing strategy for your business. For that, you can read these resources:
The strategy will define the actions you need to plan & streamline to get successive digital reach to your target buyers.
Here are the few marketing areas you need to strategize & plan actions around:
Focus on local & global SEO to make your online store rank on the search terms your users are looking for. Search for the keywords your users are targeting, use keywords planner of Google or Ubersuggest to understand what keyword to add throughout your online store, its blog, or in any promotional content, you write for 3rd party guest blogging sites.
As a part of SEO efforts, ensure your store & its products are listed on the various:
PPC is another marketing gimmick you can pull alongside local SEO if you want to create hype about your product overnight, and sell products online . You can invest in PPC ad campaigns as per your budget. This may seem a costly affair but is a sure-shot way to sell your products.
Here are a few reads if you are interested in knowing PPC from scratch
Here are Few Reads that can help you strengthen your SEO
There are 100s of things inside SEO that need conscious efforts & planning. The stores you will plan with your eCommerce development company over platforms like WooCommerce, Magneto, Shopify, or else will give you ample scope to maximize your SEO efforts - as those platforms have amazing support for SEO practices.
Focus on Social Media Marketing To Sell Products Online
Explore the popular social media platforms and choose the one where you could find your target audience at. Focus on creating a stellar business profile and social identity on platforms like - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin (choose only when you are a B2B online store), Youtube, Reddit, Quora.
You have two options to be at each of these platforms to strive your identity & start selling:
Using Only Organic Social Media
Using Social Media Advertisements
Focus on both organic and paid social media campaigning to promote your products and sell off your whole inventory.
Some tips to do well on social media:
“Almost 50% of the world's population use Email marketing.”
“Emails with personalized salutations experience 80% open rates”. To sell your products online, email is the best way to drive:
Set up customized copies with steal offers, personalized messages for your prospects, creative visuals, and keep positive narratives or messaging throughout.
Send emails but in limited quantities, as too much of it can bug your buyer.
Emails are indirect ways of selling your product online. They help you drive awareness of your products, redirect interested buyers to your store, and start an honest communication trail with them --- so that you could keep them posted on everything about your product & how it helps in treating their pain points.
Every buyer has a pain point or some obsession behind buying a product. If you can tap both of them with your email copies & campaigns, you can win massively on qualified buyers.
If you are just starting, it better is to send an email trail to your “new signees” or “someone who might subscribe to your email list” with:
Here are few resources you can follow on effective email marketing:
Pulling marketing gigs can be very challenging, especially when you are a novice. It’s better to consult a digital marketing agency that can help you promote your store under any confined budget.
Because of the pandemic, one major change in marketing strategy has been on-ground events moving towards webinars. The audience joins online and has an interesting conversation or becomes an audience to an interesting conversation, product launch, and many such things. Imagine a beauty brand doing a webinar on the launch of its new range of cosmetics and even giving discount coupons to the attendees, isn’t it an interesting way to connect with your customers and sell products online?
Here are a few other tips for selling your products online.
Go for affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is quite the driving factor behind the 16% global eCommerce sales. Invite popular affiliates to promote your products, marketing communications, over their website or any digital identity, this can help you reach a diverse audience and win actual buyers.
Most eCommerce cap their affiliation commission between 8-10% per order. However, this is no rule of thumb. It’s up to you how you want to keep the fee. The main effort lies in finding the right affiliates and their platforms to do so.
Tie up with other brands and list their hyped products in your store to sell products online. Selling hyped brands would build the credibility of your store and make you sell faster.
Like you can be a newbie looking to build a digital store with electronics & hardware, who can sell such products from brands like HP, Acer, or more. Look at this electronic eCommerce store we built from scratch and how it got great recognition.
You can sell your own or other brand’s products under one roof. Look at Amazon for instance, how it sells its niche products under the label name “Solimo” along with other brand’s commoditized products. The platform is, either way, selling products online and making huge margins.
Ensure informative, user-centric copies of products to sell products online. Amazing copies are everything. If you can’t describe what you mean to sell, you won’t be able to make a transaction happen. A copy or product description that could relate to the buyers’ need, interest, obsession, emotional or rational behavior, wins the most revenue.
Look at the above copy of Topshop’s Overcoat product that reads as…
“Tap into the pale color trend and soften your look with this light blue textured coat. Dress down effortlessly with jeans or adapt for the evening with a dress and heels.”
Do you think it is a great copy? Yes, it is. It sells an experience or suggestion rather than just a product. It clearly plays with the reader’s imagination. It defines the product quality yet makes the reader think of unthinkable things like --- how they can dress this overcoat, pair it with what clothing pieces, and on what occasions.
Add visually aesthetic and real stock photography for selling products online - Invest some time to make your products a model and click them very beautifully. Add lively product images with a complete 360-degree profile, realistic color shades to woo the user & make them buy it.
Focus on Amazing, Glitch Free User Experience to sell products online. Users want two things from you, first quality products which they can trust and afford & second superlative user experience. Well, product quality & pricing that you handle better. But user experience over your store is very important, if your store doesn’t serve a smooth user experience in terms of navigation, visual messaging, customized & intuitive design & content hierarchy, smooth checkout process, mobile responsive website, then you could experience great bounce rate. This means basically your users would fly away if something doesn’t seem right.
So don’t fall prey to DIY store building tools as they are good to start with, but won’t give you much traction in the long term. You would need a custom-coded & designed store that houses all the exceptional functionality, features, products, and ultimate buyers experience that your competitors are failing at.
So better shake hands with professional eCommerce development companies who could work within your need & your budget!
Make sure to do it all legitimately. This means ensure having a seller permit & license. Yes, you need to be a verified digital seller of any product to sell it within states or outside states.
You need to apply for the correct seller license with the state's Licensing Office or Department of Revenue whether you are selling tangible goods or services online. There are 7 types of permits & licenses you need to start selling products online.
Create a safe user experience for buyers to sell products online. Ensure reliable, safest, and credible payment integrations over your web. As users like to buy from online stores that have genuine payment integrations. It is important to ensure the store builder you are choosing is secure & has no scope for intrusion. Also, conform to PCI compliance since you do not want your users’ data to be compromised.
Whether you are a hobbyist looking to sell some homemade chunky jewelry or some serious merchant looking to serve a combination of niche-based or commoditized products, here are the eCommerce platforms that answer your question - “where to sell products online”?
Where to sell products online? Here are some amazing platforms that you can explore for listing along with your eCommerce store and high & mighty Amazon to earn lucrative profit volumes.
VarageSale - “Sell simply, buy safely”. You can earn a profit margin between $5 to $25 per product.
Ruby Lane - “Vintage Begins Here”. 58% of users on this store earn more than $59,000 per year.”
Etsy - “Start Selling Today”. A seller on Etsy can earn around $56,000 annually.
Chairish - “millions of shoppers want to buy your treasures”. Listing is simple & free on Cherish. You can earn 70% of the revenue from each sale done by this platform.
Swappa - “Buy and sell newish tech”.
Nextdoor - “Discover your neighborhood”
Starting a digital store and selling products online is easy and outright important if you want to start selling products online for some amazing profit margins in return. All you just need is user-centric products, a digital marketplace, and some gumption to get started. Also, some follow-up marketing initiatives to keep your customers involved in your communications & messaging about the brand (yes, you are a brand).
With any budget, you can get started and sell products online, you make or get them made, either out of a hobby or doing real business. It takes small steps and a small marketplace to get there. Even brands like Amazon, eBay didn’t have success overnight.
The above guide enlists key tips that helped many local vendors get their identity, a brand value to cherish for life. If you are also thinking about getting started, just bring us your ideas, product list, strategy with any budget, and our professional eCommerce development company will help you create a personalized marketplace where selling your products online is damn easy to put on auto-pilot mode.
You are an amazing reader if you hanged till here...Why don’t you leave your amazing comments down below and tell us what steps we missed on the “guide to selling your products online”.
R
I own a small business, in the initial days my website was showing good results but now in this pandemic situation it has diminished the results. What should I do?
R
I have some knowledge related to Social media marketing but I don’t know how it works? Can you help me with this?
J
Hi, I am a cake seller but I don’t have any website to sell my products. Can you tell me whether you can help me prepare my business website or not?
K
Spot on with this write-up, I truly believe that this amazing site needs far more attention. I’ll probably be back again to read more, thanks for the advice!
J
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