E-Commerce Marketplace Blog

Tag: Websites

  • Applying growth hacking to ecommerce projects

    Applying growth hacking to ecommerce projects

    Growth Hacking according to Wikipedia is processes or skills that often are cross discipline and those that can be applied to achieve rapid growth of the company.

    There are various growth hacking measures that apply generally to all business. Some of them are marketing using innovative measures or creating innovative campaign to attract customers at a higher rate than normal.

    In context of E Commerce, which means using various tactics from promotions, marketing and customer service to maximize the revenue in the shortest amount of time possible.

    Let us discuss a few ways in which growth hacking can be done.

    Using social media to create brand awareness

    Catchy campaigns using influencers if done in the right way, can lead to higher brand awareness. The influencers may create the content and it turn share the link to your website to their followers. With a minimal spend, you may get higher traffic than just traditional advertising because of the authority that the influencers command. The trust factor, or the entertainment value that they have created over the years often prompt their followers to at least want to click and discover what the influencer seems to be promoting. The higher the level of content or curiosity that the influencer generates, the more clicks to your website you might receive.

    Read more: How to effectively use Social Media for your E Commerce Business

    Faster Website/ Useful design/ Quicker Checkouts

    If you are thrifting on the quality of the web server your web site is hosted upon, you might be losing a lot of traffic based on its performance. A good server with a good connection with a reputed vendor impacts the site performance. It makes it easier for user to navigate and make decisions.

    A well-designed website where the call to action is clearest will take your visitor from just browsing to making a purchase really quick. A good, painless checkout process means that user does not spend time on understanding your complicated workflows. Instead, keep your processes simple and see your purchases improve rapidly.

    Read more:

    How to make your Website mobile friendly?

    How to improve user experience in an E Commerce site?

    Product Recommendations

    Not only you want the users to buy, but you also want them to buy another product with it. That is called as Cross Selling. You may also want to up sell user with a higher level of product, which increases the order value.

    Amazon does it extremely well, where not only cross-selling and up-selling is done but if you are logged in, they might show something related to what you have already purchased and which makes you want to buy it again.

    Also, one can do bundling which means sell two or more products together at a better rate on average than if the person would have purchased them in single quantity.

    Referral bonus

    Referral bonus refers to either monetary or point based rewards awarded to a customer that refers a new customer to sign up or make a purchase. The advantage of this kind of hacking is that the person who is already converted into using your product is more likely to convince a friend or an acquaintance to be using the same product. In this case, you are not really adding any additional cost beyond just providing a small monetary reward to the enticing party. If the product is good, the network effect that this generates is far more than anything that can be generated by paid advertising.

    Read more: How can referrals help you get customers for E Commerce?

    Using social proofs (reviews)

    If you are doing great with a segment of customer or if your product is achieving great traction, it is time for you to level up your game with social proof. The social proof can be in the form of reviews, ratings, pictures of actual product being used.

    Display of such social proof can actively convince a fence sitter that your products are worth a try. Make sure that you give a thoughtful reply to the various reviews.

  • Affordable ecommerce website builders tailored for small business owners

    Affordable ecommerce website builders tailored for small business owners

    These days you do not need to code your own E Commerce solution or even a website. There are plenty of website builders which help you, even if you are a beginner to start a website and manage your business. In addition to just listing of the product they provide multiple services like integrations with payment gateways and social media platforms. It helps you in launching your online business quickly instead of getting bogged down in the details.

    Here we have listed a few of top E Commerce platform builders with their prime features gleaned from their sales pages

    SquareUp

    SquareUp provides affordable options to start your E Commerce journey. Their three-tiered package includes Square Free, Plus and Premium with features added based on increased pricing.

    They have their products structured to industry basis and verticals include Food and Beverages, Retail, Beauty and Services as main offering.

    On a broad level they provide various services related to a website, inventory management, payment processing, reporting and analytics. Their specific product verticals provide services related to for e.g., table management for a restaurant. They also provide AI services such as business recommendations based on your industry and which features may serve you best.

    Wix

    Wix boasts of creating a website based on AI , just from a prompt or use pre defined templates to help you take your business online. Once you set up your website, you can easily list your products , add a complete E Commerce suit, add portfolios and blogs for Search Engine Optimization.

    It supports multiple payment options such a Paypal, Google Pay and Apple Pay in addition to credit cards.

    They also claim to have AI based fraud detection available 24*7.

    In addition to this, they provide CRM suit for lead management and customer engagement. They also provide data analytics for your business reporting needs. You can manage your website from their Wix mobile App.

    As for the pricing , there are four tiers: Lite , Core , Business and Business Elite with varying level of accesses and tools available.

     

    Shopify

    Shopify is probably one of the largest customizable Ecommerce software. With Shopify, a seller can instantly creating a website based on AI prompt or use their industry standard E Commerce theme for it. Once created you can use Shopify hosting space to host your website.

    Shopify boasts of automation including Email and E Commerce automation. Using these automations you can create workflows based on specific trigger conditions to perform any operation that you need in your E Commerce process.

    It has checkout module and all APIs to access your checkout process. These tools can be used either directly by business owners or by developers working to create custom processes for your needs.

    You may utilize inventory management tools, marketing automation tools and various analytics tools to learn more about your business performance.

    In addition they provide order management tools, returns management, point of sales and shipping options.

    In terms of pricing they have four plans

    Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus with varying accesses and tools availability. You can also purchase add on tools such as POS Pro for physical storefronts.

    WooCommerce

    WooCommerce is one of the best in the breed open source E Commerce Software. The best part is that it does not lock you into any host. Even your data remains with you, private.

    Woo Commerce is based on powerful and well known platform of WordPress, which means that your WordPress skills can transfer into Woo Commerce with relative ease.

    It provides WooPayment options for integrating multiple modes of payment.

    There are two different editions , one for developers to build their solutions on top of WooCommerce and one for enterprise to help them access advanced tools .

    With multichannel Ecommerce , you can use various extensions to directly sell on multiple social media platforms and e commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay.

    Photo by Pixabay:

  • Essential features of an E Commerce site

    Essential features of an E Commerce site

    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.

     

    Photo by iMin Technology

  • Costs in starting an ecommerce venture

    Costs in starting an ecommerce venture

    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.

    Photo by Yan Krukau

  • Starting a luxury ecommerce business

    Starting a luxury ecommerce business

    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.

    Photo by Kampus Production

  • How to improve user experience in an E Commerce site?

    How to improve user experience in an E Commerce site?

    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.

     

    Photo by Eugene Capon

  • Do you really need an online E Commerce store?

    Do you really need an online E Commerce store?

    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.
    Photo by Image Hunter

  • How to start your own E commerce store?

    How to start your own E commerce store?

    Launching your E Commerce store is frankly not always an easy task. However, let us outline a few strategies you can use to launch your own E Commerce store.

    Planning

    • Identify your niche

    It is the most important step in first to determine what you would like to sell. If you go too narrow , you would not see much demand. If you go too broad , you would run into competition with existing players and trust me, the competition is extremely high.

    • Sourcing your products

    If you are not already selling your products offline , you would need to think about where are you going to source your products from. Is it from in-house manufacturing or purchased from a wholesaler. You would also need to consider the lead time between customer order and your sourcing time.

    • Market Research

    You need to determine that if your product really has a demand . Without good market research you would be throwing darts in dark. Market research may involve asking around , checking with potential customers, reading research reports etc.

    • Legal Requirements

    Some places require additional legal requirements for you to be online. GDPR is a primary requirement for example when you wish to sell or market in EU countries. You would also need to understand anti-spam regulations

    • Budget identification

    You would need a substantial budget in order to for example set up a store ( even though large marketplaces provide almost free placements). You would need to take photographs, pay expert to write good product descriptions and pay ongoing and / or fixed cost based on your software requirements

    • Break even planning

    Since an ecommerce project involves resource management including money, you would need to plan as to when the fixed and running costs will be recouped. That means either doing calculations yourself or involving someone with accounting knowledge.

    • Technology

    Technology is the most important component of the E Commerce store. Even if you are using an established marketplace, you would still need to know technical nuances like setting up an store, understanding how to read reports, how to list products etc.

    If you are planning to run your own store, then you would need a partner or a vendor with sufficient technical expertise to handle deployments and various changes.

    You would also need to be updated with latest technological trends related to new developments like search engines deploying Artificial Intelligence. Your product ranking may be affected because of that

    You would need to learn about Search Engine Optimization to make sure that search engine respect your product pages and send the traffic to them

     

    Execution

    • Setting up store

    Once you have all the information regarding how to set up your store or set up your website, you would need to

    • Purchase a domain
    • Install and configure e commerce store software
    • Add product information
    • Integrate with payment and fulfilment gateways
    • Add pricing information
    • Add shipping policies
    • Integrate with shipping vendor
    • Stocking and inventory
      • Finding place to stock your inventory
      • Make agreements with vendors for supplying raw materials in time
      • Design store to put your stocks in
      • Provide easy access for inward and outward shipping
    • Payment and Gateway processing
      • Understand the charges for payment by individual gateways
      • Decide on the payment gateway vendor
      • Form an agreement with them
      • Integrate your e commerce store with their gateways
      • Test before going live with test data
    • Logistics planning
      • Connect with shipping vendors
      • Identify logistics vendors based on your cost structure
      • Finalize agreements on shipping
    • Marketing and advertising
      • Decide if you want offline or online advertising or both
      • Set up social media accounts
      • Set up Google ads account in case you wish to run google ads
      • Print flyers if you wish to market your store offline

    Post Launch

    • Fulfilment of order
      • Pack the order in suitable container
      • Inform shipping vendor of pickup
      • Change status for customer post pickup
      • Perform inventory number modifications as needed( or configured automatically)
      • Monitor orders for deliver
    • Handling of returns / complaints
      • Respond to customer complaints in a timely manner
      • Be respectful of their concern
      • Check if the replacement or refund is based on the policy
      • Arrange pickup of the item as agreed upon
      • Connect with logistic partner for pickup of the item
      • Verify item condition upon return
      • Arrange for replacement
    • Customer behaviour analysis
      • Determine which customer makes more purchase
      • Or which customer buys high value items
      • Or which customer returns more than usual

     

    Photo by zheng liang:

  • Common Pitfalls of starting small E Commerce business

    Common Pitfalls of starting small E Commerce business

    E commerce is the one of the hottest trends in technology. Easy availability of internet, high recall of top merchants such as Amazon and Ebay and umpteen choices on many platforms makes a E Commerce setup a lucrative opportunity. And you would be tempted to think that it is all No Guns and All roses in there.

    Just slap a website or open a store in large marketplaces and you are coasting to making moolah. Unfortunately , the price of ease may be good for the end user but the price is often too high for businesses running these e commerce stores. This is not to discourage anyone but to make them aware of the pitfalls before you decide to throw the money at your venture. A little caution goes a far way.

    So, you ask , what is it that can hurt your E Commerce business. Well, let us list a few items out for you.

    Intense Competition:

    In categories, where the big players rule, small players often find it difficult to attract and retain customers.

    • Long time to achieve Network effect
      • One of the biggest problem of any marketplace is that there needs to be enough sellers and there needs to be enough buyers to make a decent amount of sales. The giant marketplaces often has both. However, for am small player, achieving network effect is not easy.
    • Unfair trade practices of giants
      • Big players rarely play fair. If your products are profitable they might undercut you or create their own private labels to outsell you. However , they might give you an option to sell your stuff with cobranding as well
    • Capital requirement for advertising
      • If you are selling on large marketplaces, marketing is easier because the recall value of the website is higher. However, there too the competition may be intense and you may be asked to run paid ads .
      • If you own the website, all marketing and advertising expenses come out of your pocket
    • Logistics and Delivery Issues:
      • Warehousing
        • Warehousing of products is a capital and on going expense. You need a suitable place with adequate safeguards in place to make sure that your product is available when ordered
      • Costs
        • As stated, the costs of warehousing is huge and often needs specialized skill to store your products. You also need to be mindful of cost of perishables and methods of disposing them in case you are selling perishable goods
      • Timely delivery
        • Customer expects your products delivered on or before time. A delayed order is lost reputation for your business and source of frustration for your customer.
      • Handling of returns
        • E Commerce industry suffers from repeated returns issues. You may need to design policies around return and vet them legally in order to make sure returns are handled with care and without affecting your business severely
      • Fulfilment
        • Sometimes order fulfilment is a costly operation requiring you to contact a vendor to supply an ingredient or a raw material. You need to have contracts in place that when you customer places your order, you vendor has raw materials to fulfil them.
    • Payment Frauds and Security Threats:
      • Data breaches
        • Data breaches occur regularly even at large secured sites too. Data breaches refer to exposure of data not only related to purchase but also customer personal information such as addresses, phones , names etc. They can cause embarrassment to the customers and is fraught with legal issues.
      • Phishing
        • Phishing refers to using a similar looking page or URL in order to trick a customer into revealing their email and password. This information can then be used to glean further insight into customer.
      • Credit card frauds
      • Technical issues
    • High Return Rates:
      • Issues related to mislabelling
      • Customer fraud
      • Damages
      • Frequent returns
    • Customer Trust and Retention:
      • Identity theft
      • Credit card frauds
      • Lack of responsive customer service
      • Not good service guarantee
      • Fear of online transactions
    • Regulatory Compliance:
      • Complex laws
      • GDR
      • Taxation
      • Liability
      • Data Privacy and Security
    • Technology Challenges:
      • Data breaches
      • Platform scalability
      • Websites for multiple devices
      • Integrations with vendors.

    Photo by Micah:

  • Top Marketplace platforms where you can start a store without your website

    Top Marketplace platforms where you can start a store without your website

    You would like to start an ecommerce store of your own, and you have also decided that you would go to the most reputed and largest ecommerce stores in the world.

    You do not want to be bogged down with setting up your store and instead use the facilities offered by various platforms and start selling as quickly as possible.

    Here I have listed a few top stores where you can instantly start your ecommerce store. You would get information about why you should sell here and what are the gotchas you need to watch .

    Amazon

    Why to sell on Amazon

    According to the sales pitch on Amazon page itself, Amazon is most trusted business in America. They are incredibly popular in terms of one of  most recognized brand and third largest by revenue. Amazon ships to over 100 countries in the world that means Amazon has got a massive global visibility for your product line. There are country specific programs to help your business export from home country to the world.

    In terms of customer statistics, it is unbeatable, as customers across the world buy and sell things on it.

    With professional plan provided by Amazon a seller can do more than just sell their product. In case you have higher sales volume , Amazon provides professional plan to help you manage your listing and provide more tools to build your brand on their website

    Ebay

    Ebay is another large website which also caters to global clientele as well. In terms of sellers, as of 2025 Ebay boasts about 135 Million of them. Ebay also about $21 billion worth of GMV and sells 46% of its listing internationally.

    Why to sell on Ebay

    The Ebay site lists reasons to make it worth your while to sell your merchandise using the Ebay website

    • Easy Listing
    • Free Listing upto certain number of products
    • Fraud protection
    • Mobile oriented
    • Multiple tools available to sellers
    • Links to social media accounts
    • Global Selling
    • Your own store
    • Millions of buyers
    • Sellers Protection

     

    Etsy

    Etsy started with a unique selling proposition of selling vintage items and crafts. It soon became a go to place for sellers who were individuals or small scale craft builders. But since then it has allowed mass market merchandise to be sold on its website which has lowered its value for individual sellers as company’s focus seems to be changing.

    Why to sell on Etsy

    • Smaller fee for listing
    • Powerful tools to manage and support your business
    • Support and education for sellers
    • Customer care for resolving issues and getting help
    • Regular Newsletters
    • Community help

     

    Facebook Marketplace

    • Why to sell on Facebook Marketplace

    Walmart Marketplace

    • Why to sell on Walmart Marketplace

    Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich: