How To Sell Online: The Definitive Guide for Selling your Products Online

Starting an online business is quite an exciting and overwhelming journey for new entrepreneurs. Most of them found that in the new terrain it can be intimidating and difficult to navigate. Either you are new to the online market or you have already tried one it, in the online market you have to face little challenges to get smooth in it. Starting an online business is quite an exciting and overwhelming journey for new entrepreneurs. Most of them found that in the new terrain it can be intimidating and difficult to navigate.

Like the same, every new business will present its unique opportunities and challenges. So it is better to be prepared before facing the challenges.

Moreover, it needs much because ecommerce business is not a one-step process.

Ecommerce business composed of several steps starting.

From choosing a product, deciding it, confirming the market, sourcing stock list for your product, building your online storefront, marketing, and fulfillment, payment processing, shipping, there is a lot to learn. 

The very first step in starting the online business is of figuring out what products to actually sell online. Most of the people think that there is only one way of selling-through online and they prepare for it. However, you can reach out to your customers in numerous ways through online.

Before you start your ecommerce store go through this blog which helps you know want are the possible way of selling your product online.

In this guide, you will get to know about the difference in selling your product online. How different platforms help you reach your potential customers and increase your sales. It will also knowledge about how to set your store across the various platforms and how they will benefit your business.

Choose How To Sell Online

Here are some choices to help you sort through the most popular choices and find the best way to sell online for you.

The key points of selling on:

• Your own ecommerce store

• Marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay

• Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram.

You can sell online across different channels, without hiring any of the staff, giving up on sleep OR growing another pair of arms. Even you can integrate your online store with social media or marketplace like Amazon to boost your sales.

1. Selling On Your Own Ecommerce Store

Running your own store is the best way to sell online because you’re in complete control. You decide the look and feel of your store and how your products are presented.

If you have sufficient knowledge you can build your own ecommerce store. Else you can outsource the developer to build it for you or else you can get an ecommerce software builder to develop your store.

Read our blog to know how to set your ecommerce store Start Your Online Business with Ecommerce Website Building Software with Purchase Commerce 

2. Selling through social media site

Social media is the easiest and most affordable way of reaching customers. Even there are numerous social media platforms there where you can sell your product. One main thing is you have to discover which social media platform will suit your business requirements.

Anyone can determine thing by keeping the following thing in your mind:

• Find the social media network where your target audience will hang out online mostly.

• Research on your customers to find what kind of content your customers like to consume.

• Always go your advertisements that your where your target customers are more likely to engage.

It needs time for finding social media platforms which mostly converts the best for your audience. Even some simple competitor research help to guide your initial social media selling strategy.

Want to know more about how social media can benefit your business then read our blog Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Your Business.

Here are a few tips for making a success of selling on social media:

1.  Entertain – don’t just post your product and expect a response. Social media is a busy place and customers’ attention spans are short. Experiments with videos, riddles, questions and even jokes to catch and hold your customer’s attention.

2. Run promos – offering an exclusive discount in exchange for a ‘like’ on your page is a great way to accumulate an audience.

3.  Use high-quality images – don’t undersell your page by uploading shoddy or blurry pictures.

4. Post regularly – but don’t overdo generally once or twice a day is a good average. Experiment with different times of the day and see what gets the most reaction.

1. Sell On Facebook

It possesses a large 2.32 billion monthly active users which is a third of the world’s population. With this number, it makes the biggest social media network on the web.

Needless to say, all brands should launch a Facebook business page to help bolster their brand and increase sales. It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in, there’s a good chance you’ll find your target audience on Facebook.

However, you also have more options than just your business page where you can make direct sales on Facebook, there’s also: 

• Your Facebook store
• Facebook Messenger Chatbots
• Facebook Ads

Your Facebook store

To get up and running with a Facebook shop, all you need is a personal Facebook account and a Facebook business page—so far, so good.

Besides these two conditions, your Facebook page must abide by the following rules:

• It is limited only to sell physical items, items like services, digital, or downloadable products are not allowed to sell on your Facebook shop
• You have to agree to Facebook's Merchant Terms
• You'll need to link your Facebook shop to a valid bank account
• You'll need a tax ID number

Facebook Messenger Chatbots

As many as 20 billion messages are sent between people and businesses on Messenger each month. That’s a huge market to tap into.

Facebook Messenger has much more features for entrepreneurs than WhatsApp—namely, Messenger Ads and chatbots.

Some tips to improve your relationship with customers 

• Start the Chatbot Set Up
• Use Conversational Prompts
• Allow Customers to Speak to a Real Person

Facebook Ads

When it comes to the lead generation, Facebook’s paid-for advertisements tool. They make it incredibly easy to capture the names and email addresses of your target audience, plus, when you get it right, you should enjoy a good return on investment. 

The cost of a Facebook Ad is based on several factors, namely the relevance of the Facebook audience your targeting and the budget you’ve set. Mostly, the more money you spend, the greater success you'll have.

Facebook's algorithm gets better at identifying the kinds of people that buy your products. It can easily target your customers with its huge data set.

Here are a few tips on how to run successful Facebook advertisements: 

• Run different advertisements simultaneously. This allows you to see which one does the best. Each advertisement should boast a slight change so you can see which factor influences the difference in conversions. 
• If you’re targeting more than one audience, tailor the advertisement’s content towards that specific viewership. One size does not fit all.
• Use prospecting advertisements to boost brand awareness. Then, utilize Facebook retargeting advertisements to prompt leads to go ahead and buy.
• Emojis are encouraged! More and more brands are using emojis in their advertisement copy.

2. Sell On Instagram

Instagram is yet another popular social media network! With over one billion monthly active users, it’s a fabulous platform for promoting your business.

Instagram is one that has the highest audience engagement rates. Its customer engagement rate nearly 58 times higher than Facebook. In Instagram incredibly image and video intensive. So, if you can promote your products in an aesthetically pleasing way then Instagram is an excellent social media channel for showcasing your brand!

How Can You Sell Use Instagram?

There are a few ways:

• Instagram Stories
• Instagram Shopping
• Instagram Live
• IGTV
• Instagram Ads

First things first, you'll need to set up and optimize an Instagram business profile. A business account entitles you to tons of extra features that come in handy for marketing and managing your brand—most notably the Instagram Insights and Shopping tools.

How Do I Set Up An Instagram Shop?

You can integrate the product catalog with your Instagram profile in Instagram shopping. The straightforward promotion of your products through posts and stories gains more attraction than Ads.

The product pages on your Instagram shop are similar to that of a regular ecommerce store. For instance, you and your customers will benefit from all the following features:

• A product title
• Product photos
• A product description
• The price

A direct link to the corresponding product page on your website can be given in advertisement which may help to the user.

Instagram Ads

With Instagram Ads, you can make ads for a product or a landing page. Moreover, paid one if it bring the traffic to your store.

This works wonders for driving traffic to your store and boosting sales on your site.

Setting up Instagram ads campaigns is analogous to Facebook. Here are a few tips for making the most out of your campaign:

• Focus your time and energy on custom audiences. There are few ways to create this specific audience: Facebook pixel tracking, your email list, a list of your social media followers etc. 
• Lookalike audiences are also incredibly useful, so be sure to use these as well.
• Use images of real people. Try not to use stock photos as they do not tend to convert well on Instagram.
• Take hashtags seriously. These are a great way to connect your account with relevant audiences and for extending your reach on the platform.

3. Sell On Pinterest

Pinterest is also the biggest social media network with more than 335 million monthly active users as of December 2019.

It encourages you to curate and post all types of visual content in many different formats—images, infographics, GIFs, and videos. 

In Pinterest, there will be more beautiful looking content that inspires users. It doesn’t matter whether its new recipes, fitness tips, or business hacks you’ll find it all on Pinterest.

How To Sell On Pinterest

Using Pinterest for business purposes is something that Pinterest itself has spent time, effort and energy optimizing, and they’ve made it very easy for businesses to understand how to use Pinterest for business.

Here are a few ways that You can sell your products on Pinterest:

Promoted Pins

To reach a certain audience any business accounts can pay Promoted pins advertisements.

If you need a promoted pin you can buy for your Pinterest business account can purchase. You can use like PPC ads even though it looks like standard pins on the interface.

One of the main advantages of promoted pins on Pinterest is that they actually get just as much and sometimes even more engagement than standard pins.

Rich Pins

If you want to provide a better experience for the user that goes with Rich Pins which are highly optimized standard pins. They provide more context about the pin depending on the category that the pin fits into, and they can only be created by Pinterest for business accounts. 

Rich Pins is of four types:

1. App Pins
2. Product Pins
3. Recipe Pins and 
4. Article

Each has different features. 

You’ll want to focus on Product Rich Pins because they make shopping easier for Pinterest users by providing pricing, availability and purchasing information.  

Shop the Look Pins

Shop the Look Pins are exclusive to the fashion and home decor sections of Pinterest and they allow users to easily find and purchase items from the pin. 

Users can recognize Shop the Look Pins by the small white dots that call out the items in the pin that is for sale, and users can tap the white dot to be directed to the website where they can purchase the item. 

Shop the Look Pins can be used by influencers and businesses and they are a great way to make the shopping experience more efficient for the user.

As you can see, there are a variety of different ways to sell your products on Pinterest.

Pinterest has the right seamlessly flow with proper organic content which will never annoy any user. It is also a profitable way to compare other social media networks.

4. Sell On Twitter

Twitter has as many as 330 million monthly active users and it’s a fabulous platform for microblogging. As such, users often use Twitter to stay current on all the latest news, sports, politics, and entertainment updates. 

Twitter isn’t just great for boosting brand awareness; it's also amazing for:

• Strengthening customer relationships
• Growing your online following
• Advertising products and services
• Conducting market research

Different Kinds Of Twitter Advertisement Campaigns Can You Set Up?

Here’s a quick breakdown of the campaigns you can launch on Twitter:

Promoted Accounts: 

This helps improves your reach by promoting your account to users who aren’t following you already. Learn more about what Promoted Twitter Accounts are here.

Promoted Tweets: 

These are similar to Promoted Accounts, but instead of promoting your account to users who aren’t following you, individual tweets are promoted instead. Learn more about how Promoted Tweets work here.

Promoted Trends: 

You can take a spot on the Twitter Trends list using this option for 24 hours.  

Website Cards:

This campaign encourages users to click through to your website. In short, website cards offer merchants a choice of call-to-action buttons to use and they can also select an image and a headline. 

When done well, this kind of ad can be really effective at driving traffic to your site.

Tweets with Images or website cards will have more user engagement than just tweeting a link

Best of all, you can also set up conversion tracking to monitor how every dollar of yours is spent. Not to mention, you can also set up remarketing campaigns to retarget website visitors.

5. Sell On LinkedIn

LinkedIn boasts 303 million monthly active users and it’s an ideal platform for entrepreneurs looking to make a name in the business-to-business market.

As many as 75% of LinkedIn users earn $50,000 a year, or more! So it's hardly surprising that, when leveraged correctly, this network can produce some high-quality leads.

How Does This Work?

LinkedIn is more systematic than other social media. You can promote your product through Ads in LinkedIn in a proper way.

Generally, you can run or use three different kinds of Ads on LinkedIn:

• Sponsored Content 
• Sponsored InMail
• Text Ads

LinkedIn’s ad targeting isn’t as sophisticated as Facebook’s, but you can still reach your ideal audience by setting filters like company, company size, job title, location, seniority, age, education, skills, etc.

Make your ad copy engaging, concise, and to the point.

Unlike other social media, it won't go well with Storytelling ad instead it prefers succinct content for Ads.

6. Sell On Snapchat

Snapchat boasts a whopping 287 million active users a month and an increasing number of brands are using Snapchat to reach out to their audience—especially millennials. When you consider that Snapchat reaches as many as 41% of all, it’s easy to see why.

How Does Snapchat’s Paid-for Advertising Work?

Snap Ads:

Snap ads use interactive video for promoting a product.

The best thing about them is that they boast a swipe-up rate that’s five times higher than other comparable social platforms. 

Sponsored Lenses:

When a brand purchases a sponsored lens, they’re able to create a customized filter for Snapchat users to play around with.

Snapchat Discover:

By opting for a Snapchat Discover ad, you’ll put your brand’s story at the top of user feeds. 

7. Sell on Quora

One free way of getting traffic to any of their ecommerce websites and to grow their brand awareness will be promoting in Quora.

We can't tell that as a promotion it just places to put your content or idea to inform someone in return you may get traffic to your website.

Business owners and marketers promote products and services on Quora. 

Quora's purpose varies like just to spend time reading other people’s stories, to find out answers to serious questions, to promote a business, to get more traffic, to use Quora for SEO, etc.

It helps you reach your target audience for free.

How to Use Quora for Marketing?

The success in Quora depends on how precisely you reach your target audience and how many people see your answers.

• Position your brand as a leader
• Answer relevant question on your industry area
• Create a structured answer
• Add the link to your website.
• Answer question with a big number of subscribers. 

How to get traffic from Quora?

You can pay for traffic or you can do your best to get traffic for free

Add links to your Quora answers;

Mention your company/service/product without a link;

Suggest edits to top answers

3. Quick-Start Online Marketplaces

The marketplace is the best way to sell if you want a high profit in less investment.

It does not need a huge Budget to set your ideal online instead use the marketplace provided by others to sell your product. For which you have to pay commission pay if your product is sold.

If you look forward to setting your ecommerce marketplace, you can look at our blog How to Start Multi-Vendor Ecommerce Website with Purchase Commerce 

Here are some ecommerce marketplace examples where you can sell immediately after a few set up processes.

1. Sell on Amazon

One of the biggest benefits of selling on Amazon is that you can get access to the marketplace giant’s which has more than 100 million Prime members. 

How and where should you start?

First, pick a product you are going to sell online with Amazon. Just to give you a rough idea, you can sell pretty much anything except restricted items.

Once you start selling on Amazon, you'll have plenty of other factors to take into consideration, but for now your biggest decision will be which selling plan is the best fit for your business.

Amazon is the best most third-party sellers for anyone who wishes to start selling immediately worldwide.

You can sell mostly all types of physical products and some services on Amazon.

Thing Needed for Selling in Amazon

1. Amazon Seller Central Account is needed to create 
2. Purchase GTIN and UPC codes for your store
3. Plan everything related to selling on Amazon
4. Select the right Amazon fulfillment option

You can Use Amazon SEO techniques to improve your product visibility on Amazon. It is a search engine just like Google, that will help you drive traffic to your products.

After they're listed, people will be able to buy them. But, if they can’t find them with Amazon's search, you'll have zero online sales.

Another effective way to slightly push your target audience into buying your items is by using Amazon Ads.

2. Selling Online With eBay

eBay says shoppers are performing more than 250 million searches every day. That’s 3,000 searches per second!

This expansive marketplace gives you access to 168 million active buyers worldwide who together generate $95 billion in annual gross market value. With 190 markets around the world, you'll have plenty of opportunities to expand and grow.

eBay also says approximately 20% of sales are cross-border, so people are shopping globally for what they want and need. eBay is an auction platform for buying and selling products online. That’s how it differs from Amazon, Etsy, and other marketplaces out there. 

Stats show that around 50% of eBay auctions result in higher sale prices than the “buy it now” price.

You will have to pay to the eBay founders for being able to advertise on their marketplace and sell your products online to their audience. 

There are four price tags:

1. Insertion fees for getting your product listed, 
2. Final value fees, 
3. Advanced listing upgrade fees, and
4. Supplemental services fees.

However, there are no set up, monthly or annual fees to worry about.

3. Selling on Walmart.

Walmart has more than 440 million customers access. They visited the website, and it also took advantage of affiliate websites including Jet.com.

It provides many benefits for selling on it like a worldwide reach, easy marketing of your product.

It only has a commission fee, but it is an invite-only marketplace.

Why Sell on Walmart Marketplace?

It is easy for Walmart to get your product in front of millions of products.

It provides a high customer engagement rate.

It boosts brand recognition that ultimately leads to additional traffic and sales.

Walmart always ensures faster page checkouts and have all their preferred payment options.

Unlike other Marketplaces, Walmart does not charge subscription or other selling fees, it only applies only category-specific referral fee if you successfully complete a sale. 

How to sell on Walmart?

You need to get approval to sell products at Walmart which may take a few days.

After you need to sign the Walmart Marketplace Program Retailer Agreement. 

In Walmart it's your responsibility for managing your own inventory, price, customer support, and fulfillment and shipping, so you can build brand awareness indirectly.

4. Sell on Etsy

Its the one of the easiest marketplace.

There user range nearly around 35.8 million buyers and 1.98 million active sellers, and 26.1 million active buyers.

It is after Amazon and eBay to make a high profit.

If you have special kinds of a product like handmade products, craft supplies and vintage goods the Etsy is the best choice for you to sell.

Some benefits of Etsy as follows:

• The customer-based is aimed so, targeting customers is easy
• The marketplace facilitates wholesale business
• No unnecessary fees on selling

How to be successful on Etsy?  

You make think how selling in Etsy becomes more successful comparing another market place.

• The uniqueness of your products and the craftsmanship counts on Etsy make it most loved place for fashion lovers
• Have a personal touch while connecting with your customers makes them more engaged with Etsy and
• High-quality images of your crafts with clear navigation and highly attractive design.

Conclusion 

Here you may get to know what are the possible ways of selling your product online.

Whether it's pick the online marketplace or social media platform ensure that suits your business needs the best. It needs extra concern on what you choose because it is the main factor in your ecommerce business success.  With consistent effort, you can turn your online business into a successful one.