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Well, that is a little clickbait headline as no business can be started without money. Yes, you may utilize your time instead of money but in the end, nothing comes for free. The ideal headline should be how to start an E Commerce project with minimal investment. That makes more sense.

E Commerce is a business can be started with a little initial capital or as unlimited money as you can invest. For a small business though, it makes sense to keep costs down. Let us discuss a few ways in which we can do that.

Buying your brand domain is must

This is a cost you cannot let go. Your brand is the one that identified you. If you sell something that has your brand name on it but the domain, say something else, it will smell fishy to the buyer of your product.

Buying a cheaper domain and a cheap hosting space to host a basic website (minus any E Commerce functions) is better than not having a domain at all. There are a lot of ways you can lower down your prices of domain. For example, using comparison sites to compare prices or buying multiple years upfront to minimize average cost of renewals.

Listing your product on large E Commerce Portals

It is quite easy for anyone to start an E Commerce store almost for free on large E Commerce Portals. These include Amazon, eBay, Etsy and a host of others. All you need is an id and email and you can start listing your products for free. The initial fees are minimum and help you avoid capital expenditure. Just make sure that you are truthful about what you are trying to sell and write great product titles and description.

Marketing using word of mouth (offline marketing)

Word of mouth is one the free technique that you can employ for your marketing. You can always ask your friends to promote your store. You can create short URL of your shop and share them with them. You can also place flyers in local newspapers about your venture. You may add offers compelling people to visit your site and at least spread the word, even if they are not interested in buying. It is a great offline way to make your shop seen.

Social media marketing

If you are a local celebrity of some sort or if you have an expertise in certain area, you can create tutorials, walk throughs, how-to videos and place it on YouTube or Instagram. These sites allow you to upload videos at no cost. You may use open-source tools to create and edit your videos.

Later you can share these videos with your friends and family on various social media.

Writing content yourself

You are going to run the shop and sell the products and thus it can be assumed that you have deep idea on how to best use your products.

If you can convert that knowledge into words and start a blog based on those words, you can start seeing free traffic from Google. You may use free software such as WordPress to host your content. You may also use free content hosting sites for writing your posts till you migrate to your own platform.

Sell from social media itself

These days social media companies encourage you to create content and sell products from your content. It is becoming a go-to place for people who do not a have enough money to spend or they would not like headaches of maintain a full E Commerce project on their own.

 

Clean and Mobile friendly homepage

An essential part of E Commerce site is a good layout and page design. The headers should contain relevant links in a neat orderly way.

The main content box should display your best offering and / or any promotions that you are running for this season.

The website should not take a lot of time to load and it should be mobile friendly. This means that images and text should scale to meet the needs of a mobile user. Since there are a lot of resolutions and types of mobile phones , your website needs to be thoroughly tested on as many of them as possible.

Easy to find contact information

Contact information for your website should either be present on the home page or a dedicated page depending on your business scenario. Your contact information may be a phone number, email address or social media handles.

It would be great if you have an address and you display it in a prominent location.

It is so frustrating when a website has infinite scroll of product listing. The contact information is often tucked into the bottom of the scroll and by the time a visitor reaches there, Make your contact information easy to find and your visitors will trust you more

Good product details

A nicely written product heading and description will work wonders for your E Commerce site’s reputation. Clean graphics and sections organizing the information indicate that you take your business seriously and your work is professional.

Great images

Good quality images enhance the value of your product line. Great product images available in multiple resolutions from different angle helps a visitor decide if they wish to make the purchase or move on to something else.

Easy checkout

If a visitor is here just for one product, you need to make it easy for them to purchase it from the main page or the product page. That means, providing a way for instant checkouts ( with or without requiring logging in ).

If they have multiple products, you need to provide them to review the items/prices in for example a shopping cart page and then allowing them to make the purchase . You should be able to provide them a place for putting in discount coupons. On the other hand a running promotion should apply automatically to their cart.

Wish List/ Save for later

The benefit of an online store is that a visitor may not buy immediately but save the items in a wish list for purchase later. You may analyse if there is any way you can motivate the user move items from wish list to shopping cart. Wish list also helps you analyse which products are in demand and also if anything can be done to make sales of them faster.

Customer support channels

Customer support channels form an important part of your interaction with your E Commerce visitors . A common support channel is email and it gives you some time before you need to respond.

On the other hand , a phone needs an employee to man it. You may also use whatsapp , which is very popular for solving customer issues.

In the era of social media, it is imperative that your E Commerce product needs to leverage the power of already existing networks that are curated by various social media giants.

Using Google to leverage your content effectively, so that users can land on your page based on search results will work wonders for your E Commerce project.

Let us discuss a few ways digital marketing helps you break new ground in your marketing and how is it essential to your business’s success.

Reach

A small business will often find it difficult to reach audience on a limited budget. Building an engaged base requires money, time, and teams to manage expectations. Social media instantly allows a small business to enhance the reach. The virality generated by a relevant content idea can reap its own reward without spending any additional dollar. Users share what they like on social media with their friends, and your content can effectively spread in a geometric fashion.

Cost Effectiveness

The costs of running an advertising campaign on social media is not remarkably high when compared to offline advertising for example using a billboard or using printed material to highlight your business.

You can also use Search engine optimized content to give Google search a reason to display your link when products related to your categories are mentioned. It is often almost like a free traffic. Once you create articles or tutorials that have value to your prospects and keeps them on the hook, you will be rewarded with repeat traffic from search engines, even when you are not actively managing any ad campaign.

 

Competition

There are big sharks in E Commerce space and trust me when I say that you can not outspend them in advertising. They have specialized team and unlimited budgets and can bury your E Commerce site under their advertising blitz. The internet however levels this by giving you a chance to showcase your expertise in your product. Big competitors often will find it difficult to create content for every category and product they are in. That means using social media you can always have a leg up over them. By smartly creating helpful content which is authoritative you can bypass heavy spends and yet shine on the internet

Results analysis

The biggest advantage of online advertising is immediate data analysis available for your campaigns. You need to add markers often in the form of URLs parameters to your product and share the URLs for a specific purpose. You can instantly find in your analytics panel if people are clicking on URL and if you are getting engagement that you thought you would get. In addition to your own analytics, there are analytics dashboards provided by social media companies as well as Google to help you measure effectiveness of your campaigns.

Using this data, you can see if your campaign is working well or it needs some tweaking. You can respond faster based on the data and increase your chances at higher sales.

Customer retention

We all like to entertained from time to time. Some brands do it very well. They often share witty updates on your social media timeline. The engagement that it may generate helps social media companies to reward you with more eyeballs since your content helps user to stay on their sites longer which is exactly the metrics they measure and report to their shareholders.

In case of Google search, results mean the search is actually being effective at getting results and google loves it when you deliver on that promise.

Repeated content, which is of high quality, helps not only create engaged customer base but also helps increase sales over time.

Often you may receive feedback from customers right on the social media. You should be ready to take that into account and incorporate it into your process.

E Commerce has a multiple number of costs associated with it. Let us take a look at some of them at the top level. We are deliberately not including the costs that are common to all businesses such as inventory costs and transportation and shipping

 

Web Hosting and domain costs

Every E Commerce project if hosted on its own domain would need a domain name and a hosting space. The domain name also needs to match up with the brand name that you plan to use.

The hosting space is needed to host your product, customer and sales data. The hosting space usually is bundled with the domain name costs if both of them are purchased together.

Software costs

IF you are planning to use free open-source software, you would not need to spend any money upfront as software cost. If you are opting for hosted solutions provided by providers such as Shopify or if you are hosting on large E Commerce portals you may need to pay fees related to listing of the product.

In case you are using a hosted solution on your own, you might need SEO plugins, payment gateway plugins, email management, inventory management and other software. These may or may not cost money and you need to do your research to determine the costs associated with them.

Technical support costs

Even though your software may cost nothing, you may be lacking either in time or in skill to install and run it properly. You would also need to customize it to suit your brand image. These processes involve a consultant which can help you make these customizations. Based on the complexities of your need, consulting work may range from cheap to really expensive. If you decide to do it all yourself, you will need the time to learn them on your own. This may take your attention away from your main business.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing includes running ads on Google and social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram.

You would also need to pay influencers to help promote your products

Also , if you wish that your customers discover your products when they search about it on Google , you would need to pay Google to run ads on your behalf.

You would also need to create blogs and pay content writers a sizeable amount for writing posts about your products.

Customer Support costs

Customer support is an essential part of E Commerce project. You would need to be able to answer emails or calls from telephone. The internet users are often fickle and quick to take offense, so it is important that issues are resolved as soon as possible. You would also need to set up processes with your logistic providers as returns are a big part of your E Commerce system. These all need employees and thus may cost money.

Cost of product listing

Product is not just a static thing. It comprises of text, images and manuals associated with it. To make product look interesting you would need to hire artists who can add a bit of design to the product details such as an explanatory graphics. You would also need to redesign manuals to make them fit the web standards. You would need to take good photographs of your product from different angles and different sizes/resolutions.

These too cost money and thus they form a line item in your cost calculations.

Luxury segment is a highly profitable, high margin segment of retail business. Luxury shoppers are spoilt for choices in offline world, and they will expect the same if you take your business online. The luxury buyers want a similar experience when they visit your online store. Here are a few things to keep in mind when starting or running your luxury online store

 

Customer Experience matters

They are here for the best of the breed product. Of course you cannot have a shoddy website. Your website should be clean and neat. It should be easy to navigate. The format should follow your brand style. The website should load fast. The images should load fast. The links should all be working. The layout is friendly and bold. Everything that you do at your offline store should be replicated to maximum possible extend here on the website.

 

Personalization matters too!

Personalization is necessary for your website. Just like as you walk into a luxury hotel or a shop, the manager of the shop often remembers you and greet you. That shows that you are exclusively recognized by the store.

In the web world, there are many ways to remember your customers. You may use cookies to remember them or provide personalized service when they login. You may use an exclusive number or personnel only available to them. You may also show up products relevant on their past purchase history or upsell them new product lines.

Visuals matter!

Would you be interested in for example. buying a luxury watch, if there are shoddy display of the watch at the store front. Of course, not. Similarly, your web presence also should be full of images where you showcase your product just like you would in the offline world. And these images can be rotating to show the product in different perspectives. For example, in one image, watch should be shown in a case. In another, there could be a model shown wearing the watch. All these items should display exclusivity that only a few people in the world can afford.

 

Exclusiveness

The point of luxury store is exclusivity. If the product is available on every other online store, your buyers may feel that the brand is not catering to specific clients but to everyone in the world. Your products are costly for a reason and that is they are not available beyond select locations. And if you can create something exclusive to your web customers, you further add to the exclusivity. That would drive interests and make sales happen faster.

Packaging and delivery

Exclusive web stores need to offer exceptional packaging of the product and regular updates on delivery. They need to connect with the best of the breed suppliers and make sure their services are top notch. The notifications should be creative and should make the customer excited about the product they are about to receive. You may add personal messages and letters inside the delivery box thanking them for the purchase and place to call, in case they are not satisfied with the purchase.

Post sales service experience

You don’t just want buyers to feel exclusiveness just during buying. You want them to feel special all through the sales and post sales process. Your service line should be manned for all the shop timings mentioned. There should not be a sense of hurry in understanding customer issues. Urgency should be shown in handling customer complaints. Suggestions need to be honoured and implemented. Nothing speaks more to the buyers than the fact that their words are acted up.

E Commerce store is easy to start. But one needs to be aware of the extreme competition in E Commerce world and the need to stand out among the crowd. It is a slow, grinding path to the end. If done right, the rewards are plenty.

Next, we list out some of important and useful ways to promote your E Commerce store.

 

High-quality product titles and descriptions

The first step to a wonderful experience to an E Commerce site is attractive product titles and descriptions. You can create product titles that are SEO friendly.  Your product description may de divided into sections organized neatly. It should be easy to read and should provide a professional look for your site. If needed, you can create tables or comparison charts to make a point in favour of your product.  You may add images and videos to further enhance the appeal of your product.

Clean and bright images

Investing a good camera, photographic equipment is necessary. Clean images form the backbone of high-quality product listing. You would need images in various resolutions that satisfy printing requirements, multiple browsers, and multiple screen sizes. They also need to be mobile friendly. They need to be shareable as well, as sharing gives an opportunity for your product to be marketed at no extra cost to you.

If you can’t take quality photos yourself, invest in a great photographer who can help you in this endeavour.

Great content on the website based on Keyword research.

In addition to the product titles, descriptions, and images, you may also incorporate blogging into your website. Blogging which is search engine friendly and which has an option to share the posts, helps people share information about you with their friends and provides you with free marketing (except for the expense of writing a great blog post).

In addition, it helps you trigger word of mouth promotion which is radial and free.

 

Use Social media!

If you have budgeted money for advertising and marketing, use some part of it for social media marketing. Large companies such as Facebook, Pinterest and X have a sizeable population which is also engaged in their subject of interests. You may find groups of people whom you can target or also do interest based individual targeting. The ad should lead to your website and there should be a clean way to make the purchase.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has become infamous for the actions of a few annoying influencers. However, in this age, one cannot wish away influencer marketing. An influencer may have fans who are eager to give a try to the product because the influencer has recommended it. This works great for electronics, restaurants and beauty industries. Strategic partnerships with influencers can help your brands go places you can not reach easily organically.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is one of the most powerful methods to market your products. If an interested party (your lead/customer) has given you a permission allowing you to send them emails about your product, consider it is a privilege. People read their emails very seriously and will act on your recommendations. You need to make your emails readable and interesting.

Also do not spam. You could be unsubscribed and even fined for spamming.

Time sensitive discounting and promotions

In marketing terms, marketeer creates the urgency when they can show that either prices are going to rise or stocks are going to zero in a certain time. Real Estate industry has shown to utilize this tactic very effectively. You may also use time sensitive discounts or discounts based on festivals or events to drive sales. This tactic is meaningful though when your E Commerce store has achieved certain level of virality.

So, you have decided to venture into your own E Commerce business. Welcome to the world of possibilities. There are more opportunities than even before in this area. However, you also need to know in this sea, there are giant sharks. Large E Commerce companies with huge marketing budgets and often predatory tactics can reduce your profit margin in a straightforward way to causing your venture to shut down at the extreme.

Here are a few ways, your small or medium size E Commerce venture can compete against these sharks in the E Commerce world.

Planning

E Commerce startups often underestimate the importance of planning. You are stepping in a place where there are giant sharks waiting to eat you for lunch. You need to be able to find out how you are going to out compete. You need to do thorough research about their marketing and their strategies. It is similar to guerilla marketing tactics where you are the nimble task force fighting a mighty army. Planning at the strategic level as to what things you would compete upon (like offering/ price / customer experience) and then at the tactical level such as what steps would you take to make your offering better w.r.t. to your large competitors. It needs careful considers and market research.

Local flavor

Your large competitor is stretched thin. The segment they are in needs to be profitable enough for them to give you competition. They will find it difficult to conduct operation in every local segment. You may leverage your knowledge of area, local product, local language to create a strong offering that your competitor simply cannot match without devoting substantial resources to achieve similar results.

Strong niche

Your enemies i.e., the giants of E Commerce are often stretched. They have cost structures and often optimize for sales and cost. It is impossible for physical reasons for them to focus on every segment of the market and yet win profitably. That is where you can shine. You can determine the areas where you are strong. It could be your price because of sourcing, or it could be quality of your product or patents that you hold.

If you perform well and deliver value, it will be difficult for the large competitors to dislodge you.

 

Personal Connections to the shoppers

E Commerce giants provide services that are automated. One needs to go through multiple levels of chatbots conversations, and AI provided answers which causes dissatisfaction. On your website on the other hand, you can provide a work phone and /or a WhatsApp number for rapid answers to your customer’s questions. You customers may like such levels of personalization.

A thank you note to the buyers and if possible, a call asking them about their satisfaction of the product is how you build a long-term relationship with them.

 

Your personal story

If there is a business, there is a story. Is there a story for your business, a customer can instantly connect with and identify with?

For example, often stories talk about how founders struggled through their life experiences and then stepped up to provide you the best of the breed solutions. A personal story helps a customer relate to their own experiences of struggles.

You need to make sure that you have genuine reasons behind your story as your honesty will be rewarded with free advertisement and sales later.

Unique marketing techniques

Giant e commerce companies use billboards, big festivals and big ad spends to attract eyeballs because they have big budgets to spend.

To counter, you can go low cost, high impact tactics such as surprise gifts, detailed content videos for example tutorials/ how to use your products. You may utilize humor to craft engagement that suits your product line and not cater to whole market that your large competitor needs to cater to.

Leveraging social media to the maximum

Social media is easy and cheap medium to get famous. Create and share posts and ask your friends and family to share them on their timelines. It instantly builds up the trust without need to spend additional money. You can also create product pages and share helpful content and updates. You can create group where you can share your expertise and even others can chime in too with their opinions. Keep an eye open for the feedback and respond personally and constructively.

It is said that build and they will come. Unfortunately, it is often the case that after building, one needs to do a number of things to attract them.

Like any other business, E Commerce too is prone to failures. E Commerce projects are often brittle because they have a number of components that need to be glued together in perfect synchronization or they might fail to give the optimal result.

 

Here are a few reasons any E Commerce business may fail:

Competition:

E Commerce is usually a business that can be started in a few clicks. Unlike other businesses, which need a shop with physical and also licenses to run it, E Commerce businesses are virtual. You sign up, list the product and you are live. But if you can do it so cheaply and easily, so can anyone else. And if your product is generic, it is possible that people might not see your product over those already listed by others in highly competitive marketplaces.

The competition for E Commerce is global and if your product can be purchased cheaply from locations around the world, it will be.

Discoverability

It is hard to rank for keywords related to your product, if your product is generic or very commonly sold. However, even if your product is exclusive, it may take days before your links are recognized by a top search engine and given its due in their search pages. Often to get discovered, you will need to pay to search engines and social media giants.

Getting discovered organically is hard work and it needs sustained budget and work. A one-or-two-person team may suffer burnout just to market the product on web.

Customer feedback and issues

A big problem with E Commerce project is that it is hard to meet the expectations of customers that purchase online. In a clothing store, for example, the size or the colour of the clothing may not match the one that is shown on the website. So, the dissatisfied customer may expect a return or refund. In some cases, they might leave a bad review or file a legal complaint too.

Customers may fraudulently return used articles with damage done to them. This lowers the possibility of having a good margin and increases chances of failure of your E Commerce project.

Supply chain issues.

In a physical shop, a customer comes to you. In an online store, you ship the products to the customer. And that has its own set of issues. You need to negotiate shipping conditions with your shipping partners. The more customization you do, the more you need to pay. You also need to factor in the pickup costs in case of returns or damages. This makes the costing process go haywire.

Website problems

There could be plenty of problems with your website starting from poor response time to broken payments integrations, errors in software etc. The website software needs to be continuously updated and monitored for issues. And that costs money, time or both. You will need to connect with vendors to provide the necessary support. It may exceed your budget provisions.

Fees and charges

Hosting of website or listing your products on a large marketplace looks easy at the first glance but there are charges to keep things running. A large marketplace may charge you list your product, may take a cut from your sales and force you advertise of their website.

If you run your own website, you need to pay for domain and hosting provider. You may also need to pay for the tools related to complaint management, marketing and email automation. The costs can add quickly.

Insufficient budgets

This all leads to the most important reason an E Commerce project may fail. Insufficient provision. Even though, E Commerce is relatively easy to start but often the hidden costs add up quickly. If you don’t provision enough money, then your project runs the risk of failure. Always make sure to think of all the aspect of an E Commerce costing before you start an online store.

E commerce is one the best ways to take your business online and expand your audience to globe. An E Commerce setup involves setting up a website and placing your products in it for your customers to peruse.

However, an important aspect of E Commerce is that the customer experience has to be top notch otherwise you may risk returning customers.

Here are some tips to make your website experience much rewarding and interesting for your online visitors

 

Great Home page layout:

A great looking home page is a must for a person visiting your website anytime. The call to action must be clear if you wish them to take an action.

If your purpose is to first let the customers take it all for example a model displaying clothing range, then you need to add good quality pictures which are scrollable on main page.

If you are selling tech products, your home page should be containing tech specs and most salient points about your products that can hook your customers instantly.

Easy searchability

You wouldn’t want a visitor to be lost in a maze of web links. A neat search button on the top helps a visitor to search directly for the product on your website, in-case they are short on time. The result page from search needs to show images and links closest to their search term. It can offer suggestions, if there is no exact product that matches their criteria. Think of it as like a real shop but a virtual assistant guiding the visitors

Great product listings and descriptions

You would leave a shop instantly if it does not have clean images and product descriptions. As a visitor , you may not develop confidence that a website that does not care to put effort into listing the products properly can deliver what you order ( if you do ) on time and in right shape.

Great product listings with clear titles and descriptions make it easier for visitors to make a decision about either buying it now or to come back to at a later date .

Fast Loading

Fast loading of your website cannot be overemphasized. Slow loading website means lost revenues, customer frustration and penalty from search engines. Slow website also means abandoned carts. There are a number of free tools available for measuring and improving website speed. Don’t let a slow website kill your business.

Buy now/Wish List/ Add to the cart/ Buy later

Visitors to your website arrive with different purposes. Some wish to purchase a product immediately ( they are probably familiar with your website). Some are just looking around. Some will buy later. All kinds of visitors should be catered too. An “Add to Wishlist” button for example will make it easier for a visitor to load the products in the cart at a later date .

While a buy now button will allow them to go directly to checkout and finish the process .

Allowing customers to add reviews

Everyone likes a good review. We all tend to glance at reviews even if we don’t intend to purchase a product because of them.

Good reviews are helpful as a social proof in order to make a buying decision. Bad reviews are essential to understanding customer’s frustration with the product and a chance to improve it.

Allow all kinds of reviews and product ratings to be placed and if possible, reply to them thanking for putting a review.

Let us imagine that you have an offline business and because it is in trend, you feel it is the time for you to take your business online. Because, why not? You will have global audience; more people will know about your product line and your sales might just explode.

But hang on. This is not an article about going online. In fact, here I would be talking about why you should not go that way, i.e. do not take your business online. It would be anti-consulting advice.

Not what you want to hear?

Well, like any business needs commitment, going online is often a big commitment and while I do not wish to discourage you, I feel that you need to keep your hopes realistic.

Here are a few challenges I feel you should be aware before even you think about putting a single $ online. And these challenges are substantial.

 

Planning challenges

Planning an ecommerce store is not easy. Would you want to pay more fixed costs or more running costs. Would you want a large marketplace as your shop or would you go for your own store. How would you handle orders? How would you handle customer complaints. How would you handle social media grievances?

Well, trust me these are some of the possibilities that can happen with an online business.  And planning for every aspect will cost you money.

Local/Global

Let us say you are comfortable selling in your industry. Your processes are running as optimized as possible. You can fulfil your orders and handle your complaints because your customer segment comprise mostly of local clientele who walk into your shop or call you by phone. It may seem interesting to add a web channel, but you need to ask if it really is feasible in terms of cost benefit.

At this moment, maybe you are not comfortable serving outside the region. Having a website is good enough. You may not need an E Commerce store for your operations.

Technical requirements

Once you move from offline to online , you will realize how much of a vast world it is, With so many vendors, technologies and tools to choose from, it is a hugely confusing array of things. And unless you have basic knowledge of technology, vendors might lock you into software you may not need.

You would also need to select from the right e commerce tools to tools that do work of email marketing, search engine optimization and customer complaint system. As of now you are probably maintaining most of them in an excel sheet in a local system (which has its own issues, nevertheless). But then you would need to worry about the availability of website, technical issues, software that doesn’t work the way you want them to. Unless you have a competent team or a vendor, you will be in a difficult position to handle all the headaches that come with an e commerce store.

 

High costs

At the first glance, the E Commerce looks easy to get into but with time and experience people running a store may realize that costs add up quickly.

You would need to pay for software tools, domain names, hosting space in terms of technical needs.

Then you would need to pay for marketing tools such as email management and lead generation.

You would need to pay for the vendors to help you install these tools or you would need to invest a significant amount of your own time to learn them.

You would need support staff to manage aspects of delivery and fulfilment.

You would need a social media manager to handle all the posts on your behalf and in addition work on any customer grievances arising on social media.

So you can see there are significant costs to every component of E Commerce business.

 

Risk of frauds and legal challenges

 

As an e commerce store, you are responsible not only for listing your own product but also you are a custodian of your customer’s data. You would need to institute strong policies if for example you plan to sell in places like European Union. You would need to comply with GDPR.

In addition, you need to secure the site against cyber frauds, credit card frauds and data breaches. In some place you could be held responsible for data breaches and penalties could be heavy.

You would also need to teach your customers about safe email practices so that they do not fall prey to attacks like phishing leading to revealing their data.

Competition

E Commerce is often touted as easy to start. Thus, you have very serious large competitors which can take away your lunch money completely to small startups which are nimble enough to take off small bites from your lunch.

The competition is not just from independent websites but also from social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram etc where someone can create catchy content and instantly drive traffic away from your webstore.

The price of the product is also no longer an advantage because anyone can see and compare your prices with a million of other listings. There are now AI tools which can help scrape sites completely and thus nullify any competitive pricing advantage.

Sometimes large competitors can play unfairly and lower the price of products in a popular niche down by so much that it may become impossible to compete with them.

In addition, large competitors have much heft over suppliers, and they can easily create similar products in your category leading to sales losses.

 

Conclusion

The purpose of the article is not to discourage an average seller from starting an e commerce store. But like all businesses, easy entry means higher competition and lesser margin and often higher unintended expenses.

As with every business, one needs to be aware of the benefits and risks of starting a business. Hopefully, this article helped you understand the risks well.