Making Money with eCommerce

This is probably the most complex thing to undertake in earning online income. This is because you need to handle physical products. Physical activities such as ordering, receiving, storing, sorting, packing and delivery of your products are all involved. You also need supplies and equipments to handle your physical products as well as space to store and pack your products.

You can usually start by listing your products to the already established e-commerce websites such as Amazon, eBay and so on. These big e-commerce companies are so ubiquitous or are so dominant that even other sellers with their own e-commerce sites still list their products with them in order to reach as maximum a client base as possible.

While these e-commerce platforms are for the most part stable there is still the human factor such as products being delivered to the wrong address by delivery personnel. There are also sellers that unknowingly ship the wrong items. Even Amazon the biggest of them all suffers from these human errors. Resolving this kinds of errors could be stressful if a big part of your work process is left to 3rd party e-commerce platforms.

There are limitations too on what e-commerce platforms can do for the seller. For example I ordered about a dozen gym weights from a seller and even paid premium delivery rates. Several days have passed from the intended delivery date and my order has not arrived. I only received an e-mail from the e-commerce company that due to unusual events my order will be delivered late.

Several weeks passed by and still my order has not been delivered. When I did a formal check on the status of my order from the e-commerce website I found out that my order has been delivered by the seller to the e-commerce facilities just 3 days after I ordered it from them but the e-commerce company did not deliver my order though more than 1 month has passed by.

I have also other orders where there is a missing part on my order. Imagine a duly recognised Apple store in an e-commerce site delivering supposedly a brand new iPhone with a missing part. I have also bought laptops where the actual delivered product is totally the wrong colour. If I have returned all these products the sellers would surely lose money together with the e-commerce company.

If you are an aspiring seller and you do these kinds of practice whether unknowingly chances are you will fail soon due to negative feedback to your reputation by your buyers and you can even get reported to the law.

There is also the problem when buyers return a product for proper or malicious reasons. Get a high enough return rate for your products and your cost will pile up and bankrupt you. These returned products will be unfit for resale once they have been damaged after the buyer returns them. Usually even small packaging or cosmetic damages of these returned products are enough to make them unfit for resale.

You can also setup your own e-commerce website with or without using e-commerce software. E-commerce software may be too expensive for small mom and pop businesses but a well laid out product page and an efficient e-mail & text ordering manual process can do the same job with a more personalised touch.

You are also in complete control in the marketing and sale of your products in your own website. You can devote as many website pages in marketing your products. You can add audio, video and links for example to scientific studies about your products to improve their trust factor. You also get to keep all the profits from the sale of your products.

These two advantages from listing your own products in your own website could be very important for the success or failure of your business. Big e-commerce platforms can ban your products and remove your products from their platform. You also have limited online space to market your products in their platform. They can also increase the commission they take from you anytime.

You can also just sell your products online using social media platforms. The extra benefit of this is that you have a ready made audience of which you have an element of trust with them. Many social media platforms are also adding e-commerce capabilities to their platforms. One example is Facebook which has its “Facebook Marketplace”.

You can also do Dropshipping as a business. In this e-commerce model you do not store your products but buy them at a supplier who ships your items directly to your customers. Your business for example may be based in the US as well as your customers but your supplier may be overseas like China.

This may seem a hassle free and convenient e-commerce setup for you but remember that in this business model you hand over the quality control of your products and delivery service to your supplier. Their performance may spell the success or failure of your business.

Conclusion

More and more people are buying physical and digital products online and with the advent of Covid 19 the growth of online buying has exploded. As explained one can start using just social media as a basic online presence. If one also does not want to do the hassle of delivering their product one can just state “For Local Pickup” of their products. It is this basic.