Greatly interconnected to your marketing and communications is your business model and how you intend to sell
— finding the right route to market, analysing you possible distribution channel and retail partners for you, your product and business.
E-Commerce
Whether it be B2B (Business to Business), B2C (Business to Consumer), B2G (Business to Government) or P2P (Peer to Peer) it’s important to define your business model and route to market before you start to set-up online.
Some key questions to consider:
- Who’s your target customer?
- What problem are you solving
- What value do you deliver
- What’s your cost structure? (High volume, Low Margin, — Low volume, High margins )
- How will you reach, acquire and keep customers?
- How will you differentiate your offering?
- Is it defendable — IP?
- How will you generate revenue?
- What’s your profit margin?
“Global mobile traffic now accounts for 60% of all internet traffic” — ComScore
When choosing a platform to sell through, Jason Watkins from Channel Trading outlined different options you can go for, from Open Source (such as Magento), Custom Build or License based like Shopify. When going for an Open Source platform that might be free you may find you’ll need to invest in experience and skilled developers, and so this can increase the cost. For setting up fast and getting going then a licensed based one can be cheap, quick and easy.
Alongside this are other sales channels to keep in mind such as taking a crowdfunding route via the likes of Indiegogo and Kickstarter ( also great for raising awareness at the sametime ), or large online marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon or creative focused Etsy. Finding one that is relevant to your product and customer base is key, particularly if more niche!
“Tablet users spend 50% more than PC users” — Adobe
It’s important that your website or “shop front” is designed and optimised for mobile and tablet users to not risk losing sales.
Getting products to the customer and keeping them happy
With shipping your products and then final distribution, whether to outsource or try and handle this inhouse is often a consideration, with the option to use providers such as Core Fulfilment. It’s important to ensure that there is clarity in the contract, such as minimum volumes, billing per item or per hour, error rates and handling returns (because you will get them). Along the same lines as this is deciding your customer support strategy, often highly dependent on the complexity and quality of the product as well as the likely behaviours of your target customer.
18/01/2016 written by CRL
