If you are a seller on the sites like eBay, Amazon, TrueGether or any other then your products determine everything about your business and choosing the right product-mix to be sold online is an important decision to be made. It does not just suffice to provide a high-quality product with good pricing and optimised listing. Picking the right product that translates into monetary gains faster through high demand without much selling efforts in the E-marketplace is the key. Every product or collection of products involves costs every step of the way that may range from procurement to storage to delivery to the customer. When the individual product selection is apt then the congruity of products in a collection follows suite, thus ensuring that your costs are reduced through economies of scale and better turnover is earned. Thus, your costs of production, procurement and storage will be optimised considerably and you would be able to chart down a lucrative offer price for individual products to be sold at E-marketplaces.
Here are five checkpoints that will aid you in selling products faster:
- Check If You are Offering the Right Sale Price Range
- Ensure Product Ranking is Good
- Incorporate Optimum Packaging and Handling Techniques
- Ensure That Your products have Recurring Demand
- Ensure that Effective Naming Conventions are Used for Featured Products.
Check If You are Offering the Right Sale Price Range
There is a price range for every item being sold online, the minimum and maximum prices need to be tried and tested because people will make impulse buying decisions for products in this price range if they feel it is worth their investment. Often this range provides an optimal balance of costs and benefits to sellers on E-marketplaces. Let us take some examples:
- If you sell laptop accessories or mobile phones online, you need to ensure that the prices you offer are not over the line when compared to competing sellers. Even the smallest discount will win your customers when paired with attractive offers like 100% buyer protection and flexible return or exchange policies.
- If you sell clothing and accessories, it is important to be well-informed about what the lowest offer price to customer can be. You may need to do some research as to what the actual selling price of the raw material and end-product and costs involved at physical wholesale markets are and offer a good price range online accordingly by creating an impression on customers that your charges and selling prices are justified for the efforts put into procuring and selling the product.
Ensure Product’s Online Popularity is Good
Many E-marketplaces follow different ranking systems for featured products in the main category. On Amazon primarily for example, Best Seller Rank (BSR) gives a quick and accurate estimate of how well a certain product is selling online. It helps buyers gauge how well an individual product is selling within its category and helps sellers observe which products are well received by buyers and translate to faster turn-over.
- If you sell jewellery online ensure that the product is in high demand among the target age group and has the perfect attributes that will induce demand, like light-weight, anti-allergic, classy, durable and modern. This will increase sales and improve product ranking automatically on the E-marketplace platform. As a result, you will be encouraged to stock more of such products and sell them.
- Same holds true for laptop accessories, if the featured products are functional, durable and scalable they will be in high demand and as a result the ranking of the products will be high in the list because of their high quality, right price and good seller service.
Incorporate Optimum Packaging and Handling Techniques
If the nature of your business pertains to selling Electronic equipment such as laptops and accessories or Home and Living products, then utmost care should be taken while storing, packaging and handling these expensive products. Before the products reach the customer, the following care needs to be taken:
- Storage in a cool and dry environment in good and resilient boxes is a must even if it costs a little higher.
- The packaging has to be standardised and bubble wraps, butter sheets and good quality packaging material need to be available readily.
- If you sell products under Home and Living category or any other category for which the products need extra care, then extra layer of damage-proof and tamper-proof packaging is advisable.
- Handling the consignment, the right way for shipping is imperative, to ensure what the customer sees online is what he exactly gets from you. Ensure that the package is not overloaded with packaging material because it just makes it too heavy to carry and deliver, nor is it under-packaged leading to any damages or losses.
Ensure That Your products have Recurring Demand
It is true that sometimes seasonal products have an upper hand over sales turn-over but they are much riskier in terms of maintenance, competition and recurring demand which is the big challenge for the sellers of seasonal products. Seasonal products are in demand for hardly 4 months, while non-seasonal products have a good chance of making big bucks for sellers 12 months of the year through recurring sales. Some seasonal products such as winter wear, cold creams, sun screen products etc. may have higher procurement costs due to their high demand even if sales volumes are high, which will have to be translated into customer overheads online for seller break-even. Some customers may be discouraged from buying such highly priced products that will have a domino effect on sellers ultimately and lead to stocking up of such products in the warehouse, during off-season and will ultimately have to be disposed-off because of expiry date limits or natural wear and tear. Products that have recurring customer demand like laptop cleaning solution, dermatological shampoos, Vitamins and Dietary supplements etc. need to highlighted in your product listing above all others.
Ensure that Effective Naming Conventions are Used for Featured Products
A good keyword research tool to check for high product search rates by buyers on a particular E-marketplace is www.merchantwords.com . MERCHANTWORDS connects the dots between buyer searches and seller products. On this site you can know what search terms are the most popular, the least popular, and synonyms that can help drive sales. You need to tag keywords to your products while listing them on the Multi-channel retailing platform while avoiding repetition. It could be attributes like brand name, colour, material, size or even speciality adjective of the product. For example:
- If you are selling Hair Accessories under the kids’ category, then a name like NeedyBee Floral and Pearl Elastic Headband for Girls would be apt.
- If you are selling iPhone back covers then Fitchburg State Falcons Digital Design Unused iPhone 4/4S Hard case would be an appropriate listing name with all search attributes covered.