Many entrepreneurs who want to open an online store are wondering which product to choose for trade.
The success of the online store directly depends on the assortment of goods. In this article, we will talk about the best ways to trade online.
Re-demand goods
For online trading, it is best to choose goods of the so-called “re-demand”, ie those that need to be purchased at regular intervals.
For example, such products include consumables for printers, auto parts, clothing, food, cosmetics, office supplies, household chemicals, etc.
Every customer who has made a purchase in your online store at least once will contact you again and again, and the group of regular customers will constantly grow. Each of them will advise their friends and acquaintances to buy from your store, and you will not have to spend extra funds to attract them.
If you choose a disposable product, such as a TV or refrigerator, each customer will have to be attracted separately, and spend considerable money and effort on this. This does not mean at all that you cannot open an online electronics store, just as practice shows, for a small online store it is easier and more profitable to work with a product of repeated demand.
Small-sized goods
Online trade is associated with the constant sending of orders through various delivery services – New mail, Intime, Autolux and others.
It is worth considering how you will transport your goods to the post office, and how much it will cost to transport it. The lighter and more compact your product is, the easier it will be for you to deliver orders by mail and the cheaper it will cost to deliver it to customers.
If supermarkets and offline stores have their own warehouses, then the owners of online stores are often private entrepreneurs, and their own apartment serves as a warehouse for them. Therefore, it will be easier for such traders to work with small-sized goods.
Attractive price of goods
In general, experience shows that people on the Internet willingly make purchases if the order value does not exceed a certain price threshold, which can be conventionally called a “risk threshold”.
Subconsciously, the buyer always experiences a certain prejudice when shopping in an online store, because he sees the goods only on the monitor screen, while in a regular store he can touch it.
Therefore, if the cost of the product is relatively small, it will be psychologically easier for him to make a purchase.
For many countries, such a psychological threshold is an amount of the order of $ 100, more expensive goods already require much more effort to sell.
High marginality
For online trading, the priority is not the cost of the product, but its marginality and turnover rate. Let your product cost $ 50, or $ 10 – but you will earn 40-50% on it. In some cases, the margin can reach 100 or even 300-400%.
Not a single online store can compete with supermarkets in terms of sales, and, accordingly, cannot win against them due to turnover. Its trump cards are low costs, wide geography, rich assortment and service.
An online store can afford to trade those goods that are unprofitable for large offline stores, and due to exclusivity, quickly get its target audience.
Despite the fact that an online store usually works with small quantities of goods and receives less discount on wholesale, prices in an online store for the same product are usually lower than in a supermarket.
This happens precisely due to lower costs – after all, the online store does not have a large staff of employees, premises that need to be paid for, heated and guarded, huge taxes, etc.
Closeness to customers
An online store is essentially more like a hobby club than a market or shopping center. It allows visitors to quickly and easily contact the seller, get advice or advice at any time, 24/7.
This is a very important point in the purchasing decision process. Sellers-consultants in supermarkets are not trusted a lot, because they know – these are random people who often know less about their product than the buyer and are not too interested in the buyer being satisfied with the purchase.
At the same time, in an online store, the buyer usually communicates directly with his owner or his trusted employees who are well versed in the product and can give quality advice.
If the owner of an online store works well with his customers, pays attention to them, posts interesting and useful materials on the topic on his website, satisfied customers will begin to recommend it to their friends (fortunately, they only need to share the link in their social networks and messengers), and the audience store will begin to grow at all without any cost to promote it.
Therefore, the best promotion for an online store is the high quality of its work. Not even a product (after all, the manufacturer is primarily responsible for the product), but work!
And this is working phones, and the willingness to talk with customers, help them make the right decision for them, and the ability to make your site interesting and useful for visitors, and attention to your customers, notifying them about the appearance of expected products, new products, or vice versa, about possible problems.
Choose a product that interests you
It is very difficult to determine in advance which product will sell well and which will not. Very often people started to trade in one product, and then moved on to a completely different one.
The main rule here is one – it is better to trade the goods that are of interest to the seller himself. In this case, the seller can become an expert in his field and not only choose the best product, but also help his buyers make the right choice.
If the seller himself is well versed in his product, and he is interested in working with him, trading will be pleasant and easy, and buyers will be loyal to the seller.
Available item
The stability of the supply of goods is a prerequisite for the successful operation of an online store.
As a rule, the store owner cannot afford to have large stocks, so he works on operational stock and continually orders new small batches as needed. If the supplier cannot ensure the timely delivery of the goods, this can very badly affect the trade, because the buyer wants to receive his order as quickly as possible. The less the buyer has to wait, the better.
In this regard, the owner of an online store must constantly look for new suppliers, and try to have at least two alternatives so as not to be completely dependent on a single supplier.
Existing suppliers also need to be constantly worked with to build trust and improve conditions. As a rule, if trade is successful, most suppliers are willing to meet sellers halfway: they give them credit for goods and reduce the margin.