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.
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