Do you dream about starting your own as an entrepreneur? If you would like to be your own boss and you have a plan to start your own online business, the time is now. It is quite cheaper, easier and much faster to start an online business than ever before. But, that does not mean that is it easier to be successful in an e-Commerce industry. Being able to start your own business and being successful are two different things.
One of the best things about e-Commerce is that you can start a business anywhere in the world with the help of powerful solutions like nopCommerce, for free. nopCommerce offers comprehensive features that is easy to use for new online businesses, yet powerful enough for the most demanding ecommerce expert.
There are a lot of factors that should be taken into consideration before starting an online business such as:
Checking product demand
Many times, a lot of entrepreneurs do not like to admit that the product itself is not so great for an online business. It is not a smart idea to invest a lot of money and couple of months in setting up an e-Commerce website without even finding out what is an actual demand of the product in the market.
May be start a blog to find out how many people are interested in the product that you are planning to offer on your online store site. Look into past statistics / data to see the demand trend of your product as it is a great way to learn if the demand of your product will increase or decrease in coming months or even years. If your product is going to be new in the market then conduct your own surveys online to see if online shoppers will buy your product or not.
How you are going to bring traffic to your store site?
Just because you have an online store site, it does not mean that people are going to find your e-Commerce site easily. This is one of the most common misconceptions among many entrepreneurs that launching a site mean you are going to start making a lot of money right away. No, this absolutely incorrect as nobody is going to end up on your site accidently.
Search engine optimization (SEO) requires a lot of effort and constant work that needs to be done periodically in order to bring online traffic to your site. Search engines are the most common medium by which businesses present their products or services to their target customers. The rank of your store site is entirely based on how well you as a business owner optimize your site for various search engines. If you do not know how to accomplish this, it is quite important to get some professional help because you could be throwing away large volume of free traffic.
Some interesting information:
What about logistics?
As the site grows many businesses do not like sharing their profit with companies who make and provide them their products. During this time, many entrepreneurs think about manufacturing their own products. Sure, it is a great idea because now you are an expert in your product line and you have customers who are interested in buying it from you. It does make sense to manufacture your own product – But, it is that easy?
Not really! Many startup companies think about sourcing the manufacturing of their product to Asia. It is cheap and mass production of the product is easy but it does come with a lot of issues like:
- Language barrier
- Different quality control policies in different countries (something might be ok to do in a different country but it may not be allowed in your home country)
Even if you have an alternative to these issues, one of the most important things you will have to deal with is logistics. How you are going to ship your product from a different country to your home country where you are selling it online? How much is it going to cost you for shipping the products? Is it really worth manufacturing your products overseas?
A smart way to enter in an online business is to learn about logistics and find answers to all the above questions prior to starting an online business.
nopCommerce has a wealth of features and capabilities designed to create online store. nopCommerce is the leading open source shopping cart, allowing people to set up an online store quickly and easily. The software contains both a catalog frontend and an administration tool backend.
Author: Lavish Kumar
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