If you’ve been toying with the idea of starting an ecommerce business, now is the ideal time. U.S. ecommerce (B2C) sales have nearly doubled since 2010 to an estimated $347 billion in 2015. Global ecommerce sales are expected to double from $1.672 trillion in 2015 to $3.5 trillion in 2019.
Despite the advances in technology that make it easy to start an ecommerce business, 90% of new businesses bite the dust shortly after launching. Turns out there's more to ecommerce than loading products into your ecommerce platform of choice.
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Unless you have high margins and deep pockets for advertising, you’ll need to build your business around people, not products. Otherwise, you’ll end up in the 90% stat. We don’t want that, right? Here's why you should start with people (not products) first:
- Choose the wrong product and you’ll waste time & money
- Nail your persona and you can sell multiple products over a longer period of time
- It’s easier to build traffic and traction if you’re pushing content (not products)
- You can pivot quicker if trends change
- Give yourself a little more time to figure out the right product
If you truly have a unique product idea and the Kickstarter money to get it rolling, by all means launch it! But if you’re not exactly sure what to sell, a content-first approach is a sure fire way to succeed in a rapidly growing market.
Here’s your six step action plan for launching a content-first ecommerce business.
Action 1: Tap into the Power of Personas
We can’t have an intelligent conversation about content marketing without mentioning personas. Once you develop your persona, map out upsell and cross-sell strategies. You want to do this long before you procure products or even write your first post. Your goal should be to sell multiple products to the same person. You won’t survive long as a one hit wonder. Here’s a quick process for validating your persona and finding potential products:
1. Create a mock ad in Facebook Ads Manager
Once the ad targeting feature loads, input your persona's demographics and interests. After each interest or behavior click "Narrow" and set the additional criteria to "Must Also Match." Don't worry about location for now, we just want to make sure that there are at least 100,000 people that fit your ideal persona/market. In the example above, there are 110,000 college educated women that enjoy mountain biking and triathlons and have above average spending online.
2. Head over to Amazon to find potential cross and upsell products
For this step, all you have to do is type in one product idea you have for your persona. Once you add it to your cart, Amazon will show products that you could potentially cross and upsell.
In the example above, the original product added was a women's mountain bike.
3. Ask yourself if these products fit your persona
Make note of the products that interest you and repeat step 2 to make a list of possible products.
Action 2: Sketch out Your Business Model
Your persona should tell you if you’re going to be selling to consumers or businesses. But you also have to think about your positioning. Are you going to be a personal brand (like a fashion designer) or a business? The B2B ecommerce market is nearly double the size of B2C, but there are more challenges like tax, regulations and logistics to worry about. You also need to consider the types of products you want to sell (digital, physical, services) and how you’re going to source them. You can:
- make your products at home
- have a factory manufacture your products
- buy wholesale from manufacturers and resell
- dropship products you never touch
If you’re looking for a high margin business, your best bet is to make your own brand (make/manufacture). But you can launch quicker and scale faster with wholesale and dropshipping.
Action 3: Evaluate Product Market Fit
So now you have a dozen or so product categories in mind, it’s time to scope out the commercial value, and competition. Product market fit is just a fancy term for figuring out whether the product you want to sell has a market that you can compete in. The most practical way of figuring this out is keyword research. Here’s a simple process you can start with:
Continue reading %How to Start a Content-First eCommerce Business%
by Darren DeMatas via SitePoint
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