Few things I learned about e-commerce and selling swimwear, lingerie and costumes online.
My quick advice if you are starting your own small e-commerce business.
Pick a niche.
As I’m sure you already know, the WWW is full of many different types of products. Are you into super-foods, sports, lounge-wear or gardening? Pick one of the things you love. Secondly, you don’t need to like every single product you sell. What you love and need may differ from your customer needs. While you will be able to tweak your business model and products to your customers after you start, it is important to find the first several products that sell well. Research and analyze. For inspiration on what people are looking for and buying, take a look at Google trends or Amazon, eBay sales. If you can offer something innovative at a reasonable price — you are a winner!
As a small business and possibly a single entrepreneur, it is important to budget well and decide on the basics:
- What is your target country-market?
- Are you going to do the website by yourself or hire professionals? If you will hire, consider that you will need continued support with system updates, further developments, cyber-security, SEO. Consider different platforms (consider becoming an Amazon seller too!) and their capabilities to support X number of products.
- Can you take care of customer support or do you need help?
- How is your supply-chain going to work? Consider returns.
- Are you going to market your business or hire a marketing company?
- Forecast your margins and calculate how many orders per day you will need to process, in order to cover all the fees and receive your salary.
The internet is full of great business stories that start in a garage, by a single person doing everything. So be ready to study and learn a lot of new things within a short time-frame. You will be happy you did at a later stage, when you will need to manage teams, as you will already have knowledge in multiple business areas.
Yes or no to drop-shipping?
I know it sounds hassle-free. However, it is not. While the business model certainly has its advantages, I believe that disadvantages are greater. If you believe you can sell thousands of products each month, then do it; and beware — the margins are going to be low, due to various third party fees. Returns may get complicated, so make sure you find responsible and trustworthy business partners. Get ready to invest heavily into marketing, because you’ll need to spend money to stay on top of your competitors, who are selling exactly the same products for the same prices. Still, there are various ways to be creative and get sales. With drop-shipping you can launch a shop with thousands of products with relatively small investment. You can also choose a hybrid business model — combine drop-shipping with wholesale or your own authentic collection.
Ignore the haters.
Get ready to find out who your friends are. Unfortunately sometimes it happens, that people are jealous of others’ success and can become even malicious. Your friends will support you, your business and your ideas, they will be proud that you are working on creating something for yourself. The non-friends may spread gossip, hire hackers or try to compete with you.
Chin-up! Ready? Set. Go! This is the journey of an entrepreneur. There will be the ones who will support you, others will criticize you, others will try to destroy you. Selling lingerie, swimwear seems totally normal, right? Well, not for everyone.
Here you go.
To sum up, what I discovered from my experience — in the majority of cases, those, who criticize others are simply jealous and unable to come up with any ideas by themselves. The most important advice of all — believe in yourself, surround yourself with supportive and loving people. Good luck!
Edit: Amazon has just announced (October 20, 2021) it’s “Amazon Accelerate” feature, which will help sellers to identify product opportunities.
