How To Sell Your Products Online


E-commerce is gaining pace! Research firm eMarketer predicts that2003 will see online sales reaching US $58.2 billion excludingtravel. According to Forrester Research, another reputable research company, business to consumer e-commerce will hit US $230 billion by the year 2008. While offline retail sales are staggering and will continue to do so in near term, online retail sales will show a hefty 19 percent consecutive year over year growth! And by the same year, two third of all US households will buy some kind of products and services online. In 2003 alone 97 million consumers will make some kind of purchases through the Internet.

If you are selling products and services offline, you should seriously consider hopping on to the e-commerce bandwagon, or risk loosing significant portion of your business to your more proactive competitors!

Is it difficult to start selling products or services online?

May be, in the beginning of Internet era, this was a daunting task, but today, with proper planning it is fairly easy.

- Choose the products or services that are viable to sell over the Internet

- Build an online presence

- Create an online product catalog

- Choose payment methods

- Promote

Select products or services to sell

Although, some products are easier to sell online, contrary to popular believe, most of the products and services are, actually, marketable on the Internet. At present, books, electronics, information and travel related products are selling better online. But, that does not mean that there is no room for other products or services. As a matter of fact, you can sell just about anything over the Internet! It depends more on the market segment you choose, and how good you are in marketing. As you know, traditional items that you can get in nearest grocery store were not doing very well on the Internet. However, that is going to change very soon! According to Forrester Research many of today's slow categories are poised to significant growth as oppose to early online sales leaders like travel and electronics, which will experience market maturity and slower growth. Prediction is:

Food and beverage category will grow at a rate of 49 percent, reaching $18.2 billion by 2007. The home products category will grow by 42 percent over five years, from $7.3 billion in 2002 to $42.0 billion in 2007. Flowers, cards, and gifts will grow by 41 percent, from $951 million in 2002 to $5.3 billion in 2007.

That's not all! By the year 2008, today's best selling product:books will have a mere 3 percent share of total business to consumer online sales.

So, if your products and services can generate offline sales there should not be any problem in selling these items online.

Build online presence

You can choose to build an e-commerce website either yourself by hiring required experts, i.e. web programmers or by appointing a website developing company to do the job for you. In both of the cases, you have to be prepared to spend a significant amount of money. E-commerce site is a very broad terminology! Depending on you demand, it can cost you from a modest US $800 to any where over a million US dollar! That's not all! You have to be prepared to spare considerabletime on it, as well. Writing the technical scope, choosing the appropriate design for your site and creating proper content for your site will take a lot of your time. And there is no guarantee that you will do everything right!

That's why, if you are new to e-commerce and do not want to spend a fortune in your first endeavor, you should think about making your online presence by choosing one of the available, on the Internet, Web Store services. There are enormous advantages of using these services:

- You can build one for a fraction of the cost, needed to create an e-commerce website.

- You can choose the design of your web store from numerous available templates.

- Simple editor allows you creating your web store all by yourself.

- You can be up and running within days.

- You can choose a merchant account from the one offered by the service provider.

There are many Web Store service providers on the Internet like Yahoo! Store, Bigstep, Rusbiz, etc. Compare and choose the one, which best suits your requirement. As an added advantage, some of the Web Store service providers will integrate your store with a shopping mall or e-marketplace free of charge. This will instantly expose your web store to a large targeted prospective customer audience.Create an online catalog

If you sell only one or couple of products and do not add products or services often, you don't require an online catalog. However, if you have a product line of over 10 products and you constantly add or change products, you should consider a web store with the facility of an online product catalog. This feature of a web store service allows rapid developing and maintaining of you electronic catalog without spending large sums on creating one by yourself.

Look for a web store service provider who offers wizard or form base product adding method to the electronic catalog and use some kind of standard product classification codes. At later stage, if you choose to sell products through e-marketplaces, this will allow you to integrate your products to e-marketplaces and make sales offers with ease.

Choose a payment method

If you are planning to sell ebooks, reports, whitepapers etc. I would suggest you to consider using clickbank's marketplace. That way, you don't have to worry about getting a credit card merchant account.

Around 90 percent of all sales transaction occur online are by credit card payments. To accept credit card payment over the Internet, you must first have a merchant account. A merchant account allows a vendor to process credit card transactions. If you built a web store online with one of the web store service providers, you will see that they offer gateways to one or several merchant account providers and have partnership with them. In general, you get a better deal with them. However, as charges vary significantly from one merchant account provider to another, make sure you shop around before committing yourself to one.

Promote you site

To sell your products through your site, you must draw traffic. There are number of ways of promoting your site on the Internet. This includes:

- Search engine submissions

- Adding your site to different online directories

- Opt-in email campaign

- Link exchange

- Banner and link ads

In you effort to promote your site, you should combine as many offline and online promotional methods you can come up with. The more traffic you can generate the better chance you have of selling more products from your Web Store.


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Increase Company Productivity

After years of hard work, finally your business started to pick up. You are selling more products then ever! You have lined up a good number of suppliers and buyers. Things have never been better than now. Except one thing! With rising sales your overhead and supply chain expenses are also sky-rocketing. Your profit margin is no longer the same as it used to be! You feel that you are in a limbo! How to increase productivity? How to cut costs without giving up sales?

Sounds familiar to you? Well, your company is not alone! According to IDC, a research firm, while interviewed, overwhelming majority of the company executives claimed that their biggest concern is declining profit margins.

Companies, in order to stay competitive, must find solutions to increase efficiency in business operations and control costs. Is there a solution to this ubiquitous problem?

Remember Dorothy from the children classic "Wizard of the Oz"? She had to go through numerous obstacles in her quest to find a way to get back to Kansas, her home. Only to find out that the silver shoes that she was wearing from the very first day since the cyclone brought her to the Land of Oz could have taken her back home, all she had to do was to knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry her wherever she wished to go.

Similar to this story, solutions to these corporate problems are widely available right under your nose, only you as a company executive have to overcome the fear of new technologies and adopt them to your own good.

B2B exchanges or emarketplaces are capable of solving many key problems that corporations are facing today. Emarketplaces can provide immense opportunities to automate supply chain process, increase operational efficiency, reduce overhead costs and expand market at a minimal cost.

Using emarketplace effectivelyTwo primary factors of company productivity are Revenue Increase and Cost Cutting. Both are achievable if a company seriously decides to incorporate emarketplace features in all aspects of business operations. That means if as a company you want to reap all the benefits of emarketplaces, you have to commit yourself seriously.

Become a memberOnce you find an emarketplace that suits your requirement, the first thing what you have to do is to register and become a member.

Most emarketplaces have different membership packages. Although, to check out the emarketplace - whether it is viable for your business or not - you might start with the free membership package, but once you are satisfied with your selection, to use the emarketplace to your advantage you should choose the package with most features and functions.

Integrate your products to e-catalogIf you are a supplier, this is a very important step to take. Unless you have thousands of products to sell, this should not be a difficult task. All emarketplaces use either a form or wizard-based, not-so-complex and user-friendly product adding tool. Since e-catalogs that emarketplaces use are industry standard, once you aggregated you products, same information you will be able to use in other e-catalogs, emarketplaces and even in your own website.

Apart from your own buyers other prospective customers from the emarketplace community are able to view your products in the e-catalog, which in turn will bring you new contacts and sales.

Create products for sale offers You should create sales offer of your primary products that you carry most of the time and post them on the emarketplace. Many emarketplaces have options to sell products with different procedures. You can make offer to sell access inventories through dynamic market, also called auction, you can make hot offers with time limit, etc.This is an extra sales channel in the beginning, which might grow into your primary one!

Involve your buyers and sellersIf you would like to use an emarketplace most effectively, youhave to get your suppliers and buyers on board too. Supply chain management solution that usually comes with an emarketplace allows you to reduce operational costs significantly.

- Encourage your buyers to send request for quote for a product through the inbuilt system of the emarketplace.
- Make strict rules within your company to send all quotes exclusively through emarketplace.
- Ask your buyers to send Purchase Orders to your company via emarketplace.
- Bill all your clients using invoicing system of the emarketplace.
- Manage shipping and handling though emarketplaces.
- Convince your suppliers to use the same emarketplace so that even as a buyer you can get the benefits of a B2B exchange.

Complete adoption of an emarketplace will help a company gain numerous benefits. The following figures taken from various research notes emphasize the importance of e-marketplace in today's business world.

- Thanks to emarketplace, companies can reduce purchase order processing cost from US $75 to less than US $10.
- By automating sales and customer support processes companies can lower overhead costs up to 25 - 30% easily.
- Companies also can reduce more than five percent of their maintenance, repair and operation by incorporating e-business solutions, which are integral parts of any emarketplace.
- Business process automation using B2B emarketplace helps companies decreasing of document errors from 20 percent to less than one percent.

B2B Emarketplace solutions are great opportunities

The famous inventor Thomas Edison once told, "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

Company executives are by no means afraid of hard work, but unfortunately many of them have colossal fear of high technology and because of this reluctant to explore new Internet-based technologies to their advantage. If you are one of them, be assured that knowledge required to adopt emarketplace to your business and manage it properly is easy to learn and implement.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business.You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com, http://www.rusbiz.com


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