You may have many great ideas when you start a new E-commerce business, but we suggest you put aside your ambitions and focus first on the most practical phases of your business plan. For starters, what you really need is a simple online medium to sell your products. For example, a basic template for a store, from a platform recognized as Shopify works great for this. If it comes to the trading for oil then there are options for that too.
You may want to take more than 30 minutes, but be careful with the amount of time you spend on this at the beginning. Recall the wise words of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, who said: If you are not ashamed of the first version of your product, it took you too long to launch it. This maximum also applies to electronic stores. The key is to launch your online store quickly and start thinking about ways to generate sales through online marketing, which will allow you to improve other things along the way. For now, you should do the first things first.
Find the products
If you are just beginning to explore the world of electronic commerce, surely the first thing you will be wondering is what products you should sell in your store. In fact, getting stuck in this dilemma is one of the main reasons why many people don’t make the leap to start their own e-commerce business. Indeed, choosing what to sell in your online store is not as simple as buying the most products you like, publishing them on your website and sitting down to see how the inventory is sold.
In this sense, you must establish a strategy to identify a set of products or a niche market that is in vogue and that is not so easy to find in stores or on popular E-commerce websites such as Amazon. Therefore, taking the generic path and choosing to sell books or jewelry will probably lead to your store to fail, because there are already businesses covering those demands. Instead, look for more specific articles that appeal to a particular audience.
We suggest you start by making a list of potential products that you would like to sell in your store. Think about things that you, your friends, work colleagues and family would be interested in buying, but don’t limit yourself exclusively to these items. Explore posts on social networks like Pinterest or Instagram and in stores like Etsy, where you will surely find more sources of inspiration to decide what to sell in your own store. You can also check if your product ideas are going the right way by doing a Google Trends search. For more information on what to sell, we invite you to read this step-by-step guide here.
The Drop-shipping Model
Surely you are also wondering where you should buy your products and this is where dropshipping can be a viable alternative to the business plan of your online store. Dropshipping has gained great popularity among entrepreneurs because it considerably reduces initial investment and poses a lower risk than other traditional e-commerce business models, in which you must have your own inventory. The dropshipping works as follows: you find the products you would like to sell in a marketplace, such as Oberlo, and then import those items to your store.
