Selling Products Online – Physical Or Digital?
Selling products online for most people probably means ebay or A N other online auction site. They may have sold anything from a pair of shoes to a car. That’s brilliant enough but the bigger picture is awe inspiring. The fact that you can build a hugely profitable and enjoyable business out of selling products online is truly exciting. In this post I wanted to explore a few options.
We might as well start with Ebay. People have been selling products online with Ebay for quite a few years now. Over that time it has evolved from a great place to unload unwanted goods or pick up a bargain, to a worldwide e-commerce platform. Now you can have your own Ebay store or stores and buy and sell pretty much whatever you like.
Whilst unlike Amazon who I’ll look at next, Ebay doesn’t offer warehousing at present, they do make a lot of the selling and delivery process simpler. You can for example print and pre-pay postage addresses. You can link Paypal accounts to your store and automate payment and invoicing.
Selling Products Online – The E Commerce Approach
If you decide that selling products online through ebay is the way you want to go you’ll need to consider where the products are being stored. If you are planning on shifting a lot of stock and scaling up you can either deal with storage and delivery yourself or outsource to a fulfilment company. There are lots of them out there who specialise in Ebay businesses.
A big advantage of selling products online with Amazon is that they do offer a fulfilment service. Because of their sheer size FBA (fulfilment by Amazon) is a very smart move. Aside from anything else they have secured unbeatably cheap carriage rates with UPS for moving your stock from your supplier to an Amazon warehouse. They also make the business of labelling, and shipping products very simple.
If you are looking at selling products online with the e-commerce route you’ll be wondering where to get products from. This has become such big business that the range products available wholesale is bewildering. Have a look at alibaba.com as one example.
You can find a product you want to sell – both Amazon and Ebay provide screeds of info on what’s selling best at any time. Now you can also have it branded to your own specification. On the Alibaba supplier portal you’ll find manufacturers of everything under the sun. You can negotiate with them to get the best price and quality. You can arrange your branding and packaging and get your orders shipped off to Amazon.
Getting The Right Training
Although the process is pretty straightforward you should invest in some specialist training for Amazon. I’d recommend Amazing.com. There are best practices involved in choosing, sourcing and shipping your products. The Amazing.com training was developed by two very successful Amazon entrepreneurs and covers everything in great detail.
Of course there are other ways of selling products online. The big advantage of Amazon is that they will store and ship your inventory. If however you are not dealing with physical products, things get even better.
Selling digital products online dispenses with the need for warehouses, shipping, postage and handling. Products such as video training courses and e-learning content are bought online, paid for and delivered in a matter of seconds. Imagine how that’s worked for people like Tony Robbins….
The All Important Marketing….
Whatever method of selling products online you choose there is one constant: Marketing. It doesn’t matter if you have the best products in the world at the best price if now one can find them.
Amazon and Ebay provide a lot of advice on marketing and there are lots of third party training products out there like amazing.com. If you aim to build a big online business either on an e-commerce or affilate marketing model you will need to develop some marketing expertise.
Beating The Competition
You’ll need to be looking at social media, websites and online marketing in general. It’s an ultra competitive marketplace but still a very young one. Lots of people are scraping by and even doing well even with pretty poor marketing on Amazon and Ebay. With better marketing strategies and skills it’s still quite easy to stand head and shoulders above the competition.
I’ve recommended amazing.com here specifically for selling products online with Amazon. For a broader education in online marketing, which covers – selling digital products, high commission affiliate products and all of the strategies and systems common to all, go to SFM.
SFM have been training individuals and businesses how to sell products online for quite a few years now. Their unique platform not only provides advanced internet marketing training and coaching: It also provides cut’n paste digital business systems and even a range of high commission education products to sell.
To learn more about SFM’s hugely successful approach to selling products online click on the banner below to get their free 7-day video training series.
2019 Update: Since writing this post SFM have created a new platform called IMportXperts. Its specifically for people who want to sell physical products via Amazon and other platforms. They have a dedicated office and support agents in China.
By Dave Menzies
