Can you start an E Commerce business for a little or no money? For sure. You can utilize a number of channels other than the standard domain name and website. With enough innovation and creativity, you may utilize many channels available to sell your product without spending a dime.
Previously, you would need a website and a domain name to sell your products but of late, it has been very easy to reach to relevant people without destroying your bank.
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 compelling offers to induce people to visit your site/ or your social media page.
Social media marketing
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. To create such videos, you may use open-source tools to create and edit your videos.
Consistently creating a user base using social media posts helps create trust between your business and audience at almost no or minimal cost.
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. This is great for people with minimal budgets. Also, maintaining an E Commerce website is costly. Using social media pages and videos to sell your content is a great way to save on costs.
Buying your brand domain(optional)
If you can afford to buy a domain, you should. Your brand is the one that identifies you.
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.
As you can see, there are many ways to sell a product or service, even if you put a small or no capital.
Photo by Marsel_Shots
Leave a Reply