E-Commerce - Places to Sell

[ukconstructionguru]

Hi,

Currently helping out a friend who's selling fashion accessories including belts, sunglasses, hats, gloves etc!

He's multilingual so interested in all European online marketplaces but we're not sure which are best / most popular etc.

We've thought of:

a) Ebay
b) Amazon
c) Play.com (Priceminister)
d) Own Website

Any other ideas?

Many thanks

 

[andrewmcde]

I would say that you've listed some of the best places to start, but also make sure he has his own website through which he can sell.

I've often found that through buying things off Ebay, I've tracked down the seller's own website, which goes on to save them, or in this case your friend, a fair bit of money on avoiding Ebay fees etc.

In any case, best of luck to him!

Cheers,

Andrew

 

[j600com]

eBay is a good place to start, get a pro designed eBay store (makes a big difference when selling fashion on eBay). Then get own site and consider pushing product feeds to other marketplaces and affiliate sites like amazon, ASOS, play and Designerclothing.com

 

[ukconstructionguru]

Hi,

Thanks for that.

The pro designed store - you mean a website developer designs it (3rd party) or is it an advance option (monthly fee) on ebay?

Cheers

 

[j600com]

Web developer, if google eBay Store Design you'll find plenty who do. Usually between £200-£1000 depending where you go.

 

[webgeek]

Might want to keep Pixmania in mind as well. 6 mil clients and 25 mil uniques each month makes them a pretty high traffic market where you can sell (PixPlace).

 

[paul_e3creative]

A custom ebay store is a great way to increase conversions rather then the original ebay store template.

If a website is developed, Google Base is a good platform which hasn't been mentioned also. This can be automated from your website product inventory.

Also with the product inventory, Amazon api's can be used to automate product inventories on amazon also. A well designed, and developed website can automate exposure on amazon and ebay.

Dependent upon the budget etc involved starting with a custom ebay store, as this offers instant exposure to a client base.

The problem with selling platforms like amazon and ebay you have seller fees.

The best plan of action would be to decide on how much money and time you can allocate to marketing.

Marketing a website in the long run will have greater rewards, although short term selling on various market places to generate revenue may be the best route to begin with.

 

[The Wholesale Forums]

I'd include Facebook as another venue to sell or at least, link your products to. Bearing in mind your friend sells fashion items, I imagine attractive photos of stock are available - this can easily be liked or shared by followers, increasing your chances of making a sale.

I hope that helps

Lace

 

[Ninja Commerce]

Hi John.

I don't think there is a lot to suggest that hasn't been mentioned already in terms of your question, but I once ran a similar business myself, so I can offer a few tips.

Firstly, it is much better to do a couple of things well, so personally I would probably stick primarily with eBay, Amazon and your own website and concentrate on making the most of those sales avenues (at least to start with)

When I was running my e-commerce business I felt like when I ventured into other selling formats I let my sales slip on those more important platforms because I was over-stretched.

The website almost certainly has the most long term potential, so as has already been mentioned, get Google base set up. How you do this will depend on how your site is built, but any good developer should be able to make it all work/update automatically, so it can be pretty much a set and forget proposition - although it is worth spending some time optimizing it each month.

Other than that, it is well worth doing SEO from the outset - it will be slow at first but in the long run it is a great way to build a big brand.

I always found that eBay and Amazon offered a better ROI than Adwords and other PPC advertising, but they are probably still worth testing as the store gets bigger and more established.

The best possible thing you can do to help grow your customer base though is get email marketing sorted right from the start and make sure you encourage every customer (whether they come through eBay, Amazon or wherever) to sign up. Offer your eBay customers a discount for their next purchase that they can redeem through your website to encourage migration.

Oh, and one more thing - I don't know if stock handling is an issue for you, but I found a tool called linnworks (linnworks.com) to be very handy. It will download orders from all your platforms, manage stock levels and update everything, even ending eBay listings if you sell something through Amazon or your website. It's a complicated product and does a lot, but for me it was essential.

Anyway, sorry to go off the point a bit, but I hope that helps you.
Regards, Mark.

 

[jai1557]

Most of the e-commerce is done in virtual form but also does transportation of physical products. E-tailers are online retailers and e-tail is retail and World Wide Web consists of almost all big retailers. There are different kinds of e-commerce. E-Commerce between two businesses is called Business to Business or B2B which can be either open to all or for specific qualifiers. The e-commerce between businesses and consumers is termed as Business to consumer or B2C. Here the buyer is directly in contact with the business like online shopping. There is no presence of intermediary service in most of the cases. E-commerce involves the sales and the transfer of data to enable the financial transactions of businesses.

 

[vickyallison]

You definitely can't beat eBay if you're a specialist retailer.
But it's always wise to link to and promote your own online store.
That way you can try to convert regular eBay (or Amazon) customers to regularly use your online store instead, saving you some money otherwise lost to eBay listings.

 

[globaltrader]

I'd include Facebook as another venue to sell or at least, link your products to. Bearing in mind your friend sells fashion items, I imagine attractive photos of stock are available - this can easily be liked or shared by followers, increasing your chances of making a sale.

I hope that helps

Lace

Yes, Facebook is a good channel and you can add a shopping cart to your Facebook page and with that you can do all sorts of things. You can give a discount to people who like a product or give a discount to a particular group of visitors. We use Vendorshop and it's great.

 

[Craig Lackie]

Fashion is a very competitive market, but if you get yourself a great website and make it multi-lingual you may just succeed along with good SEO, IMO

 

[Daniel.ChannelGrabber]

Hi there,

Lots of people have given you some really sound advice, I will just give my 2 cents also.

1. Do not try to sell in too many places, you will struggle to try and sell everywhere instead of selling only where it counts. Being based in the UK, the 3 biggest marketplaces are Amazon, eBay and Play. Play used to only be about selling their own media items (much like Amazon and books) and have recently branched out offering their own marketplace. They were also recently bought out by the Rakuten Group which means they have some serious money behind them and are definitely a place to look to get ahead of the curve.

2. Ignore Facebook, even the big players who put loads of money in to their Facebook stores have withdrawn as it wasn't worth it (notably GAP) and I read somewhere something I believe to be very true "Trying to sell to people on Facebook is like trying to sell to people in the pub whilst trying to socialise with their mates". That said, it can work for some people but in every experience I have had, it has tanked.

3. Get a webstore, check out how it is with SEO as some will be better than others. A good way to see this is to search for people who sell similar to you and see who is at the top and what they use as their webstore platform, it is usually at the bottom in the form of a link.

4. Get a eBay store design, costs a bit but the return on investment is very high, especially with clothes. Make sure you use high quality images and place lots of pictures within the listing so it doesn't cost any extra.

5. Make sure your images are SEO friendly on your webstore, put in effort here because especially with clothes people will go to Google images and search for what they like and will see images and when they click the images they will be taken to your site.

6. Use a multi-channel management system to help you list, manage listings and inventory, manage your stock, manage your orders, host additonal images for you and some are very good at creating variations *cough* ChannelGrabber *cough*

7. Once you have established yourself on eBay, Amazon and Play in the UK, start to branch out to Europe and the US. The US has the benefit of same language and same economy and fashion etc. however the postage takes longer and may be harder to manage from a customer service perspective. Pick European countries close to the UK first, with good postal services and with similar economy and fashion (France and Germany are good, as is Netherlands but Amazon NL is not out yet and eBay NL isn't the best for selling out there, they mostly use Marktplaats)

8. This ties in with webstore and point 7, when selling to different countries, people like to read in their language. You can even use Google translate to start with, it doesn't need to be perfect, heaven knows that English speaking British people who sell on eBay have appalling grammar most the time and it is the same in other countries, they don't expect perfect but they won't put up with English.

I could go on all day but would not like to send you to sleep!


Daniel Williams
Managing Director

ChannelGrabber
Simplified (multi-channel) Selling