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The number of people selling products and services online keeps growing by the day. The question is whether everybody selling online is able to do so profitably. After spending months looking at different online selling platforms, I thought I would put this out there just in case somebody is in the same boat I was.

Obviously, generating traffic to your product page and converting those visitors into buyers, is the number one priority when selling online. The second thing is making sure that you do not end up donating your product to the people who own your selling platform. You are a business who owns the product and there is no use in giving everything up just for the sake of making a sale. Remember, if you do not keep the money, it is not a sale.

Among the things to look out for are the charges for placing your product on somebody’s page. In the simplest form, most merchant service providers have a fixed transaction charges, closing fees and discounted percentage rate. Do not get fooled by a low discounted rate, make sure you know the true cost of their services before you sign up.

For example: I looked at a provider 1: who charged $ 0.40 fixed transaction fee and then 5% discounted rate. In addition to those two, the provider charged $1.00 closing fee per item sold.

Another provider charged 25% of the product cost. I am a small items seller, to get the true cost per item; I took a product that I was going to sell for $5.00.

With the first provider, the cost for selling that product was ((0.05*5.00) + 0.40 + 1.00) = $1.65 (which is 32% of the product cost).
And the cost of using provider 2 was (0.25 * 5.00) = $1.25

Thus, although the percentage rate was much higher for provider 2 the actual cost for using provider 2 is actually more profitable than that of provider 1 for a low priced item. Having said that, if you did the same calculations for a high-priced product; provider 1 is a better option. So, before you sign up determine the price range that you are going to sell in and calculate your costs accordingly.

To see more tutorials on pricing strategies visit udjuni.com and checkout our tutorials under the business tab. To see our merchandise, visit udjuni.com/shop to see our collection of merchandise.

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In your usual brick-and-mortar retail store, you have customers coming in and get a feel for the products and services you offer. Online retailing is heavily dependent on pictures and the marketer’s ability to construct crafty marketing messages and product descriptions. Online retailing is also not as rosy as many people make it to be, it is a tough operating environment, people have to be able to find your website. In other words it must be optimized for search engine indexing.

Online retailing however, has its own advantages. With brick-and-mortar, your business is basically confined to the location of your store. Thus you may not be able to sell to potential customers in other geographical locations. In other words online retailing gives retailers access to international markets. The geographical limitations however can also be viewed as an advantage of the brick-and-mortar retail stores, in the sense that you get to communicate face-to-face with your customers and built personal relationships. Where as with online retailing you may get skeptics who are reluctant to form such relationships, let alone buy from unknown and small brands.

While your brick-and-mortar store relies heavily on the notion of location, location, location!, your online retail store will have to rely heavily on generating traffic and gaining higher page raking, which could potentially mean long hours of work. There are however some form of savings that comes with moving your retail business online such as savings on rent and utility bills required to keep the regular store running. Just do not rush to everything online if you are not sure how you are going to run your business entirely online.

For tutorials o internet marketing, business and accounting please see udjuni.com

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