I can imagine that opening a business used to be a bit more straight forward back in the day. You’d find a product or a service, find a location to do business out of, put up your sign, and wait for people to come. Since the explosion of the internet, with the entire world now open to you as your “front door”, starting a business online should be much simpler, right? Or is it?
Ask anyone who has started an online business and the first thing you will realize, is that it is not as easy as it might sound. There are hundreds if not thousands of outlets you can choose to set up shop if you are a retailer. Places like eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Shopify, Craigslist, Amazon, Wal-Mart, or even your own custom developed website. For service based businesses, that can be even more difficult to find an outlet, as people typically look to their local sources for services for their homes, cars, pets, etc. We will discuss that in another article. So, where do you begin? How do you choose? Where do you look?
Ebay, one of the many options for selling online!
What are you selling?
The first and simplest question to answer is - what am I selling? If you are selling physical products, the next question to ask is - are your product custom made (for example do you create them at home as part of your own brand), or are you re-selling existing products? If the answer is the latter, places like Amazon are going to be great places to start. On Amazon, as a third party reseller, you can list almost any product that you can find anywhere in the world. Be warned however, that in order to sell in certain categories such as Health & Beauty, Food, or under certain brands like Hasbro or Mattel, you will have to prove yourself a worthy seller and get “brand approval” from Amazon before you can even list in these categories. Keep this in mind before you go out and buy a closeout deal of 4,000 bars of soap to resell on Amazon - they might not let you!
Ebay is another great place to start selling. While Amazon is closing in on 50% of all e-commerce sales in the US, eBay is relatively large as well, hovering around 6% as of the writing of this article. Ebay allows you to create your own listings, something that is not quite as simple on Amazon, and upload your own pictures to display your products. This can be a great outlet for well known products, in which you want a little more control over the price, shipping charges and pictures.
For custom made products, sites like Etsy are king. They allow very custom listings to be created, as well as facilitate great communication between buyers and sellers, even allowing customization of many of the items for sale by directly speaking with the seller. If you have your own custom product to sell.
A fourth, more aggressive option, is to start your own website. There are a lot of great sites like Shopify and Squarespace and Wordpress, that allow you to set up your own sales templates, but you can also have a custom website created that suits your particular needs. This can be quite an expensive option however, and there are a lot of “developers” out there that want to sell you a custom built website that is essentially garbage code, for very cheap. When you handling customer transactions and sensitive information, that is a recipe for disaster - stay away. Find someone you can sit down with face to face and trust, its almost never a good idea to buy a “custom” website from the internet.
Deciding where to start, of course, is only the first part of the battle. In the next article, we’ll talk about the costs of selling online, and some things you should be aware of as you develop your plan of action!