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MenuWhat's the best way to go about selling my product online?
I have no idea about eCommerce and planning to sell my product online. I am not sure which marketing agency to use and which dropshipping is the best?
Answers
There are a lot of options out there for you to explore when launching your new eCommerce site (ranging from utilizing an open source/self-guided platform to hiring an agency to build a completely custom web experience.) But before you think of the "how", make sure and be spend a considerable amount of time around the "whos" and "whats" of your new eCommerce business.
The type of platform, plugins (including dropshipping) and tools you need to be aligned before launching your new store largely depends on the type of product or service you are selling and who are you planning to sell it to. My company has helped launch hundreds of new ecommerce/marketing sites over last 12 years and without fail businesses who strategically and in a detailed fashion map out who their target market is (and calibrate the front end of their eCommerce platform accordingly) as well as think through the nuances of their production/manufacturing/supply cycle (and have their back office tools be congruent with those nuances) are far more likely to succeed. So in order to answer which plugs and which platform/agency i would start with a detailed laying out of all the factors that impact your business specifically and begin to work your way back to start answering some of those questions. With the entrepreneurs/site owners I work with there is a list of questions you can go through and answer as a starting point, but they most resolve around the areas you'd imagine (target market, growth goals, whether or not there is an existing business attached to it, offline sales, digital and content marketing needs, budget/timeline etc.)
Best of luck and feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss any items in greater detail!
Firstly, you have to check if selling through dropshipping or whatever is a good choice.
This all belongs to: MARKETING STRATEGY.
It's not about which company is the best or which platform, if you have this problem it's because you lack of a real plan.
You need to take care of Marketing. Marketing is the lifeblood of your business, outsourcing it without even know what's good or wrong, it's like givin the key of your house to the first encounter of the street.
An entrepeneur is basically someone who's expert about marketing and knows numbers.
What is your product? What is your angle of attack which makes it unique?
How much is your budget?
You have to deep define your market and don't fall in the shiny object syndrome: to try everything that seems new or suitable to your business and mistake a tool as a strategy, or looking for the holy grail
Start with a website and social media marketing. Website must be SEO friendly and try using WordPress. Add products on the website and then share on social media. Use paid marketing on social media with advance targeting to boost your posts. After you have traffic start re-targeting the customers using custom audience technique.
For drop-shipping compare the price you are getting with the products already available online. Calculate your profit ratio and then decide about it.
Amazon. Online stores are dying. They are moving toward boutique status whereas Amazon is what malls or strip-malls once were (before Amazon). If you don't know what you are doing don't try to learn it--lean on Amazon and focus on what you do well (product development, branding, etc.).
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Thanks for reaching out. Do you want to meet in person? I am in San Francisco/San Mateo location. Best, SeanSP
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How can I make a small, profitable business on Wordpress?
It sounds like you have plenty of skills to get started now. There's no need to keep re-training in different areas when you have experience to get started today. My suggestion would be to pick a niche and try and become the go-to guy in that particular niche. Let's say, for example, you are interested in men's fashion. You have experience in creating Wordpress ecommerce sites. You could call up maybe 10-15 of the local businesses in that niche in your local city/state and offer to make their website and get them in on a set-up fee and then a monthly maintenance retainer. This approach would be lower stress (because it's something you're interested in) and also because you could create a methodical framework that you could apply to other businesses in that niche. That's just one idea. Second idea - create a course on WooCommerce development and put it on Udemy (or Coursera etc). Note down 10 of the biggest obstacles you've had to overcome when building sites for friends and family and then note down 10 of the most important considerations people should consider before people get started. Now you've got 20 video lessons for your course. Charge for the course on Udemy or use it as a marketing tool to get more b2b development work. Idea 3: Go make money on freelancer.com, peopleperhour etc. Perhaps you've tried this already? Skills like yours are in demand on those platforms. Idea 4: Take the things I noted in the second idea above, and turn it into a handbook. Sell that book via Amazon. Idea 5: Go on Tweetdeck. Create a column that searches for people who are using keywords like "Wordpress woocommerce issue" "Wordpress woocommerce help" "WordPress woocommerce problem". Give them your clairty.fm link and tell them you'd be happy to have 5 minute discussion to see if you could help them resolve their problem. Idea 6: Find 10 major theme development companies. Sign up to their help or support forums. Do a similar thing to what's noted above on Twitter and offer to have a quick call via clarity.fm to see if you could help. Idea 7: Go down the route of finding existing Wordpress/Woocommerce blogs. Write posts for them about specific WooCommerce issues, problem solving or project management tips. Do this with the aim of improving your inbound consulting gigs. Idea 8: Do the exact opposite of whatever those friends are telling you. Idea 9: With your skills you could easily start a dropshipping company. I won't go into all the details here but just start looking at sites like Clickbank or Product Hunt to get a feel for something you're interested in. Build your site and start dropshipping products. https://www.woothemes.com/2015/06/dropshipping-beginners-guide/ Wordpress consulting alone, yeah it's probably quite competitive, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of opportunities for revenue. I think you will be even more motivated, successful and less stressed if you pick a niche industry, product or service to focus on. Enjoy it!SC
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Shopify is best use case for $0 to $1M ish, depending on product line, how many transactions that makes up, and if their are some custom things that are not possible on Shopify that realistically lead to huge gains that would cover more costs of a custom solution with something like magento. I recommend Shopify to everyone starting out. That's what we used at Diamond Candles up until about a $5M run rate. We were/are growing quickly so we hit a point where payoff of customizing checkout flow, add of social sign on, etc. that could not be done because of Shopify, would cover and surpass costs of a more custom option. Best to think about this simplistic example. View the ecom platform market in about 3 buckets. 1. Starting out: $0-$1M ish 2. Wow looks like you have a business: $1M-$20 or 50ish 3. You are/could be publicly traded: $50M+ Take a look at usage #'s for market share size from independent third party analytics tools from Builtwith: http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Shopify/Market-Share http://trends.builtwith.com/shop http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/hosted-solution Just because something is found on the web more isn't the full picture. Ie. I could make a blogging platform and have a bunch of scripts and bots install it on millions of domains and I would have majority of the market for blogging platforms (ya that would take a while and isn't a realistic scenario but you can get the point). Providers dominating the different categories by companies in those areas actually doing volume and being succsessful? 1. Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento GO, 2. Magento (varying editions), Yahoo Stores, Symphony Commerce 3. Demand Ware, GSI Commerce, Magento (varying editions) At the end of the day a good illustration goes like this. A truck and a moped are two different things. A truck is not trying to out 'moped' a moped and a moped not trying to out 'truck' a truck. They are both perfectly suited to different applications, situations, needs, and circumstances. The same goes with who you choose to handle your ecom platform. For 2-3 search for internet retailers first 500 and second 500 lists. Pull off all ecommerce companies doing between $10-$50M as an example. Use the builtwith.com chrome toolbar to tell you what platform they are using. Hire someone for $2 an hour via odesk to make a spreadsheet of everything and the make a pretty little pie chart. Now you know what each revenue volume level chooses as 1, 2, 3 preferred platforms. Option 3 as a side note but very important one, is primarily a platform and commerce as a service model with companies like Demand Ware and GSI Commerce leading the market with platform and services including but not limited to customer service for the brand, fulfillment, marketing services, website product photography etc. Their pricing models are based on gross revenue share. ie. SportsAuthority.com does $100M online this year, GSI takes 30% of that to cover everything. (I am not sure who Sports Authority uses, just an example) You can almost pick any traditional brick and mortar retailer and if they have a website where they sell things, they all do, GSI or DW are the people behind the scenes running the call centers, shipping etc. Diamond Candles, my company, who started on Shopify decided to not go with a the market dominating option of Magento for a few reasons. One of which being upfront cost for an agency or on staff magento CTO type. We decided to partner with a newer entrant, Symphony Commerce, which blends the 3rd category model of platform plus service. Rev. cut is significantly smaller than providers in category 3, but still get benefits of volume savings on shipping volume, scalable customer support that can handle rapid growth and occasional spikes without us having to worry about scaling or implementing best practices, and a fully customizable platform as a service so to speak that doesn't require us to have in house tech but where we are essentially renting part time ecommerce engineers from with resumes that list Google, FB, Twitter, Magento, Amazon, etc. So in summary. If you are <$1M in revenue just roll with Shopify. Greater than that but less than $50M ish then I would recommend looking into Symphony. If Symphony is interested in letting you in then you won't have to incur the upfront costs of an agency or implementation and you will have an ongoing partner equally incentivized i your long term success financially which I prefer as opposed to an agency model which economically is incentivized to offer a one time finished product and their revenue is not tied to my financial success. It is the closest thing to an equity partner while returning our full equity.JW
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