10 things every retailer should know about selling online (1)

Internet and e-commerce are two major breakthroughs of our time, and their use is increasingly widespread. 

There are few physical stores that lack of digital presence, at least through a corporate website. But there are still many which are reluctant to sell online, or do not understand how. 

If you are one of those who have a physical store and your unresolved matter  is to start selling online, this post is for you. Because in it we break down  the 10 things that every retailer should know about selling online. 

Pay attention because selling online may not be as you imagined... ¡Take note and take the first step! 

Today there is still the (wrong) perception that selling on the Internet implies moving from a dying physical business to another flourishing online and with nothing but growth prospect. 

This is fairly half-truth. Because, while it is true that the online environment favors the business to be prosperous in certain respects, it is also true that, if you do not move freely in that environment, your business failure can be resounding. 

In addition, you have to bear in mind that, if your product or service does not interest in the physical world, it is quite unlikely that it has an interest in the online world. 

At the end, people who buy online are the same that goes down the street; Those who do not enter your physical store are the same that probably do not buy online. 

In the first place, understanding "price" as the sum of retail price and the shipping costs. 

It is hard but it is so: in Spain the main factor of online conversion is that the total amount resulting from the sum of the price of the product and the shipping costs is interesting. 

In the second place, there are other possible purchase drivers, such as the quality of the product or service, the personalized advice or the variety or specialization of the catalogue. 

So, when you start to sell online you should take into account that, in all likelihood, your potential customers are not willing to accept the shipping cost, at least not in its entirety. 

To be appealing, you must be able to absorb all or part of the shipping costs, even at the expense of sacrificing part of your profit margin. And you also have to work very hard to maximize that margin. 

In the case of the Internet, the profit margin will not be optimized by rising the price, but buying cheaper. So, from the very beginning, you need to bet on having a lot of order volume and a lot of rotation. 

In this way, you will be able to make cheaper purchases and offer the product also cheaper to the client. Your sales volume will increase, and also your benefits, but with a reverse strategy to the traditional retail: instead of betting on the service and making few sales but big, you must bet on price, with the goal of making many sales of lesser amount. 

And this is how you will successfully enter the most popular purchase driver in Spain: price. 

If you are planning to start selling online, you probably have some savings to make this project a reality. 

However, be careful, because it is easy to be carried along by what most seduces us of the Internet: The image, the first impression, the interface we click on. 

The aspect of your online store is important, no doubt; And even more that it works well technically, that the user experience(UX) is good and the checkout page is short, is completed in a few clicks and does not request many personal data. 

But far more important than all that is that your product or service is appealing to your audience. If what you sell is not interesting, no matter how cool the website is, nor how amazing the user experience is. A monkey in silk is a monkey no less. 

With all this we want to tell you that it is more important that you focus on the differentiation of your brand, the added value of your catalogue and especially in the acquisition rather than in design and technical aspects of the web. 

In fact, today you can have a very cool online store with a minimum investment in time and money using cloud platforms like Oleoshop. 

As we said in the previous point, one of the keys to sell online is to realize that the image of your online store is not the most important. Definitely, the most important thing is acquisition. 

Because it is useless to have a very cool website with an amazing product if you do not have traffic and, consequently have few chances of conversion. 

Do you remember those savings you have saved in a bank account waiting for you to decide to sell online? Well, invest at least 80% of them in acquisition. 

Concerning acquisition, it is clear that one of the first means of acquisition that comes to mind is online advertising, which Google Adwords-now Google Ads-is the prime example. 

But it is not the only one by a long shot. 

And the thing is that, without going any further, social networks offers advertising systems that are very interesting for retailers who start selling online and need new customers. 

These systems are much easier to configure than Google advertising, so you will not need external experts to help you; But they also allow you to segment much more and they are much cheaper. 

Take a look at Facebook and Instagram advertising: Depending on the product you sell, it can be the ideal place to start acquisition. 

And also be inspired by the strategy of online advertising in social networks developed by Hawkers, a company that, instead of using a hammer to crack a nut, they opted for hypersegmentation and acquisition of queen bees. 

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