New To Selling Online?
Why have an online store?
An online store is like having a 24-hour salesperson. Like a real person, your online shop can provide sufficient information about what you sell, as well as create attention, interest and desire in your products. Its ultimate job is to encourage both a click-through to add something into the cart, and to encourage the customer to take action in completing the checkout process and purchasing the cart’s contents. You therefore need to apply the same basic marketing and sales principles that apply in any business:
- Consider who your perfect buyer is – not everyone will be the right buyer for your products
- Consider their preferences – how much information do they need to buy your products?
- How will you find them?
- What are your competitors doing?
- What is the main point of difference between you and your competitors? The barriers to providing superior service are much reduced in the online world, but this means that competition can be more intense?
- How can you protect your idea and approach from being copied?
- How will you get noticed? How will you encourage customers to buy from you?
Choosing the right suppliers
Choosing your suppliers is an important part of starting an online shop. There are many things you will need to discuss. Will you drop ship your products directly from the supplier to the end customer or hold stock? What are the shipping times and costs? Are there any restrictions in getting products to your store? In what quantities will you be purchasing the stock, and will there be customs or duties that apply? How reliable will your suppliers be? How many other people are selling these same products? How many others could use these same suppliers (and does it matter)?
Find the right niche
If you can find a niche in the current market, or open up a new previously untapped group of customers for your product, you can succeed online. Many physical stores use an online store to reach customers in other areas, to expand interest in their products in a wider range of people or to build loyalty in existing customers. Ecommerce features in Ozcart give you plenty of flexibility in finding your own niche and exploiting it.
Pricing and Shipping
One of the biggest barriers for you to overcome as an online store owners is how to price your products and help your customers understand shipping costs. Online, customers often add the cost of shipping to the product price to work out their total spend, but don’t add the cost of petrol when comparing these prices to the ones they get in stores. To address this perceived difference, you can do things like bundle products together, offer loss leaders, use multi-buy offers or price your products with free shipping. Ozcart lets you run sales, run special offers and price your shipping in different ways with ease.
Importance of Design
As competition intensifies online, more brands are turning online to grow their business. You can succeed in this intensifying market but you need to have a website that is appealing to your target customers, works smoothly, is efficient and is memorable. With customers today ever more demanding you will want to put your best foot forward when setting up your website. We put you in control with the built-in visual editor, letting you re-colour and choose fonts for the site or for particular pages to suit your look and feel. We make it easy for the first time store owner to create a professional looking storefront for your business.
Importance of Trust
Just as brand matters in the offline world, establishing trust and a reputation in your industry is essential when selling online. Ozcart helps you with this by offering you ecommerce features, security taken care of for you behind the scenes (including the SSL padlock on checkout and your whole website), integration with social media like Facebook so you can post your products to social media and encourage customers to connect with your brand.
Support you can count on
If you’re new to ecommerce, you’ll likely have many questions. Ozcart makes it easy with support for your website every day of the week, every day of the year. We have a multi-tier support system – consisting of knowledge base and email based ticket system where real ecommerce technicians can assist you with your specific question. For first time store owners we will also set up one payment and shipping method for you if you wish.