The postal charges keep rising and getting more complicated.
Postal charges have been a problem for us for a while, after implementing a decent shipping matrix we removed a lot of these problems. Instead of charging a standard £6 for all shipped goods, we were able to tailor the cost per cart. Try to optimise where you can save on shipping, is it worth sending a £2 item signed for Royal Mail or could you just slap a 2nd class stamp on it. Obviously this is going to be specific to your market but you get the point, optimise the process.
The distance selling regulations keep getting more onerous.
I don't sell abroad so can't help there.
Customers are becoming more fussy, more demanding, wanting everything instantly and being quite aggressive in some cases.
The customer is always right.. I don't think this way because people are generally fickle beasts. But you do need to cater to your target markets needs. We live in an age where people can watch TV on demand, shop from home and find anything online in an instant. This wont change, you need to find a solution to counter this, we found a faster courier and kept more product in stock.
The quality of goods available to stock is going downhill rapidly because of the pressure on pricing and cost cutting by manufacturers.
There is always a tipping point for quality vs price. It will get to a point where your customers will hit a floor and go "this is too cheap and nasty, I need to spend more to get a decent quality item" and they will come back to you. Think of Argos furniture, why do you think companies like that Oak Furniture one (the TV advertised one) are doing so well? It's because people know cheap stuff from good stuff and will buy accordingly. If your target market is now starting to look for cheaper goods, change your product or change your target market.
The social networking opportunities for promoting a business are either saturated or have become costly.
Social networking is a funny one, a lot of businesses think they need to be everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram.. etc. You don't, you just need to be where your target market is and more often than not, you're not selling there, you're making a presence there. Personally, we get more engagement (up to 1000% more) for our "Funny Friday" posts on Facebook than we did when we offered £1500 of free stuff in exchange for a email address.
Big companies are now taking priority over niche businesses on Google.
Google, Facebook etc need to make large amounts of money.
Amazon is taking over everything and surviving on its low profit model
The technology side is becoming more complicated.
Ebay has become pretty useless for some sectors as a sales channel.
Primark prices are hard to match for clothing.
There is always going to be someone bigger than you moving in on your patch of ground, you have the upper hand though as you've likely been doing it longer so know more about your market. Use this information to counter-act your new competition. Alternatively, take pointers from the bigger companies to optimise your own company, where can you save money, how can you do more for less?
Ebay, Amazon, Large Chains are again always going to try take up the smaller people and move into everything. Its their business model, they don't get huge by staying with the same products. If possible, either beat them on price (rarely possible) or take the loss and move onto another product (keep stocking it at the price you need to, but don't make it your bread and butter) If you're in a niche market, great, even easier to beat the bigger companies, establish yourself a market leader in knowledge, show potential customers why they should come to you and not Primark, what sets you apart from them? You just need to focus on your strong points and strengthen where you're weak.
Internet fraud is increasing.
Agreed, all you can do here is put steps in place to minimize your risk, we use a third party checker that evaluates the transaction and gives it a score. Not much else you can do.
Bedroom sellers with no concept of proper profit margins abound.
These generally fall as fast as they pop up, if they don't know their margins, they either go bankrupt or work for pittance and burn out.
I can't really see many positives on the horizon. Seriously thinking of packing it in and finding something new to do....
If its no fun anymore then don't play the game. But if you found fun in the challenge and the excitement from selling online, you just need to understand the rules changed for the same game and change your approach. Think of new ways to get to your market and dominate and maybe don't look so much at Google, try Bing or similar. Yes Bing's market share is considerably smaller but with more and more Windows 8 machines going out pre-installed IE and bing as the default search you're still going to get something. Its better to have 20% of something then 100% of nothing. No one can make the decision for you to pack it in I guess but I, like you, had enough of the bedroom sellers and especially eBay sellers who are making 20p each sale and thats of all the staff work minimum wage and the send the parcels in 2nd hand Tesco's bags but over time I found these people faded out and our customers came back.
Good luck.
