Ecommerce Business Ideas For Beginners
If you have been following the news, you will most likely know that many businesses these days are using the ecommerce model to generate profits. Amazon have been recording massive profits year after year, and it was not too long ago that Alibaba had a billion dollar IPO. Online retail is a very lucrative business model, with many websites such as Shopify, Etsy and eBay allowing people to set up their own storefronts online.
Setting up your own retail commerce business is not as difficult as it may appear to be. If you are thinking that you are going to need your own inventory and have to handle shipping and delivery in order to run a success retail business, then you are wrong. There are other methods that do not involve that. This includes drop-shipping and affiliate marketing.
Drop-shipping means that you have your own storefront and you let someone else ship the product for you to the customer. Usually the one who ships is the manufacturer. With this approach, you just need to set up the front end store and your drop-shipper will take care of the back end stuff. In most cases, your shopping cart is connected to the drop-shipper, so they will get notified when someone confirms a purchase.
Affiliate marketing of physical products is the more common ecommerce strategy that many beginners adopt. Affiliate marketing is simpler and provides more freedom. What do I mean? Like drop-shipping, affiliate marketing does not require you to carry your own inventory. However, in this case, you do not need to get a drop-shipper. You only need to join an affiliate network such as Amazon Associates where you will be allowed to promote any product on Amazon and you will receive a commission for every sale that you refer. There are lesser restrictions here because the shopping cart is taken care of by the vendor, so the restriction that I mentioned earlier is non-existent here.
Before you start, I recommend that you do some research to see what products are selling well. You can look at Amazon’s best seller list. It has a whole list of products that people are buying. Of course you are not limited to just promoting Amazon products. Websites such as Commission Junction, ASOS and Rakuten also allow affiliates to promote their products.
You will be able to find plenty of online retail courses where you can get more in-depth information on marketing strategies for running your own ecommerce business. There are lots of interesting tricks and tips that you can apply. Don’t stop at what I’ve shared with you today. Keep learning and I hope you’ll be successful one day.
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