At Optimize Click I help entrepreneurs with their business marketing, finance and strategic initiatives. I focus specifically on finding tweaks that make the ROI needle rev-up.
So you may have read about all these people who are making a fortune with online stores.
– Richard Tarjeft
Yes the media would have you believe that is true. The part you didn’t read about is the hundreds, or thousands, of hours of work that the person experienced failing before they found their current online store success. I decided to take our vast experience in launching and marketing successful online stores and condense it into one easy-to-follow guide.
The online store ‘elephant’ in the room:
Regardless of what you might think about Amazon owning the world there is still over $500 billion dollars worth of annual online sales conducted on stores outside of the Amazon empire. Besides if you can sell product in your own store you can certainly piggy back off the monster customer base Amazon has and sell most good products there as well.
Some things need to be consider before you launch your online store front:
- What am I going to sell?
- Where am I going to warehouse and ship what I am selling?
- How much is it going to cost to package my product
- How much is it going to cost to market my product
- Where should I host my online store?
We will cover all of these eCommerce topics and more on this site. So be sure to opt-in to notifications and you will be the first to ready our helpful marketing and sales guides as they are released.
Finding what to sell
The worlds biggest market for sourcing products to sell is Alibaba. We have an article on how to best use Alibaba here. For now just know it’s one of the biggest network of source manufacturers in South-East Asia. Particularly prominent with Chinese suppliers. You can find American sources if you dig as well. Depending on where you are in the world using a local supplier is always best. That saves you time, money, and culture misunderstandings that can be costly.
How to host an e commerce store
There are only a few simple options in the market to put an e commerce store online. Our personal favorite is wordpress for a number of reasons, speed, ease, and cost are the primary considerations but there are other reasons as well. We like the diverse mix of add-ons, inventory management, and user level access controls that come with the platform as well. That way all members of your team can work where they need to without an extensive learning curve or a super high IT budget.