Starting a company and selling a product has changed wildly over the last few decades. Nowadays, even physical products often debut online rather than in brick and mortar shops, which is the default route to take when you consider the reach that online retail has.
Digital products clearly suit online distribution particularly well, but regardless of whether your product is digital or physical, when it comes to selling online, you are going to have to find yourself an ecommerce platform upon which to parade your wares. Accordingly, the best platform where you can sell your digital products successfully is in Shopify.
There is a temptation, for the uninitiated, to perhaps build your own website from scratch from which to market, sell and distribute your goods. The main reason people tend to think this way is due to a reluctance to pay a slice of the profits to one of the online retail giants or pay an ecommerce website building platform for hosting a professional-grade website, but this can be a slightly short-sighted way to approach the incubation period of a new business venture.
Of course, you want to be saving as much money as possible, especially in the beginning, but think about the huge investment associated with creating a fully functioning, compliant, scalable web store from scratch. And don’t forget that there’s significant business value in minimizing “time to market,” as well.
The advantages of using an established platform to sell your products come down to two factors. The first and perhaps most important factor is the investment of resources that you would have to put into creating your own storefront. And the second factor is that no one will discover your products unless you can tap into the reach that these platforms already have.
Let’s drill down into both factors in greater detail.
You need their tech
Let’s say, for example, that you are trying to launch a new online course. You could “go it alone” and build a website from scratch, taking endless hours to build, and even more time to maintain and promote. The other option is to use one of the already established online selling platforms and leave all the difficult tech side of things to the experts.
Many of these platforms not only deal with the “back end” technicalities that all online stores require, but they can also provide you with simple templates to aid in your website design, as well as simple checkout options to ease the implementation of the actual monetary transactions. Of course, if you don’t like the idea of these simple ways to build and maintain professional looking websites, you are free to dust off that book on basic coding and get cracking – or to hire a professional to build it for you.
On the subject of digital products like online courses, their meteoric rise has been down to multiple factors. Firstly, signing up for online courses tend to be far cheaper than actually attending your local center of higher learning. With further education costing a small fortune to attain these days, using a cheaper alternative to achieve the same result seems like a no-brainer. Couple this with the fact an online course is far more convenient than its physically attended counterpart, and you can start to see why so many people are turning to e-learning for updating their skills.
Our hectic modern lives don’t tend to meld particularly well with rigidly structured regimes, and as such, courses we can complete in our own time seem to be a perfect answer for those wishing to learn but find themselves far too busy to attend classes. As their popularity increases further, those who want to make sure that their courses to stand out from the crowd are going to need a clean and functional website from the very beginning. If your course is a worthwhile one to undertake and presented well, it has the potential to make you some serious money.
You need their reach
Much of the advice given for digital products will, in the modern world, also apply to physical ones, too, which leads us nicely onto the second factor to consider before going it alone, and that is “reach.”
Sure, you could start your business with your own website being the only way to purchase your product, but seeing as most people head straight to one of the big-named marketplaces the vast majority of the time, it is often best to make sure your products get as much exposure as possible. This doesn’t mean that a few years down the line you can’t simply retract your goods from Amazon or Etsy, but doing so before you are an established brand might not be the most sensible option to take.
If and when you decide to move away from the online retail giants, it still may be worth looking at website building platforms that specialize in your particular set of needs. For example, services such as Wix or Squarespace have templates specifically designed to show off artwork and photography in a visually appealing way, while Weebly sets itself apart by having a particularly easy transitioning tool for those who wish to change the look and feel of their website regularly.
Standing on the shoulders
Going it alone when selling online might sound appealing, but the work needed to achieve the results you want will probably be a surprise to those without some serious technical knowhow. Whether you are creating an online course, selling digital images, or printing T-shirts, spend your time on the product rather than the portal through which you sell them.
If your product ends up making waves in your particular field, you can move away from the retail giants and move your customer base to your custom-built website. Until then, use platforms to leverage their strengths, and reap the rewards.
