How to Sell on eCommerce Marketplaces

I can't say if it is possible to start a business from scratch if you want to do offline business, however, if you want to start an online business, you can absolutely start a business from scratch, you can start alone, without any help from any kind of people, you can start with zero investment, you don't need any investment, and you can scale your business and make it really big to bring you a lot of money. 

Print-On-Demand: This business can be started with zero investment however, you need graphic designing skills to start this business because you will have to design products and product mock-ups. 

Dropshipping and dropservicing: These are also free business models but you need to be an exceptionally talented marketer to drive sales on your dropshipping products and services. 

Digital Products: If you are a graphic artist, this is also a free business model that allows you to earn really well.

Selling on eCommerce Marketplaces

When you do research, you will discover that online stores have a low success rate and require high investment. You need to spend at least $10 per month for VPS hosting, you need additional money for domain and Security certificates. You need to spend at least $100 for advertising every month and spend over $5000 to build the store and inventory. If you tried dropshipping instead of building your own inventory, you still needed at least $500 to build a store and spend a lot of money on marketing. Therefore, instead of an online store, selling on eCommerce marketplaces is better.

How to Choose Niche for eCommerce Marketplaces

Niche and keywords are the most important aspects of selling on ecommerce platforms. Selling print-on-demand products and digital products on ecommerce platforms is not all about graphic designing skills or even elaborate SEO. Your chosen niche determines whether you will sell or not. The keywords you use in the title and tags also help you with sales. Even though a description helps you generate sales, the description does not improve visibility, your keywords on the title and tags help your products to get discovered.

How do you choose a niche?

You need to check the trending products on the marketplace where you want to sell. Check what products are bringing sales; see what kind of keywords these products are targeting.

Check the trending products on Google.

Check what kind of product is not available on the marketplace or has low competition but has a high chance of selling.

Check what kind of products can be combined with the product you are selling, in order to sell more products.

Choosing the Products to Sell: The Checklist

It is very common not to have sales on each and every product you publish. However, if you manage to generate sales on about 10 percent products you have listed, you are selling well. Selling is also a trial and error process, you will have to test different products and see which works and which doesn’t.

Checklist

Is this product trending on the marketplace? Does the niche have a high search volume?

Does this keyword or niche have low competition? Less than 1000 designs available for sale.

Is the keyword trademarked? Trademarked keywords mean Google, Facebook, etc.

Is this topic viral on the internet? You can check on Google Trends or social media to see whether the topic is viral.

Once the product you want to sell passes the aforementioned 4 point checklist, you can start creating your product. However, you need to still remember one thing this is sub-niche or cross niches. When you blend two niches into the same product it is a sub-niche or cross niche, for, example a product for coffee lovers who are also pet owners, or vegetarians who like hiking.

SEO on eCommerce Stores

If you are not tracing Key Performance Indicator, you will never be able to build traffic on your store, and as you know no traffic means no sales, and hence no money. Just like any other website, your online stores, whether on your own domain or on other eCommerce platforms, need valuable content to rank high on search engines. When people can find your products while searching online, it is very likely that you will be selling the item. If the store does not get ranked high, it will not generate a good amount of traffic, thus, the revenue will be low, or non-existent. If your store manages to get traffic from search engines and if the traffic has a high conversion rate, the store can generate good revenue. If you are selling on eCommerce marketplaces like amazon, ebay, etsy, zazzle, redbubble, etc, your products should also rank in internal searches.