Here in this post, I am going to tell you how you can sell any products online and make profit. As due to recent pandemic, people often come out of their home for purchasing products. Instead they looking more from online to buy products.
So this creates more opportunities for online sellers and now in this digital age, every business need online presence to stay on the competition. If you are looking for help on how to sell product online for profit, then this post will show you the roadmap. Even if you have any products you can start selling and make some profit. I will show you how to start your online store. So keep on reading till the end.
Here are Table of Contents for the post.
How do I start selling things online?
There are 3 different ways to sell product online:
1. Plug into Big shopping sites like Amazon, Ebay, Flipkert etc.
Now let’s look at the pros and cons of selling in big ecommerce sites.
Pros:
(i) Easy traffic: I don’t think anyone need to introduce this giant shopping sites like Amazon, Ebay etc. Millions of people buy from Amazon every single day. So you don’t have to give extra effort or buy traffic. Because Amazon has already advertising it for you.
(ii) Apart from this, they have thousands of Amazon associates (affiliates) who will promote your products for commissions. So there is great chance to get sells thousands of products overnight, if you apply the right strategy.
(iii) Easy product listing: Another advantage is, you can upload multiple or single product and within a minute your products will be visible for customers.
(iv) No need domain purchase and web hosting: Just create seller account, upload products and start selling for profit.
Cons:
(i) Since you are borrowing a space, you don’t have freedom to create or change the elements or structure. So, there is no way that you will build a business empire with Amazon.
(ii) You are not the owner of the site, Jeff Bezos does. So if they are not pleased the way you are handling the business, you are likely to be driven out from business.
(iii) They collect hefty fees ranging from 10% to 30% depending on the categories, as referral fees, fulfillment fees and closing fees. So will lost some profit and high chance that your business break.
So the bottom line is, this business module will not help if you are manufacturer or planning to sell your own self-made products.
2. Choose hosted ecommerce platforms- Shopify, Ecwid, Etsy, Prestashop and many more.
If you choose a hosted platform to build your online store then you are renting a space to manage your store. It is beginner freindly and easy list your items. But you don’t have complete control over your store. Right from email marketing tools, onsite SEO, payment systems, you have to use whatever they provide you. If you add any functionality they will charge you hefty fees. Even for using third party payment processors they will charge you extra transaction fees for each successful payment. Moreover some store builder platforms charge listing fees for uploading for each of products.
So they are taking percentage of every sale and it is just kind of losing some money out of your profit. Another disadvantage is for backing up store is hard and time consuming, which is crucial for every website. Some platforms even need addons which again cost you money every month.
Another set back is you don’t have options to upgrade your hosting when you need bigger bandwith when your online store grows.
If you want to try shopify to sell product online, here is the link
3. Use self- hosted platform to build your online store:
This is the most recommended choice to build your online store. WordPress and Woocommerce is open source content management system and you have full controll over your site. And you will surprised that both is completely free and can customized as per your need.
There are more than thousands of plugins to add functionality for SEO, mail autoresponder, Site optimization, Amp, Site security and back up, payment gateways, etc.
Once install wordpress you can easily integrate Woocommerce to build your online store.
So considering all these points, Woocommerce is ideal choice to sell your products online and build your online business empire.
How to create your online store? Steps
Alright now, before telling you the detail steps to build, let me discuss what are things required to build your online store.
To build your online store you need 4 things.
(i) Documents required
(ii) Domain name
(iii) Web hosting
(iv) Something to sell
(i) What are the documents required to do business in India?
It is always good to start business with all necessary documents and better avoiding unwanted issues.
- Identity proof(EPIC card, Adhaar card, Driver licence, etc)
- Address Proof
- Company Registration(Sole proprietorship or Pvt. Ltd)
- Authorization certificate (Dealership certificate)
- Busines bank Account
- Busines PAN card
- Good and Service Tax Tin number.
Here are the links below to get your online Company certificate, GSTin no. and consultation to start your business.
(ii) Get your domain name:
First of all you need a website name for your online store. For that you can create a free account in Hostripples.com and search your store name. Once it is available, complete the purchase for your preferred domain name. Domain name will cost you around $12.99/yearly.
If you want domain in India you can get the cheapest rate of Rs. 99/ year.
Buy domain . in for Rs 99/year
(iii) Get your business started at low budget hosting:
You can save lot of money on hosting when you just started.
Consider on low budget hosting if you are short of fund. Always good to start business small when you have less visitors. It will be a better idea that you save money. Because you will need lots of funds for other resources like hire employees, purchasing wholesale items, packaging, shipping etc. I have good news for you, you can start hosting @ $1.46/month
Click the image below and complete the purchase for your hosting plan.
Install WordPress
Now after that login to your account then click on services > Active product/services > manage > select your domain to manage your domain on that hosting plan.
You can also login to your Cpanel by using e.g. mydomain.com/cpanel in your browser.
Next scroll down to find Softaculous Application installer > install the latest version of WordPress.
Then install really simple SSL plugin to load your site on secured https.
Go to your wordpress dashboard > plugins > add new > search for simple Ssl > install > activate.
If you want the details how to install, please go through link below
Really simple plugin installation steps
Now the next important step is installing Woocommerce compatible theme. For that go through the link below and download your Ecommerce theme.
Download your perfect e-commerce theme
Follow the steps to install the theme
Appearance > Themes > Add new > Upload theme > Choose your downloaded theme > upload and activate the theme.
Download your pre-Template Online Store.
Now I will teach you how you can download the free Template Online store. That will make you super easy and faster to build your online store.
Instead of creating store from scratch we will use sample template to build online store.
Now go to the Plugin in your wordpress dashboard again.
Click add new > search for ” Starter Template “
Install and Activate the plugin.
Once activate, you can go back to appearance in your dashboard then click on Starter Template.
You will find 100 plus, sites templates to choose your store.
For now select the Brandstore template and click on the bottom right corner and import the whole site.
Once downloaded, your site looks like a complete ecommerce site.
